Your leasing team should not be approving at their discretion. With fair housing laws, you can't chance being in violation. We offer leasing bonuses for new leases and renewals. Renewals are a higher rate, it is a set amount for certain terms, longer leases are paid out higher. Though, we will be looking at this again because we are using a revenue management system at some sites and it will offer better rates for lower termed leases based off of lease expiration limits sometimes. You could incentive higher for renewals, the more qualified tenants you have the longer they will stay (no evictions, skips, non-renewals).
We also offer qtrly bonuses that are calculated based off of a few different benchmarks: % Qtrly online training completed by the staff, Revenue increase, expenses to budget. The property must be 90% occupied to be considered to receive.
We do not give a bonus based on strictly occupancy %, increasing rents is part of increasing revenue(see note above) and we are okay with a slightly lower occupancy to be able to collect more in rental income.