It’s summer vacation time and people are on the move and looking for apartment homes. Kids are out of school, young adults are graduating, obtaining jobs and moving out on their own, and for the most part, the weather is cooperative.

With all these factors in play, there is big turnover in rental units during the summer season. This provides communities with ample opportunity to increase revenue and gain occupancy, but on the other hand, it means there is a lot of competition.

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Stay on Top of Technology Trends

Technology is not taking a vacation this summer—in fact, it’s raining down on the multifamily industry. It seems for every situation, there is a new and innovative system designed to improve your operations and leasing process. With every new solution there is a new set of data to become familiar with and review on a regular basis. This in turn can be counterproductive.

To combat data-overload, industry leaders are looking to Business Intelligence (BI) tools to effectively manage their data and harness actionable information and analytics. In effect, taking control of all the new technology instead of it taking control of them.

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Identify Critical Needs Quickly and Keep Big Project Focus

In the National Apartment Association white paper, “20 for 20: Where Multi-Family Housing Operations is Heading by 2020,” industry leaders said they had an annual focus on one ‘big project.’  With all hands-on deck to ensure that project is being implemented, important day-to-day operating decisions get pushed aside or overlooked all together.  

BI is key to keeping additional focus on “non-big project” factors to spot critical needs in marketing, employee performance and leasing methodology. The technology is now readily available to not only corporate leadership, but also management in the field, keeping everyone on task using the same data and metrics.

An example is HawkEye® Business Intelligence by LeaseHawk. This BI solution is available to managers on their mobile devices and computers and pulls together a total leasing picture, including ad source effectiveness, caller behavior, employee performance and more.  Leadership can quickly spot issues with just a glance into its intuitive dashboards to recognize opportunities for improvement—such as high missed call rates or underperforming employees.  Another benefit is keeping track of the total prospects each community receives and the marketing sources that generated them, so ad spend can be adjusted appropriately.

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Need to know which properties are struggling to schedule appointments? Or, which ad sources are lease producers? A quick look at an effective BI tool like HawkEye can tell you in near real time. Waiting for monthly meetings or scrolling through spreadsheets of data can put a management company behind in the race for occupancy. Instead, be empowered to make faster decisions by using BI technology to figure out where training and resources need to be applied.

Take a summer vacation, but also take a look at the newest technologies that are heating up the industry. Hit the ground running and stay in front of the competition this leasing season.