Kristi Fickert
Realync
Today’s Apartment Academy guest is Kristi Fickert, Vice President of Enterprise Growth at Realync. Realync is a leading video leasing engagement platform for multifamily. We spoke to Kristi about the growth of video leasing tours and other new tools for property management and operations.
After years on the operations and marketing side of multifamily, Kristi joined Realync in part because she likes being on the cutting edge of new industry technologies. Property management is not known for being the most forward-thinking industry. For Kristi, working with a vendor provides opportunities to innovate and create products and tools that multifamily can use.
Video Leasing Tours Shorten the Leasing Cycle
Newer technologies like video and chat tools and give people options. Often, they prefer these options over picking up the phone and calling. And that shortens the leasing cycle. It shortens the time that that customer has to spend doing research about a property and helps them get to that conversion point.
This helps to solve two issues. The first is for the onsite team. Those teams already don’t have enough hours in the day. They’re already responsible for so many different tasks. These tools put more time back in their day and give them time to focus on qualified prospects who really want to rent. It helps with automating processes too.
Simplified Shopping for Prospects
On the other side, for the people who are shopping, these tools create a much easier and smoother process for finding a new home.
The average prospect visits a property 2.8 times before they rent. And if you visit a property almost three times before you can make your decision, you’re probably doing that with three to five different properties because you’re going to shop the market. That’s a lot of time for that end user. Video helps fill that gap, shortens the leasing cycle, and makes things easier for both parties.
Video can create a more authentic connection between leasing teams and prospects. It’s more effective to convince them to come out and tour the property. And even if somebody still wants to tour in person, it’s still a quick video. And the leasing people can replicate those easily too.
Create a Video Leasing Tour Library
Another useful tactic is taking a quick video of the “money” unit on your property if and when it becomes vacant. Once you add that to your content library, you can share it any time that that apartment needs to be shown to a prospect. You can personalize it too.
There are a lot of different types of video content out there. It ranges from that sexy 360-degree video on the homepage of your website to the more authentic and raw videoconferencing setup. Just talking back and forth with prospects or even residents is a valuable way to engage people and create a better experience.