Multifamily Automation

Automation Best Practices in Multifamily

Automation can be used in various ways, especially in the multifamily housing industry. It can enhance the resident experience, increase operational efficiency, and streamline processes. Critical areas for automation in multifamily can include leasing processes, resident services, and communication/engagement. 

Implementing the right kinds of automation can be the difference between 1 and 100 hours of extra work in a month. Investing in automation that works can save your team immensely. To make the most of how your systems are working, there are best practices to put into place from the beginning. 

Automation Best Practices in Multifamily Housing

Implementing a comprehensive automation strategy

First, you’ll want to assess your automation needs by looking at your pain points. What processes are taking the most time for your leasing teams? What areas require human interaction, and what would be easiest to automate? Define your goals and objectives based on the information you find. Then you can prioritize your initiatives based on impact and feasibility. Decide which tools make your life easier, and look for the best options.

Choosing the right automation technologies and vendors

Conduct thorough research and due diligence on all the platforms available. Compare the value you pay for each platform, and decide which makes the most sense for your company. It’s essential to evaluate the scalability of your portfolio and what integrations are available. Do they play nice with other vendors? Seek recommendations and references from other industry experts to understand the success of a tool’s functionality.

Ensuring seamless integration and interoperability

Once you’ve found the right tech stack, establish open communication protocols and standards from the beginning. It’s often practical to complete a 90-day test period on a few properties before rolling out a product to the entire portfolio. This way, you can ensure the compatibility and functionality of the product before involving more parties. You’ll want to take the time to integrate different automation systems and platforms as much as you can to make the most of your automation. 

Providing proper training and support

Once you’ve finished testing your products, you are ready to roll out to the entire team. Training staff on new automation technologies and processes is critical. Ensure the tools you have partnered with offer ongoing support and troubleshooting assistance. Encourage your team to share feedback addressing any concerns so that you can share it with the appropriate groups. 

Case Studies: Successful Automation Implementations in Multifamily Housing

Check out how these companies have implemented automation techniques to save their teams time and money:

  • Paradigm saved over 6K hours by implementing chat and lead nurturing technologies
  • ITEX saved over $115K by implementing automation for their primarily affordable communities
  • Highmark saved their properties over 104 hours a month by automating processes

Automate Away

At the end of the day, implementing the right automation solution can assist in several ways. On average, teams using BetterBot’s automation platform save about 100+ monthly hours per property. That saves their team $2,000+ and helps reach prospects they may not have previously been able to. Implementing these best practices when choosing your automation can help ensure everything goes off without a hitch. Embrace the automation tools available to improve efficiency and satisfaction for both prospects and residents. 

Automation for Pre-Leasing

How Automation Can Help You Pre-Lease Your Community

Managing a lease-up community is hectic. There are a myriad of things to do to prepare and marketing a community becomes a daunting task. But not everything needed to lease up the community has to be stressful. Setting up automation strategies can help you pre-lease your new community. 

Engage with Automation

Using automation at your lease-up community can engage prospective residents from the moment they look your property up on the internet. Using automation like a chatbot, you can reach customers anywhere they can find you, like social media, property websites, landing pages, ILS accounts, and more. As you begin to claim your listings, having a bot can help field the traffic that comes through and share the most qualified leads with your on-site team. 

Nurture During Pre-Leasing

Automation can help you nurture leads at your new community. Your on-site team is inundated with things to prepare the property. They are fielding tasks that are not typical on an established property. That’s where lead nurturing comes in. It’s common for lease-ups to see several people who want to see what’s new and aren’t genuinely qualified or interested. Having a nurture solution can help weed out those prospects that may not be serious about leasing and have your site teams working with those most likely to lease. 

Save Time For Your Teams

When pre-leasing a community, many marketing teams may set up a splash page to get a list started. It may not have all the information that an entire website would have, but basic information to get interested in the property. With minimal details, prospects may be prone to asking more questions because they seek answers they can’t find online. Using an automation solution with chat technology may help save time by answering those questions for you. While your chatbot solution answers questions, it may also nurture those leads, set appointments, and even begin the leasing process for you. On average, BetterBot customers see 100+ hours saved per property when using the complete solution. That’s some vital time that could be allotted to more critical tasks. 

When it comes down to it, automation can help assist communities of all types. However, it becomes imperative at a lease-up community because teams often work with a leaner staff and higher traffic volumes. Your teams can work efficiently using the available tools while providing the top service expected at a new community. Check out some of the ways that automation can help short-staffed leasing teams

BetterBot - Automation Redefined

BetterBot is Redefining Automation — Here’s How

Automation has been seen as a “nice to have” feature in the past. It was a nifty add-on that could enhance your leasing process. Automation seemed innovative but was never seen as imperative to most property management companies. However, these days automation is essential to a successful business. That’s why we are redefining what it means to automate your marketing.

What is automation? 

Let’s start by talking about what automation is. Automation is a practice that typically uses technology to limit human input for a particular process. This can be set up for several areas in the leasing process, including lead nurturing, leasing-centric tasks, resident-focused activities, and so much more. 

Why is automation so important? 

There are certain areas where it may be beneficial to automate a process and others that will never make sense to automate. It’s essential to find the right balance between optimizing technology and utilizing the human connection.  Automation helps streamline processes so that humans can do what automation will never be able to do — connect meaningfully with others. This means implementing new conversational technology into old automation methods to improve consumer engagement. While automation engages prospects and residents in new ways, it allows for those meaningful connections to be made by the site team at impactful points in the renter’s journey. 

Brenee Brown said it best in her book, Dare to Lead

“The hopeful news is that there are some tasks that humans will always be able to do better than machines if we are willing to take off our armor and leverage our greatest and most unique asset — the human heart.” 

So what can automation do for humans so that teams can focus on connecting with others? A few of those things include: 

  • Lead response tools 
  • Chatbots
  • Online leasing assistants 
  • Self-guided tours
  • Referrals
  • Prequalification process
  • Lease management software
  • Move-in automation
  • Smart homes 
  • Resident reminders
  • Rent automation

How is BetterBot Redefining Automation? 

As we mentioned, these days, automation is essential for the leasing process. Redefining your automation means implementing conversational technology into old automation methods to improve consumer engagement. At BetterBot, we built our automation technology to give renters and property managers their time back. We believe that technology should make life easier for humans. An omnichannel automation solution should handle time-consuming, mundane, and repetitive tasks so humans can have the time to engage in meaningful conversations with fellow humans. 

Time-Savings

How Much Time/Money is Automation Saving?

During a typical conversation around automation technology, a question that often comes up is, “How much time and money is automation saving me?”  We’ve got the answers you’re looking for.

The Data

Let’s look at what automation does in a given month for an average property when deployed on a property website and additional channels in the digital marketplace. Other channels could include  Facebook Messenger/Marketplace, Google Ads/MyBusiness, Yelp, Instagram, YouTube, etc.

For example, BetterBot’s Multifamily automation solution saves an average of up to 100+ hours (per property, each month), which allows team members to focus on more critical tasks. 

On average, 300+ unique prospect conversations occur through the solution (per property, each month). Because the average person uses the 1.9x, that’s nearly 600 total conversations/property/month. 

Out of those conversations, teams can expect an average of 36 appointments set. BetterBot qualifies those prospect conversations and sends through the traffic that is most likely to convert. Which, in turn, saves the team time. And those appointments have around a 90% show rate. A call center is around 50% in show rate; a typical property scheduled appointment is approximately 60%. So when prospects schedule an appointment through BetterBot, they show! 

The average time is 16.3 days from when a prospective renter first engages BetterBot to when they fill out an application.  That’s between 1/2 to 1/4 the time of a typical ILS.

The Increase

When property marketers deploy the BetterBot automation solution, they often see an immediate lead, conversation, and appointment bump of 20%+.  Why? Today’s consumer, especially the renter demographic, is less and less inclined to make phone calls and doesn’t like filling out web forms.  Often they’ll just pass through your social outreach, ads, and website without engaging. But they’ll engage with conversational technology, especially a quick system, that provides what they’re looking for in less than a minute. This is essentially putting a fuel additive in your marketing gas tank to drive more efficiencies in your consumer outreach.

The easiest way to quantify the value of the increase is simply to figure out how much it would cost to drive 20% more leads, conversations, and appointments to your respective properties. 

Additional Considerations

What’s not being factored into the above calculations is: Automation works 24/7/365, doesn’t get snowed in, doesn’t need sick days, nor requires benefits. It can handle 3, 5, 20…an unlimited number of conversations covering a dozen topics simultaneously. Automation can be deployed on virtually every digital channel to meet and greet prospective renters anywhere instantly, at any time. Automation can look up and coordinate complex calendaring and appointment scheduling in seconds, see and convey unit availability and pricing in under a second, show virtual tours and videos at the click of a button, and so much more.

Automation-Savings

Devin Lusk, Director of Marketing at American Landmark, shares, “Everything was so just manual before BetterBot. You miss phone calls, and you miss prospects. BetterBot is just so amazing because it’s my favorite system that we have. BetterBot makes our lives so much easier. It’s so hands-off, and it’s just the easiest system that we have.”

In conclusion, let’s be very clear: Bots will never replace humans. They simply create efficiencies of marketing scale while reducing repetitive tasks that humans either don’t do, don’t like to do, or don’t do very well.  Humans will always be needed to handle interactions that require thought, empathy and complexity. So let’s let humans be humans and utilize automation to do the rest.

Girl looking at laptop

Generate Better Leads By Using Automation On Your Website

Automation is one of the best tools to work with leads on your property website. Instead of producing more leads, it’s crucial to consider the importance of better leads. Automation can mean several different things. Ultimately, automating a process allows technology to take the wheel and handle more menial tasks, so that team members have more time to focus on more complex duties. Automation can come in many forms, including chatbots and lead nurturing.

The Challenge

When people visit websites, they are faced with unnecessary contact forms popping up out every corner, invitations to chat with a live person, or suggestions to subscribe to a newsletter. The reality is that these customer engagement methods rarely provide decent results and can often have adverse effects on customer satisfaction scores. Cost can also be a huge problem, especially in the case of automation. You spend a big chunk of your marketing budget to bring visitors to your website only to see “agent is not available” when trying a live chat.

Ways Automation Can Help

Automation, such as chatbots or lead nurturing can effectively solve many of these problems. Automation can help brands better engage with website visitors who are more willing to share their information. Here are more potential benefits that you can expect by utilizing automation on your website:

  • Help visitors in real-time, no waiting for an agent and no time gaps between agent responses.
  • Engage with visitors 24 hours a day.
  • Focus your live agent on higher-value activities while offloading menial tasks to your chatbot.
  • Offer a consistent experience in multiple channels like Facebook, SMS, and Web.
  • Your chatbot can provide real value that will encourage visitors to share more information.
  • Chat transcripts can be forwarded to live agents for a seamless handoff.
  • Sentiment analysis can measure how visitors feel about your brand message.

How Automation Provides Better Leads

When automation jumps into the equation, there are endless possibilities. One of the results of deploying this type of technology is better leads. For instance, using automation through chatbots allows prospects to gain basic information about the community, which means the most interested leads will move forward to the next step in the leasing journey. Another example would be lead nurturing. When lead nurturing is automated, it allows properties to connect with their customer while putting in minimal effort. It will enable the prospect to continue the conversation and move forward when they are ready. 

All in all, we know that humans will never be extinct in the workforce. Technology will not replace humans, but it is there to help them. That’s where automation comes into play. Automating processes that are time-consuming and don’t require much effort allows teams to focus their time and energy where it matters most, resulting in more leases. Click here to set up your automation tools today.

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