Whichever approach a company chooses, there are three main ingredients to a centralization project: self-guided tours, flexible labor and task automation. As with all recipes, each ingredient can be used to a different degree, depending on individual company preferences. I have outlined each of the three components below.

What Makes a Great Self-Guided Tour Experience

There are several ways that a prospect can tour a property, including touring with an agent, taking a virtual tour or a self-guided tour. 

Operators can and usually do offer any combination of these tours, and it's not entirely predictable which will turn out to be the most popular at each individual property. But the key thing to understand is that great tour experiences are about choice. It's desirable that time-pressed prospects should tell operators when and how they would like to tour, and it's the operator's job to make sure that they can say "yes." 

When we consider how companies approach centralization, the main priorities are reducing the workload on property leasing staff and extending the hours in which tours are available. The biggest point of leverage on these objectives is the self-guided tour. It represents a viable alternative to the agent-accompanied tour and typically accounts for a much higher share of tours than virtual ones for properties offering both options. 

Self-guided tours can take various forms, ranging from simple "key on a stick" tours with a low technology component to highly-curated digital experiences on the property. A few elements are vital in providing a great self-guided tour experience: the scheduling of the tour, how you organize access to the community, the experience that the resident has in the building, and finally, the coordination of the follow-up after the tour. 

Properties that get these elements right can significantly increase the number of tours that do not require leasing agents. That reduction frees up leasing agents' time to focus on higher-value activities and provides a path toward centralization. 

Increasing Flexibility of Labor

In a previous blog, we talked about the suboptimality of having individual leasing agents assigned to individual properties. As we pointed out, it is harder to predict and handle peaks in the volume of work. A single leasing agent is tied up with work in even the most modest of peak periods, meaning that it's tough to deliver consistent levels of service. A less rigid staffing model enables capacity can flex to accommodate peak demand periods. 

Technology also enables greater labor flexibility, as AI leasing agents and chatbots provide immediate answers to prospects on demand. However, these technologies only work when there's a very clear hand-off to a human. There will inevitably be occasions when a caller wants to speak to a human. Failure to hand that call over smoothly is detrimental to the leasing experience and, ultimately, the outcome. 

A well-drilled, centralized team specializing in call handling and lead nurturing can handle this use case and other leasing conversations. A central team can more easily cover peak periods because its capacity is distributed across numerous properties. Labor on-demand avoids the typical "fully-occupied or unoccupied" characteristic of the traditional coverage model while increasing hours of operation. 

Finally, by increasing the use of labor on-demand, operators can reap the benefits of specialization. Property leasing agents have several responsibilities, including conducting tours, closing leases and generally providing service around the property. On the other hand, a centralized team can be trained specifically to be good at call-handling, lead-nurturing and follow-up steps. 

Automation: The Essential Enabler

Finally, the ingredient that holds all of this process together is automation. The least efficient leasing operations and processes are the ones that rely entirely on individuals to organize tasks, especially when those individuals have to multitask. It is hard to organize systematic lead follow-up while answering phone calls, conducting tours and answering unpredictable service requests. 

As we discussed previously, there are ways to prioritize lead handling that greatly increase the likelihood of a signed lease. But it requires consistent management of information and logic and automation to ensure the right next steps at the right time. 

Some combination of a call center and an AI or chatbot that can work in tandem with centralized or property teams, enabling all aspects of the follow-up through to the confirmation of the tour. Post-tour, a combination of AI or automated triggers can drive the nurture steps to close, supporting either the inside sales team or the site team.

By applying the technology to the task of automation, operators close some of the biggest gaps in the leasing process. Technology is better at comprehensively handling and tracking calls than individuals, so leveraging technology means no longer missing calls. It can route inquiries to the right resources and guide them through a consistent sales process. 

When companies apply automation, their data and ultimately their control over their business can improve radically. For years, the multifamily industry has relied on individual leasing agents to complete guest cards, providing only real insight into the sales pipeline. But when technology underpins the whole process from lead to lease, operators have visibility over the entire sales process. This level of transparency in tracking is essential in centralized leasing operations, where associates working on multiple different properties need quick access to prospect information. 

Finally, the data used to track prospect activity must be structured around the individual prospect rather than the property. For example, if a prospect visits three different properties in a submarket, an operator can track the activity through a single customer record. That represents a departure for most companies and technologies, as they would traditionally store that data in three different property guest cards. 

The need for data structures and automation to be customer-centric cannot be understated for any company considering centralizing leasing processes. It is the underlying enabler of many of the improvements discussed in this post.

The three ingredients described above are the essential components of centralization. However, ingredients alone are not enough to prepare the dish; we need a recipe that embodies how we want our operations to work. Or, to put it another way, an organization needs a playbook for how centralization will work across its properties. A centralization playbook gives us the ability to understand which processes, staffing models and technologies best fit our desired future state and how we should deploy them. And that will be the subject of the final blog post in this series.