The Demand Solutions Blog

If - like me - you're in the business of demand optimization, you'll know that it's been getting harder and harder to talk about any trend in multifamily without first referencing the ten years of unprecedented growth that the industry has been experiencing.  For as long as anyone can remember, residents have been relatively plentiful. That's great news for operators and investors, but a growth environment can paper over cracks in sales and marketing performance.

This inescapable trend was on our minds when we embarked on a new study of lead conversion tactics.  A couple of weeks ago at the AIM Conference, we published a new white paper "Converting Leads to Leases." It is an update to a study that we had run previously in 2014 and 2017.  

The results of the first study were instructive, presenting a call-to-action for marketers and operators.  They highlighted the extent to which operators were failing to implement some of the most effective and least expensive tactics for increasing lead conversion.  We updated the data nearly three years later with an identical study, which yielded mostly similar results. The 2019 paper reproduces the methodology from those studies to report back on how the multifamily marketing has progressed in the last five years. 

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I was talking with one of my clients about sales management, and the topic of how many unanswered follow ups are appropriate before declaring a lead to be 'lost'. He admitted his company had no standard, but surmised that if they did have one “It would be at least three, maybe four”.

I generally agreed with him that three or four was reasonable, provided he added to that one more email or voicemail…the most powerful and effective email/voice mail in a salesperson’s bag of tricks. It’s so powerful that it can only be used once with a prospect; and like many powerful tools, using it too early will negate its power.

What is this magical email or voicemail, you ask? Well it’s not really magical, but it does have strong results. At D2DS, we call it 'the break up email' and it goes something like this:

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Multifamily operators live in a world where demand is determined by factors completely out of their control. Sure, through levers like marketing and pricing, they can affect how much of the demand they capture, but they really can’t affect the overall demand itself. That’s determined by factors that drive household creation, e.g. job growth, divorce rates, and other macro demographic statistics like the number of students graduating college programs each year.

If you still doubt this, just ask yourself whether an apartment company could advertise in a way that suddenly made someone go, “You know what? I think I’ll move next week.” This “structural demand” contrasts with most consumer-driven businesses that can and do create demand (“I will …” “take an extra vacation,” “buy a car a year earlier than I planned,” “go out for dinner tonight,” …) and has dramatic implications for how we approach all aspects of lead management and leasing.

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