Apartment Leasing – Interrupting Your Prospects Buying Cycle

When we train to maximize our apartment leasing, we often discuss a sales cycle required to close more leases.  This usually follows the general progression of acquiring prospects, setting the appointment, touring the community, closing, and follow-up.  But just as important as it is to understand our sales cycle, it is just as important to understand our prospects buying cycle.  If you can anticipate your prospects actions when leasing a new apartment, you can develop strategies that increase your odds of closing!

Before we can develop a strategy to affect your apartment prospects’ buying cycles, let’s try to fully understand it.  Although prospects take a wide variety of paths to their buying cycle, let’s take a common one:

  1)      Step One:  Establish a list of possible apartment communities to live in.  Historically, this meant using a print guide they picked up at a local grocery store.  More often today, however, that means starting online at one of the many ILS’s, on Craigslist, or other listing sites.

  2)      Step Two:  Possibly call ahead about any specific questions they might have.

  3)      Step Three:  Plan a day to visit several communities.  (Let’s actually break this up)

1. Community 1
2. Community 2
3. Community 3
4. Community 4 – Your community!

  ///   -- OUR GOAL = INTERRUPTION --  ///

1. Community 5
2. Community 6

  4)      Step Four:  Discuss apartment options with decision makers

  5)      Step Five:  Select apartment community

As you can see, your ideal scenario is to close the resident after the come to your community, thus skipping from your site visit all the way to Step Five.  But oftentimes, closing a prospect while at your community simply does not happen, no matter how strong our sales tactics are, so they leave the property.  But let’s compare the next step in our sales process to the next step in their buying process.  Our next step is the follow-up, which often doesn’t happen for 24 hours, if at all, while the next step for them is visiting a competing community.

But what if we had another strategy to effectively interrupt their buying cycle?  If you don’t close them during the first visit, the next best option is to figure out a way to have them skip the visits to Community 5 and 6.  There are likely different options at this point, but I want to share one strategy with you today:  Food. 

So let’s say that you tried to close the apartment prospect, but they are not biting.  They are going to leave your community, so instead of just letting them drive to the next community, offer them another option.  Try this:  “I don’t know if you all are tired from apartment hunting, but I’d like to give you a free pizza.  It’s only good for 20 minutes after your visit today, though.” 

So why give them a free pizza?  Well, that free pizza interrupts their buying cycle!  Instead of visiting two more competing communities, they now pause the apartment hunt to get a bite to eat.  This strategy does several things that boost your chances of leasing to that apartment prospect:

1. First, it establishes reciprocity.  In other words, you have given them something, and it is human nature for them to want to give something back to you.  That’s why people always give away free pens!  Even a pen can help establish reciprocity, let alone a free meal!
2. Second, like I said, it pauses the their buying cycle.  People have momentum in life, and interruptions do a lot to disrupt plans.  Think about when people miss a day of working out – how often does that lead to a 2^nd, 3^rd, and 4^th day of missing your workout routine?
3. Third, it gives them a time to discuss their apartment options among themselves, which is their Step Four!  Even better, when they are stopping to discuss their choices, yours is freshest in their mind!  For those of you who watch American Idol, at the end of the show, which singers are you most likely to remember?  Probably the first and the last, right?  So while they are trying to remember which community had which amenity, yours is crystal clear in their heads.
4. Fourth, it’s nap time!  How do most people feel after a heavy meal?  Sleepy!  This further reduces their interest in restarting the apartment hunt.  In the end, people want easy decisions, and you have made it easier for them to just go ahead and choose from the communities they have already seen.  This means you have reduced your competing properties from five to three!

Two important notes about this concept:  You might be thinking that it might end up costing a nice chunk of change.  Well, I would suggest partnering with the pizza place (or other restaurant) to help advertise to your existing residents.  Make it a trade, where they cover half the cost of the pizza in exchange for free promotion.  You cover the other half, so it only costs $5 per prospect.

The other question is about timing.  If it isn’t the lunch hour, have another option for free ice cream!  If it is at the end of the day, you still need to offer them something per fair housing, but the strategy still has value.  Just make sure to implement an online apartment leasing solution they can use when they get home from dinner.

What do you think?  Do you have any strategies that could effectively interrupt your apartment prospects buying cycle?