The 24/7 Leasing Office: Why Instant Service Is a Must-Have

It’s Friday at 5:00 p.m. A property manager locks their office door and heads home. A few hours later, a renter opens their laptop and starts scrolling through property listings. 

The problem? Property management typically operates during business hours, but 70% of renters do their searching in the off-hours. That leads to delayed responses, missed opportunities for property managers, and a frustrating experience for prospects.

In today’s tight rental market, a delayed response is an invitation for a prospect to sign a lease with your competitor. Delivering instant responses to prospects is the single most effective way to protect your leasing funnel and reduce vacancies.

The “Amazonification” of Leasing

Convenience used to be a differentiator. Now it’s table stakes. Amazon, Uber, and Netflix have trained prospects to expect a frictionless experience and instant results. When they reach out to a business, prospects assume they’ll get immediate answers. When they don’t, they disappear.

A prospect who requests a tour or inquires about a pet policy is at a high level of intent. But if they have to wait until the following business day for an answer, the momentum dies. The delay causes friction, and they return to their search results for someone else who can give them the immediate answers they’re looking for.

When the vast majority of rental inquiries happen outside of business hours, immediate responses are a particular challenge for property managers. And speed-to-response becomes your biggest competitive advantage.

Why Speed-to-Response Is More Important Than Ever

Speed-to-response isn’t a new concept. Nearly 20 years ago, a study by an MIT professor found that the likelihood of successfully contacting a lead decreases 10x after the first hour.

Today, largely thanks to automation and AI tools, the pressure to respond quickly is even greater.

But you can’t realistically expect your leasing team to be available 24/7/365 to respond instantly to every incoming email and phone call. That’s a recipe for fast burnout and high turnover.

Luckily, leasing automation can help. Speed-to-response is where technology transitions from a cool feature to a core part of your operations. 

Your Tech Toolkit: How to Build a 24/7 Leasing Office

The key to achieving the 24/7 leasing office that today’s prospects require is technology. Finding the right tools to extend your service beyond office hours will help convert leads and ultimately get leases signed. 

Here are four solutions to help you automate your operations.

1. Virtual AI Agents

Some property managers worry that AI will replace their human leasing agents, but AI agents like Tina act more like an extension of your team. 

They field repetitive questions while your human agents focus on more meaningful work, and they fill the nights-and-weekends gap, responding to inquiries when your staff are unavailable. In fact, 61% of conversations with our virtual AI agent happen outside business hours.

AI agents ensure that prospects keep moving through the leasing funnel, regardless of when they reach out. And they’re effective. 

Tina has handled 111k conversations in a couple of months, and 21% have converted to booked tours. Those are folks who before didn’t get responses, and now about 1 in 5 of them are turning into tours. 

So you’re not just saving time, but you’re also ensuring prospects can get questions answered and move forward at any time of day.

2. Self-Scheduling

When prospects look to schedule a showing, they’re are at their highest level of intent. But if you don’t have self-scheduling set up, you’re missing out on business. Prospects are forced to wait until the next business day for a response, and scheduling manually often requires a few back-and-forth messages.

Every additional step creates another opportunity for prospects to abandon the process. But self-scheduling lets prospects do their scheduling whenever it’s most convenient for them, whether that’s a Sunday afternoon or after work on a Tuesday night. Self-scheduling delivers the quick, Amazon-like service that they’re looking for.

Earlier this year, we launched an integration that makes self-scheduling even easier for prospects using Zillow. Zillow Tour Scheduling lets them book a showing instantly without needing to leave the Zillow listing page. 

3. Automated Communication

Leasing teams spend lots of time nurturing leads, sending them reminders and follow-up messages. But much of that communication can be automated. 

Tenant Turner automatically sends text messages or emails to leads to remind them of an upcoming showing. Leads can confirm, cancel, or reschedule as needed, even if they’re responding after business hours.

You can also send automatic follow-up messages after a lead has toured a unit, helping to keep them moving through the leasing process. Our integration with Zapier makes setting up custom communication workflows easy, and ensures that your communication stays on track no matter when you need to send a message.

4. Self-Showings

Another way to expand your business’s availability is to offer self-showings. Self-showings work by giving leads remote access (typically through a digital lock or lockbox), so they can tour a unit on their own at their convenience. 

With self-showings, leads aren’t restricted to your leasing agent’s schedule. Our customers have found that this flexibility translates into fewer no-shows. 

Take Regina Ingram of Results Property Management in LaGrange, Georgia, for example. With accompanied showings, she experienced a 90% no-show rate. Not only were those missed opportunities to fill a vacancy, but she wasted much of her day waiting around for leads to show up.

Then she switched to Tenant Turner. Thanks to the pre-qualification and security features, like location verification, Regina was confident that her properties were protected during self-showings. She saved time and her customers were able to tour properties at their convenience.

Speed Is Your Competitive Advantage

The 24/7 leasing office is all about extending your team’s ability to meet prospects where they’re at. When you provide them with instant answers, you shrink the entire leasing cycle, driving down days-on-market and building your business’s reputation as a modern, frictionless property management company.

Curious to know what your prospective renters experience? Audit your own pipeline tonight. Send a test inquiry after hours and see how long it takes to get a response. If it’s more than 15 minutes, consider adding leasing automation to your tech stack.

With the right technology, your leasing office transforms from a physical place into an always-on response system.

Schedule a Demo to see what a 24/7 Leasing Office looks like in your operation.