A man walks unannounced into a leasing center. He sits down and halfheartedly flips through a magazine while he impatiently waits for the next available agent. Twenty minutes later, the agent emerges from her back office and leads the man to her desk. She hands him a stack of property brochures—enough to fuel a fire for a week. Oops, a dozen glossy sheets of floor plans spill out of the brochures and fall to the ground. The man and agent both laugh, bend down to pick up the materials, and the agent launches into her well-rehearsed, perfectly-timed apartment property diatribe. Sound familiar? It does if you leased apartments in the late ’90s and early 2000s.
Fast forward to 2010. The scene has changed entirely. Today, the same man shows up at 3:50 p.m. for his 4 p.m. appointment. He spends the next 10 minutes poking around on the 42-inch touch-screen monitor in the lobby, checking out real-time unit pricing and availability. At 4 p.m., the leasing agent promptly greets the man with a cup of coffee or bottle of water. She skips the canned property 411 talk. (He already knows every last detail about the property, thanks to the Internet). Off they go on a tour.
No doubt about it, the apartment leasing process has changed dramatically. Technology has revolutionized both the way prospects hunt for apartments and the way on-site staff ultimately seals the deal. As online leasing and call centers become the norm for many multifamily firms, leasing agents and managers are finding their roles changing at warp speed. Here are five ways to re-configure your leasing staff—and leasing office—to meet the needs of today’s renters.
1. Divide up the Labor.
Leasing agents are often considered a jack of all trades—part salesperson, part customer service specialist, part bookkeeper; the list goes on. But a number of multifamily firms say their on-site staff can be most effective if segmented into two distinct, specialized groups: sales and customer service. “We are separating our office so leasing people are on the front lines, spending the bulk of their time creating traffic, touring people, and closing leases,” says Jerry Davis, senior vice president of operations at Highlands Ranch, Colo.-based UDR, which owns 45,913 units nationally. “And then we want customer service people spending the majority of their time dealing with existing customers.”
Village Green Cos. follows a similar structure. “Our sales people are 100 percent committed to renting units,” says Jonathan Holtzman, chairman and CEO of the Farmington Hills, Mich.-based firm with regional oversight of approximately 40,000 units. “There is no one better qualified than a manager to handle service requests, lease renewals, packages, and complaints. This frees up the professional salesperson to handle the new customer.”
The division doesn’t end there—Village Green leasing centers also have two separate doors: A prospect enters one door to meet with the salesperson, while the resident enters another door to meet with the manager.
2. Don’t Answer the Phone.
It’s the great multifamily debate: To use a call center or not to use a call center? An increasing number of firms are saying yes, hiring third-party call centers so their on-site staffs can focus on existing prospects and residents. “We had 60 percent of our phone calls going to voice mails,” explains Karen Kossow, vice president of sales and marketing at McLean, Va.-based Kettler Management, a regional manager of 13,000 units. “What do you do when you call a business and get a voice mail? Hang up.” Nearly all of Kettler’s projects now use call centers, allowing the on-site staff to focus on the here-and-now while the call centers collect detailed information from prospects. Leasing agents then use the information to take a customized sales approach when the prospect arrives for his or her appointment. Kossow notes that call centers do not equate to the need for less on-site staff, but rather a shift in duties.
Despite the success cited by Kettler and others, Village Green is adamant that call centers are not an effective leasing tool. “Village Green does not believe in call centers,” Holtzman says. “A call center is a person who reads from a script. They have no emotional, professional, or compensatory ties to satisfying that customer.”
Houston-based REIT Camden Property Trust, meanwhile, seems to have struck a happy medium. Hesitant to turn over all of its calls to a third party, Camden rolled out an in-house alternative this past summer. The center is staffed by 13 Camden employees from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., after which the calls roll over to RealPage’s Contact Center. “This ensures they are getting a Camden customer experience when they call, as 80 percent of the people have worked on site at Camden communities,” says Laurie Baker, vice president of fund and asset management for Camden, which owns 63,286 units nationally.
3. Tear Down the Walls.
Traditionally, a large desk separates a leasing associate from the prospect. That barrier is being removed as apartment firms attempt to make the prospect-leasing agent relationship a more intimate one. The result? Smaller, more comfortable gathering spots scattered throughout the office.
“The walls are coming down,” Baker says. “We used to have true offices in a leasing center, but where we have a large enough footprint, we are designing open-concept leasing offices that allow for areas where you can sit and have private conversations.”
At Cleveland-based Forest City Residential, those conversations are happening far away from the leasing office. The goal at one of its newest projects is to make the leasing office actually disappear from prospects’ sight. At The Presidio Landmark, scheduled to open in San Francisco in July, a small office tucked away in the back corner of the building’s lower level is to be solely used as a space for signing papers and answering phones. Instead, the leasing staff will greet the prospects in the building’s high-end lobby and promptly give them a property tour—with a laptop on hand to review available units and pricing.
“We are seamlessly integrating the staff into the experience of the building,” says Scott Villani, director of marketing for Forest City Residential, which manages just over 36,000 units in 23 states. “We don’t need an office door with an open sign. We are always open now. We have a 24-hour front desk, and we want people to be able to access whatever information they need at any time.”
4. Go High-Tech.
Still, not every potential resident wants to talk to the leasing staff. Whether at the airport or grocery store, customers crave self-service. The same goes for renting an apartment. The solution? A marketing kiosk. More multifamily firms are installing kiosks in their leasing centers or, in some cases, large, flat screen TVs with touch-screen capabilities to search real-time unit availability, pricing, floor plans, photos, and even the option to print your own PDF with customized pricing information and floor plans. At some communities, kiosks even offer portals where residents can pay rent online and submit service requests.
Multifamily executives, though, are careful to point out that technology should enhance—not replace—the role of a leasing agent. Though it’s undoubtedly a tough balancing act to foster a personal relationship with a prospect in a world where the computer has all the answers. Holtzman at Village Green goes so far as to ban kiosks from the leasing center. “We want the interaction to be between the customer and the salesperson,” he says. “We want all the technology to be online before the prospect arrives at the site.”
5. Embrace Mother Nature.
Kiosks replete with 3D floor plans and interior and exterior photos have replaced the need for much of the traditional printed brochures that have been a mainstay in the industry for years. In fact, Kettler Management recently added the ability for users to view floor plans side-by-side at its marketing kiosks to ensure that prospects don’t miss the printed versions. “That functionality is what helps you replace the paper aspect—a lot of customers like to lay the floor plans in front of them,” says Kettler’s Kossow.
Disappearing, too, are printed copies of leases and other legal documents. “I think leasing offices will be much more eco-friendly. Camden is moving that direction with its document management system,” says Camden’s Baker. “All of our documents are online now, hosted by our property management system. With the ability to execute a lease online, residents can review their documents at anytime via the Internet.”
Electronic documents equate to more storage space and a reduction in paper and printing supply costs, Baker adds. “If you think about all those consumables that go into printing a 25-page lease as well as the savings across 200 properties, it’s pretty exciting to see where we are going.”