Which KPI would you bury first?

When asked what KPI should be taken out to pasture, an audience poll produced a clear front-runner: lead volume. It is the metric everyone reaches for when leasing slows, the one that whispers, "we'd fix this if we just had more leads." Kadi Mancuso Rice outlined the issue: More leads only help if those leads carry intent. Otherwise you are funneling junk, eating up your team's time, and handing everyone a dose of artificial confidence because the dashboard looks busy.

She indicated she would rather have five leads in a week where all five lease than five hundred that go nowhere and let someone in another department feel like the box got checked. The better signals, the panel argued, are lead-to-tour conversion, engagement quality, lead scoring, and genuine intent.

The case against physical occupancy

Next on the block, Matt Rogers laid out the case against physical occupancy as a tracking tool.

Roughly ten years ago, he stopped leading with physical occupancy and shifted to a 60-day availability-to-rent metric (ATR). The trick was pairing it with a standard deviation, so he could see what occupancy would be doing two months out rather than today. In his market, he knows that gap is about 2.31 percent. So against a budgeted 95 percent occupancy, his ATR needs to hover near 92.69 percent. If it climbs to 93.5, he raises rent. If it slips to 91, he approaches the issue in the opposite manner. The point, he said, is to play offense with small incremental rent adjustments rather than defense once the number is already screaming red.

Physical occupancy, he announced, is dead. "Done and buried."

Renewal percentage: a lagging indicator you can barely touch

Renewal percentage is yet another lagging indicator you have little ability to impact. By the time June shows you renewed only 20 percent of expiring leases against a normal 40, the moment to act is long gone. Renewal rates tell you what happened, but they rarely explain why.

What replaces it is intent, tracked earlier in the process. RPM Living measures intent from the prospect stage all the way through the resident's living experience, with back-end scoring that flags who is at risk and who is likely to renew. When a moment of negativity surfaces, the team is alerted and can get in front of the resident with a simple question: How can I make this better?

Matt cited a striking figure shared by a colleague in the industry: 31 percent of residents' reasons for moving out trace back to maintenance. His proactive fix is to mobilize the maintenance team for retention. Put a new-resident check-in on the maintenance supervisor's schedule. Have them knock, introduce themselves, and ask if there's anything to improve. Eight times out of ten the answer is "no, but thank you for asking," and that goodwill is the renewal beginning to form.

Kara Rafferty chimed in with her sister's real-world example. Her decision not to renew didn't even wait until the initial move-in – she had decided not to renew before even stepping foot into her new home. The property manager failed to do the basic elements that make the move-in experience positive, which Kadi Mancuso Rice called "compliance theater" where checking the boxes often do not fulfill the ultimate goal of the action.

The context of KPIs

Even within a single KPI, context can provide different signals. Kara Rafferty shared an interesting concept: should success be measured the same way in every season? She argued that different KPIs deserve the spotlight at different times. Spring and summer lean toward leasing velocity, traffic, and acquisition. Fall and winter shift to retention, renewal strategy, and resident engagement. In other words, a KPI can offer more or less value in different contexts, or also may signal success or failure differently depending on the scenario.

The panel extended the idea to cadence, too: some signals are daily (traffic), some weekly (lead-to-tour), some monthly (renewals), and some only reveal themselves over a quarter or longer (brand lift). Measuring a long-horizon metric on a daily dashboard is its own kind of noise.

The verdict, and the rubric to take home

The final verdict wasn't that old metrics are worthless. It's that we measure them too late. Physical occupancy without economics, lead volume without quality, renewal percentage without intent. Those were the three laid to rest.

What deserves another decade, per the panel's "KPI Hall of Fame," shares four traits: the metrics are predictive (they look ahead, not back), actionable (they drive decisions), timely (they arrive early enough to matter), and owned (someone is accountable). The nominees included economic occupancy, renewal intent, preventive maintenance, engagement quality, lead-to-tour conversion, and payment-risk forecasting.

To decide what stays and what goes, Kadi offered a simple rubric: Role → Outcome → Signal → Timeliness. Who owns this KPI? If no one does, it may be time to bury it. What outcome are you trying to drive? What signal tells you it's working? And when, how often, and why are you measuring it, given that meeting time spent on a meaningless metric is just wasted time. If you can't answer all four, it probably shouldn't be on the list.

Matt's shared a parting challenge: take one metric you track every day mostly out of habit, run it through the rubric, even drop it into an AI model and let it push back.

If a KPI doesn't change behavior, as the panel asked in their final slide, why are we measuring it at all?