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Free Toolkit: How To Increase Occupancy In Apartments with Video Tours

Inside the toolkit:

  • Learn how to record an apartment video tour that converts.
  • Watch our step-by-step unit recording best practices video.
  • Download our 9-point cheatsheet for future reference.
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About the Toolkit

Promoting a multifamily property in the modern leasing landscape presents some unique challenges. Prospective residents are busier than ever, may not be able to travel to the property prior to leasing, are most likely looking for an authentic experience, and, on top of that, there is more noise from competition in the market than ever before. So how do you stand out from the crowd and make your leasing life easier? Turn to video! Using this toolkit, you’ll learn how to use live or recorded video to overcome the problems of geographical distance,

busy schedules, and a lack of easy, transparent communication with your online, typically remote, audience. Afterward, you’ll be able to create a truly authentic experience that will make your videos and community stand out. If you enjoy the toolkit, sign up for a demo of Realync’s video tour software. With Realync, you’ll be able to create polished, professional, cloud-based videos, and host live video tours that are simple, welcoming, transparent, real, and, most importantly, authentic.

How To Increase Occupancy In Apartments

Multifamily apartment communities fail to thrive in both financial and social realms when vacancy rates are high. Vacant units reflect negatively on the overall desirability of the community as well as greatly decrease its bottom line.

Low occupancy rates also may attract vandals and other unsavory elements to the area if it’s an unsecured garden-style community that doesn’t have the security measures in place that highrise communities may be able to offer. All of which can further reduce profitability by contributing to an environment that doesn’t appeal to most prospective residents. Fortunately, there are strategies available to help property owners, leasing agents, and property managers optimize apartment occupancy rates.

If you’ve been wondering how to increase apartment occupancy rates, the very first step is to determine the root causes of struggling, unimpressive apartment occupancy rates. For instance, if your community has a high resident turnover, you should look at what you can be doing to retain quality residents so they don’t head out for greener pastures. Is the community welcoming and home-like, or does it have more of an industrial ambiance and loner mentality? Does it offer green spaces with picnic and barbecue spots for residents, or does the outdoor living space more closely resemble a prison exercise yard? Does your community offer resident events that promote community and belonging? These things matter. The next time you ask yourself “how do I increase tenant occupancy?” take a good look at your community from the perspective of both a prospective and existing resident. Ask yourself if you’d want to live there and if the answer is no, it’s time for an honest assessment of what you can do to attract quality residents and make them want to stick around.

How To Calculate Occupancy Percentage

The first step in figuring out how to increase your occupancy is to understand exactly what your actual occupancy is. Learning how to calculate occupancy percentage for apartments is an essential skill for those seeking ways to decrease vacancy rates.

Once you learn how to calculate occupancy rates in Excel or your lead management system, you’ll have the numbers right in front of you. Be sure to keep this data updated on a weekly, if not daily basis. If you don’t know what occupancies you currently have or have coming in the next few months, you will not be able to accurately and effectively lease your community. By now, you’re probably wondering how to calculate the occupancy index?

How to Calculate Leased Percentage
The formula is rather simple — an occupancy rate is simply the percentage of available units that currently have someone living in them. Start by counting the number of apartments in your community that are available for rent — including the ones that are already occupied. Don’t include units that are currently off the market because they’re undergoing remodeling or in need of serious repairs before they can be rented out again. Take the total number of apartments and divide that number by the number of units that are actually rented out, and this will give you your occupancy rate for that particular month. Before doing the division, multiple each number by 100 to express them both as percentages.

Unlike hotel rooms, apartment occupancy rates aren’t calculated using a double occupancy formula. It doesn’t matter if five people live in an apartment or if one person lives there — the unit is counted as occupied. Student living is a different scenario though as everything is counted by the bed for student housing. But that’s another post for another day.

How to Calculate Pre-Leased Percentage
Pre-leased percentages are calculated in the same way. The only difference is that they refer to construction that hasn’t yet been finished using the number of units with a designated future tenant who has signed a lease agreement divided by the total number of available units. Pre-leasing a multifamily community is one of the most critical phases for the success of a multifamily investment, so it’s important to know exactly how leased-up you are at any given point in time.

Apartment Occupancy Calculator

If you’re like most busy people, manually calculating occupancy rates is a time-consuming process that also leaves your data open to error due to interruptions and other distractions. Using an apartment occupancy calculator minimizes this risk as well as makes the process go more quickly. As an added bonus, you can use an apartment occupancy calculator to create your own customized spreadsheet in Excel or other type of spreadsheet program, which will ensure that you own the data.

How To Calculate Vacancy Rate For Apartments

As its name implies, a vacancy rate is the opposite of an occupancy rate. Multifamily vacancy rates are important because they help you form an idea of how the property is performing on an overall basis.

You can compare them to other vacancy rates of nearby properties as well as compare them to the vacancy rates of your property during different months and years to see if they’ve improved or gotten worse. For instance, you can compare vacancy rates in 2018 to current rates to see if there has been a noticeable change in either direction. They’re also used to determine market trends in a given area.

Vacancy rates are calculated by taking the number of vacant units, multiplying that number by 100, and dividing it by the number of overall units. Vacant units not only include apartments that are currently vacant and waiting to be rented but those about to become vacant due to a tenant giving notice and units that are currently unoccupied because they’re in need of repairs or renovations.

How to Calculate Delinquency Percentage Apartments
Delinquency rates in apartments refer to the percentage of units in which residents are in arrears on their rent payments. Naturally, you’re going to want this figure to be as low as possible. It’s calculated by dividing the number of apartments occupied by someone who is delinquent on their rent payments by the total number of occupied units. Most property owners and managers only count residents who are seriously late, such as one month or more, rather than those who are only late by a few days because including the latter in the percentage may cause the delinquency rate to be higher than the actual and rather unrealistic.

Other Multifamily Calculations

A good occupancy calculator will allow you to do much more than simply formulate occupancy and vacancy rates. For instance, you’ll be able to quickly calculate a performance metric known as RepVar that tells you the revenue produced by each individual unit as compared to the others. Knowing all of your numbers and occupancy and vacancy rates is a critical part of efficiently managing a multifamily community and a critical part of understanding your overall NOI (“net operating income”).

How to Calculate RevPAR
RevPAR stands for revenue-per-available-room and it’s calculated by determining the average daily revenue intake by the occupancy rate. RevPar is used more often in the hotel industry than in apartment communities, but having this data can be helpful if you live in an area where high rental turnovers are common, such as neighborhoods situated close to college campuses or military installations.

You can also use an occupancy rate calculator to determine the long-term occupancy average, which you can then use to craft other multifamily calculations. For instance, you can use it to determine the long-term occupancy average of your property or to develop an occupancy forecast formula. It’s also possible to play around with different numbers to calculate the gross potential rent using as many different price points as you want.

Multifamily Marketing

Developing an effective multifamily marketing strategy is another essential component of managing a profitable apartment complex. Modern marketing strategies include creating and maintaining a positive online presence with a website that’s easy to navigate and being responsive to those who reach out to you about available vacancies, amenities, and policies specific to your community. Placing an apartment advertisement online will probably reach more prospective residents these days than by running an ad in the local newspaper, but don’t forget non-digital strategies such as putting up several old-fashioned For Rent signs in highly visible parts of the property.

Other apartment marketing ideas include holding an open house showcasing your apartment community, hosting a community yard sale in order to help your property get noticed by others in your community, and creating attractive, informative brochures that you can leave in various locations in your city. You should also never underestimate the power of an engaging, positive social media presence when seeking to fill vacancies. Also, knowing your target market is essential when developing an apartment digital marketing strategy. For instance, if your apartments are ideal for college students, you’ll want to market specifically to that demographic rather than taking on a one-size-fits-all approach to apartment complex marketing ideas.

Do consider the power of multifamily video marketing as well! Empowering your onsite team and leasing agents to create, post, and share a do-it-yourself multifamily video that portrays your community in a real, transparent way is one of the most effective multifamily marketing efforts your team can pursue today.

Apartment Leasing Incentive Ideas

Leasing incentives are another tool you shouldn’t ignore if you want to increase occupancy rates. Possible ideas include apartment move-in incentives, such as offering several free months of membership at your apartment community’s on-site fitness center if there is a fee for that, free parking, gift certificates for local pubs and restaurants, free renters’ insurance for a specified period of time, and free gifts such as coffee makers, toasters, or other appliances. Money also talks — for instance, you can offer discounts on security deposits, and, if vacancy levels are high in your particular geographical area, you might consider offering a discount on the first month’s rent.

Other move-in special ideas for apartments are free subscriptions to Netflix, free use of a moving truck on the day they move in, or tickets to a local sporting event or concert. Again, it’s important to gear incentives toward your targeted demographic — if your average resident is a young professional living alone or with roommates, he or she probably won’t be tempted by incentives involving free or discounted membership to a local family fun center but will probably appreciate a gift certificate to a nearby restaurant or a couple of months worth of free parking.

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Ready to Get Real?

Accelerate Leasing

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    Speed Up Lease Up

    by providing construction updates and showcase your space without having to do hard hat tours.

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    PRE-LEASE OCCUPIED UNITS

    by ‘showing’ them without having to physically tour the space by sending pre-recorded videos.

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    CONVERT A HIGHER PERCENTAGE OF YOUR LEADS INTO LEASES

    when you receive notifications when prospects are viewing videos to cater your follow up.

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    SPEND LESS TIME TO CLOSE EACH LEASE

    by removing roadblocks and barriers in the leasing process.

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    INCREASE SIGHT-UNSEEN LEASING

    by making it a breeze for out-of-market leads to choose your community.

Improve Community Engagement

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    PROMOTE YOUR PROGRAMS BETTER

    via pre-recorded videos by linking via social media or internal apps.

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    DECREASE MAINTENANCE REQUESTS

    by creating maintenance videos.

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    REINFORCE COMMUNITY RULES

    by receiving notifications when residents are viewing videos to know who has seen a message and who hasn’t.

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    REDUCE REPETITIVE QUESTIONS

    because consumers retain 10% of a message when reading it via text, but 90% of a message when viewed in a video.

More Than Software

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    Virtual Training

    is available for every property utilizing Realync.

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    Make your video efforts consistent

    with one set, standardized process and platform.

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    TRACK ENGAGEMENT And Usage

    across your entire portfolio.

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    Partner with the Realync Team

    to create a personalized training program to be rolled out across all properties.

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    Are you Ready to Get Real?

    Talk with us today to see how Realync’s platform can 4X your lead-to-lease conversion!

    Request a Demo