Renters start more than half of leasing conversations after the office closes
By Orce Kozarinov, Product Marketing Lead at Betterbot
53% of apartment leasing conversations start outside office hours, based on hundreds of Betterbot communities, Jan–Sep 2026. See the data by channel.
More than half of apartment leasing conversations start after the leasing office has closed. We looked at leasing conversations across hundreds of communities that use Betterbot, from January 1 to September 30, 2026, and 53% of them began outside office hours.
Every leasing team has a gut feeling about after-hours leads. We wanted a number we could stand behind, so we counted conversations, not messages. A long chat at 11 at night counts once, the same as a two-line email at 10 in the morning.
When do renters start leasing conversations?
53% of leasing conversations started outside office hours. For this count, office hours are Monday to Friday, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., and Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday counts as closed. Every conversation is timed in the community's own local time.
If Saturday counts as fully closed, the share goes up to 59%. I'm using 53% because plenty of leasing offices keep Saturday hours, and I'd rather quote the number that's harder to argue with.
Which channels carry the after-hours conversations?
Website chat carries most of them. Here's the share of conversations that started after hours, by channel:
- Website chat: 54%
- Email and text: 41%
- Phone: 13%
The phone figure needs a footnote. Many communities only send calls to Betterbot when the office doesn't pick up, or only during certain hours. So that 13% says more about how phone lines are set up than about when renters like to call.
Why does this matter for a leasing team?
Renters shop for apartments around their own workday. That puts a lot of first questions in the evening and on Sundays, when nobody is at the desk. Anyone who has opened a leasing inbox on a Monday morning knows what a weekend of questions looks like.
When half of the first questions arrive while the office is closed, the first reply often comes the next morning. A renter who is comparing a few communities may have heard back from one of the others by then.
Teams handle the gap in different ways. Some stagger shifts or stay open later. Some send calls to an outside call center. Some work the overnight inbox first thing in the morning and accept the delay. More teams now use software that answers right away and leaves the conversation for the team to pick up. Each option costs something in staff time, budget or control, and the right one depends on the portfolio and the people running it.
How does Betterbot handle after-hours conversations?
Betterbot is an AI platform for multifamily operators. It answers prospects and residents 24/7 by chat, text, email and phone.
Betterbot works with Yardi, Entrata, AppFolio, Rent Manager and RealPage. It pulls current pricing and availability, creates leads and books tours in your PMS.
Your team sees every conversation in one place, can reply by text or email, and can pause the AI for any contact.
In practice, a pricing question that comes in at 9:40 at night gets an answer with current numbers, the tour goes into your PMS, and the whole conversation is waiting for your team in the morning.
How we counted
- A leasing conversation is a prospect starting a website chat, a leasing phone call, or an inbound email or text reply.
- Each lead counts once per channel, timed by its first message.
- Left out: automated follow-ups and reminders that Betterbot sends on its own schedule, resident calls, maintenance chats, renewals, conversations with no community attached, and our internal test property.
- Most communities don't store their own office hours in a form we can read, so the same standard schedule applies to all of them, in each community's own local time.
Quick answers
What share of apartment leasing conversations start after hours?
53%. Across hundreds of communities using Betterbot, from January 1 to September 30, 2026, more than half of leasing conversations started outside office hours.
Which channel has the most after-hours conversations?
Website chat. 54% of website chats started after the office closed.
Does this include residents or maintenance?
No. This count covers prospects only. Resident calls, maintenance chats and renewals are left out.
