Your leasing team plays a vital role in your portfolio’s health. Leasing agents are the first responders to lead inquiries, the tour guides for prospective residents, and the welcome wagon for new tenants. They are the difference between a profitable occupancy rate and crushing vacancy loss. When rentals are flying off the market, it’s easy to celebrate them — and even easier to question them during rough patches.
Whether or not you are satisfied with your leasing team’s numbers, it’s tempting to chalk them up to their performance as employees. However, their success (or lack thereof) may have less to do with their work ethic and skill level than you think. Have you ever stopped to ask yourself if you are arming them with the data and tools that they need to succeed?
In our latest report, we looked at data across over 350,000 apartment inquiries nationwide on ApartmentAdvisor.com and over 10,000 end-to-end interactions with renters via our Lease ASSIST AI. (You can access the full report here.)
Using data from this report, we found the biggest mistakes that your leasing team is likely making right now — and how to help put a stop to them.
Did you know that leasing teams miss up to half of inquiry phone calls made by prospective tenants, or that the average leasing agent can take up to a full day to respond to an inquiry? In a role where response time is the key benchmark, this may sound shocking. But when our data indicates that over half (52%) of inquiries come in after business hours, can you blame your team?
Lowering your team’s response time on inquiries is one of the easiest ways to improve their close rate, but having them work around the clock isn’t sustainable. If your team is letting leads fall through the cracks after hours, you may want to consider a tech solution to help fill in the gaps in their time. That’s why we developed Lease ASSIST AI — a highly trained AI agent, capable of engaging leads instantly with nuanced follow-up regardless of time of day.
You may think the equation is simple: Inbound inquiry + completed tour = lease. Anyone who has worked in leasing long enough knows that this is rarely the case. While a renter may like the look of a unit online, this doesn’t necessarily mean their requirements are met by that unit. How many times has your team spent time touring a lead — only to realize that their move-in date is months away, despite inquiring on a unit that was currently vacant? Or, that they have a pet and have inquired on a no-pets building? One of the most common reasons a tour doesn’t turn into a lease is misaligned preferences — a problem that could easily be solved before any time is spent touring.
Long gone are the days when more tours means more leases. Your team may be wasting valuable time touring seemingly qualified leads whose preferences do not align with your available units, while leads that are actually more likely to close sit on the back burner.
This is another situation where smart tech can make all the difference. For example, our Lease ASSIST tool — which automates FHA-compliant screening on every lead — will ask renters about their preferences and make sure they align with your available units. From there, it organizes and ranks your team’s pipeline by conversion potential, giving agents a prioritized list to act on.
We all know that prospective renters can be picky. According to our data, most (60%) will only submit inquiries on a single unit — and the drop-off was steep. Renters were 3.5x less likely to submit two inquiries. That being said, we also found that renters who tour multiple units are much more likely to sign a lease.
Make sure that your leasing team is following best practices around touring: Every qualified lead should be shown multiple units that match their preferences, even if they only inquire on one specific unit, to increase the likelihood that they sign a lease.
If your property is home to flashy, big-ticket amenities like a swimming pool or fitness center, your leasing team may be overestimating how important these are to prospective tenants. On searches across our website, laundry reigned supreme. Just over 1/5 of all renters who used amenity filters (22%) selected that they wanted an apartment with laundry — which includes both in-unit and in-building facilities. This is by far the most popular amenity, followed by parking (12%), air conditioning (11%), and a dishwasher (9%). The least selected amenities during searches are doormen (0.7%), backyard access (0.82%), and pool access (0.83%).
While all amenities can have a positive impact on a prospective tenant, your team would benefit from highlighting the most popular amenities early and often during tours.
Interested in more data-driven insights around leasing? Fill out this form to access the full 2025 Multifamily Leasing Insights report for free now.