Enhancing the Buyer’s Experience Is the Way in Apartment Marketing

The whole point of apartment marketing is to fill the top of your leasing funnel. Attraction is step one of the prospect journey you create, followed by engagement, lease signing and, finally, risk mitigation. Your prospect’s experience in the leasing process — from casual, potential prospect to loyal resident — is the key success driver. And you want to make that drive as frictionless and efficient as possible.  In a recent series of four webcasts about enhancing the prospect experience, RealPage® experts discussed the strategies and tools to achieve that. The second webcast, entitled Leasing: A Smarter Way to Get to Yes, focuses on the importance of the buying experience in the online leasing process, and how you can deliver the kind of experience prospects expect today. Wanted: The Amazon Experience “A client told me that they no longer view other apartment communities and their websites as their competition when it comes to their website,” says Andrew Bowen, industry principal, asset optimization at RealPage. “They view companies that their prospects also shop on as their online competition when it comes to the experience. For prospects out shopping for an apartment, that no longer means grabbing a book and driving around. It means pulling out your phone and swiping. They might very well be shifting between an e-commerce site like Amazon and your website. Or booking their vacation plans and then looking at your floor plans.” Bowen says buyers today want a complete process where they can discover, research, inquire and commit all in the same session. They want that frictionless, seamless Amazon experience, regardless of whether they are on Amazon, your website or another community’s site. And they approach buying the same way on all these sites. It’s the e-commerce process to conversion: discovery, due diligence and research, price comparison, and peer review.  Commitment is the ultimat...