As we get near the Apartment Innovation and Marketing (AIM) conference, I wanted to take a moment to discuss an innovation from single-family rentals (SFR) that I believe should be getting more attention from multifamily housing (MFH) operators.

As many of you know, we recently released a white paper, 20 for ’20: 20 Conversations with Senior Multi-family Executives About the Outlook for 2020 and Beyond. The paper presented findings about the nature of technology projects, recruiting and retention issues, the development of BI, the focus (or lack thereof) of executives to a variety of new technologies and the “state of the state” of pricing and revenue management.

One of the most surprising findings from 20 for ’20 was how slowly MFH is adopting self-show. Self-service is, after all, a mega-trend across all industries, and given that self-guided prospect tours have been so successful in the SFR space, we might wonder what’s holding us back in multifamily.

Self-Show Q&A

Here are several of the objections that we heard during the interviews as well as our response based on the extensive work we’ve done in the SFR sector:

Now, let's look at the upside

While there are some details for multifamily operators to work through none counts as a show-stopper. Meanwhile, self-showing solves several long-standing problems and creates some exciting opportunities for multifamily. Three obvious ones spring to mind:

  1. Night touring low season. Especially in northern climates, tours can end as early as 430p since there are legitimate safety concerns about leasing associates accompanying prospects when it’s dark. Self-showing extends this by as many hours as operators want.
  2. Handling overflow on busy weekends. If you’ve ever had more prospects wanting tours than there are leasing associates to tour them, it is obvious how self-showing can expand the number of tours.
  3. Aligning to the growing self-serve desire of prospects. As mentioned earlier, an ever-greater number of prospects may not want a leasing agent “hovering” over them as they tour. They’re used to self-service at airport kiosks, online check-in for hotels, car rental programs that let them go straight to a car and self-service check out in grocery stores. So shouldn’t we allow prospects to view their new apartment at leisure?

Learn more at AIM 2019

As we concluded in 20 for '20, self-tour is a matter of "when," not "if" in multifamily. If you want to learn more about how to make it happen for your company, be sure to register to attend AIM and let us know that you’ll be there. We are going to be exploring this in two sessions:

We’d love to see you at both sessions and to have the opportunity to carry on the discussion about how multifamily operators can accelerate towards making self-show a reality.