Industry Benchmarks/Transparency

Hello! I have been in the multi-fam marketing world for a little under a year. I am with a company that currently has a little over 300 units and we are building another project that will bring us 110 more.
Anyway - I am looking for some industry benchmarks for marketing. I found the survey that Multifamily Insiders put out and while it offered some insight, it left me curious still.

Specifically for digital ads - what is good cost per lead/cost per lease? And how are you accurately tracking those leads? We use Knock and still most of our leads come through as "property website"
Are the numbers in that report speaking to overall cost per lead/lease or specifically to digital marketing?

I am sure I have more questions, but that is all that is coming to me at the moment.

Would anyone in marketing be interested in a discussion?
 

Hi Karlyn —


Benchmarks in multifamily marketing are a myth — here’s why.

1) Every operator starts with a different foundation
Some teams have 100+ digital assets (video, vertical, static, fast-rotating creative), fast sites, unit-level URLs, and fully wired tracking. Others don’t. That foundation alone can change CPL or cost-per-lease by multiples, not percentages. Comparing them is already invalid.

2) Apartments are one of the most fraud-infested ad environments
I’ve seen real data showing 1 legitimate click to 19 fraudulent clicks in multifamily campaigns. That single variable can inflate costs 10–30× before you even factor in creative, bids, or market conditions. If you’re not defending against fraud before launch, benchmarks are fiction.

3) Tracking quality determines the “benchmark” you think you’re hitting
Poor attribution collapses paid, organic, and referral traffic into “property website.” That doesn’t mean ads failed — it means measurement failed. Two teams can spend the same amount and report wildly different CPLs purely due to tracking integrity.

4) Market mechanics are not interchangeable
Lease-up vs. stabilized, rent band, unit mix, seasonality, and demand elasticity all change performance. A downtown Class A lease-up and a suburban workforce asset should never share a benchmark — yet reports group them anyway.

5) Benchmarks ignore defense costs
Fraud mitigation, bot filtering, server-side tracking, and site performance are marketing costs. If you don’t account for them, you’re comparing a defended system to an exposed one — and calling the exposed one “inefficient.”

Bottom line:

Benchmarks don’t measure performance. They average wildly different realities and call it authority.

On new construction, after ~6 months of real optimization, I’ve personally seen $65 per signed lease (about two years ago). More commonly, $350–$550 per lease is achievable when the system is properly defended and accurately measured. Meanwhile, vendors were pushing $2,000+ per lease as “normal.”
Those aren’t different opinions — they’re different levels of control.

The only numbers that matter are:
Your trend lines
Your lead quality
Your lease velocity

And none of those mean anything until fraud is mitigated, tracking is accurate, and the digital foundation is actually sound.
Benchmarks comfort people. Systems make money.

Hey! Thanks for taking the time to write all of this. I really appreciate it. You should teach some webinars on here! 
 

 Ask, and you shall receive. i believe someone said that a while back.
i probably have the education material. I have to train my team, so it accumulates over the years.

What do you want to learn?

1) Site Architecture
2) Local SEO: Google My Business, Bing Places, Directories, Site Seo,  Social Media organic post best practices for any channel
4)Google Ads
5)Meta Ads
6) Bing Ads, LinkedIn ads, TikTok Ads, X (I don't recommend, but it's similar as Elon sends a lot of fraud), although I have had success even with bots on X.
7). ContentOps: design theory best practices, Adobe: Photoshop, Figma, Adobe Premiere, Canva. Video and image ads design - Stacy is probably good at this. 
AI and design: chatgpt/google studio/gemini, Midjourney Wondershare, RunwayML, Kaiber, Lumino, Gemino, Sora 2, Veo3, storytelling, transitions, ElevenLabs, Ubio, Lyrics with Google Lab

9) Analytics and Strategy: GA4, SGTM, Looker/PowerBI, Google Search Console, Semrush, python/dex/sql and how to put it together
10) How to check what your marketing agency is missing
11) Code Vibing

Tell me a one item and i'll see what i can do. 1 through 4, I have a lot of material; 8 and 11 do as well. The rest i'd have to think about how to approach. 
Books:  drive.google.com/drive/folders/1OoeHOyI8...CJgtiDbN?usp=sharing
Seth Godin, Zag, and anything by Strategize are really good