Accelerated Leasing Consultants
What is Accelerated Leasing?
We get this question more than any other. Many multifamily owners aren’t aware that Accelerated Leasing is an option because they’ve been led by their property management firm to believe that they can do it all. While there are many excellent property management firms, they will always be pulled between working to keep existing residents happy and leasing to new prospective residents. And 99% of the time, the efforts for existing residents will win out.
That’s where Sales, Inc. comes in. By sending one or more of our highly trained Accelerated Leasing Consultants onto a property, the management team can fully focus their efforts on resident satisfaction while we focus our efforts on closing the deal with potential residents. Using our proven sales training and techniques, our Accelerated Leasing Experts typically close at two to three times the rate of a traditional leasing consultant.
Numbers don’t lie. Here are some results from a few of our recent apartment accelerated leasing engagements.
- Leased 57 apartments in 17 days in Charlotte, NC!
- Leased 102 apartments in 60 days in Houston, TX!
- Leased 227 apartments In 114 days in Richmond, VA!
- Leased 80 apartments in 14 days in Las Vegas, NV!
- Leased 158 apartments in 75 days in Atlanta, GA!
- Leased 92 beds in 36 days in Tucson, AZ!
If the average rent on the above apartments was $1000/month, Sales, Inc. helped generate $730,000 in new income per month for those 6 owners alone. Multiply those by 12-month leases and that’s more than $8.5 million in added revenue.
Think about all of your vacant apartments. You are losing out on your share of that income every month you wait for your property management firm to catch up and make leasing a priority – which might never happen.
But at Sales, Inc. leasing is our only priority – making our goals perfectly aligned with yours – and the reason you should call us today.
Challenges of Leasing in the Class A Property Market
Class A residents can oftentimes demand more of your staff’s time and attention because of their higher expectations for service. Many times even on a new lease-up, this can divide your staff’s attention to the point that marketing and leasing don’t receive the necessary amount of attention needed to meet your leasing goals on time.
A new property has the added challenge of a newly-hired staff focused on learning a new system, new procedures and getting to know residents as they move in. With Sales, Inc. in place to handle the leasing efforts, your staff can fully focus on getting the property up and running smoothly, ensuring satisfied tenants who are more likely to renew when they know the staff is focused on attending to their needs.
While Class A properties comprise the smallest section of communities, more often than not your competition offers the same amenities and luxuries you do, making it imperative that you have the best sales professionals working for you, which is what you get with Sales, Inc.
Sales, Inc. Solutions to Successful Class A Leasing
We start by picking the best leasing consultant on our staff for your property. Because of our ability to recruit nationally, we can send a Leasing Expert to your property from anywhere in the country. Once we arrive, our Leasing Consultant and Director of Leasing will quickly get to know your market and competitors so that leasing is ready to begin only 3 days after arrival.
If your Class A property is priced at a premium, you need to ensure you have a professional staff who will fully engage with every qualified prospect, which is one of the fundamental techniques we provide our LEs in training. You can’t always just get them in the door and expect the property to sell itself. With Sales, Inc. you can rest assured that you have someone incentivized to close on as much qualified traffic as possible, ensuring the quickest lease-up of your top-dollar property.
Challenges and Considerations on Class B Properties
Class B properties make up the highest number of communities in major metropolitan areas across the country giving you the immediate disadvantage of a high supply market. Not only are you competing against other B properties, but in many markets the lower A and higher C communities are also trying to market to your prospects.
One of the most difficult downfalls to overcome is a Class B property’s location. If your community is located in a struggling area or just simply off the beaten path from the city center and neighborhood hubs, it may be less attractive to potential residents. If your property’s location is not the issue but rather its age or construction, these are also factors that may deter quality applicants because appearances play strongly in a first impression.
Sales, Inc. Solutions for Successful Class B Leasing
Sales, Inc. will help insure you property is one of the winners in the Battle of the Class B properties by securing what we refer to as “more than your fair share.” If there simply aren’t enough residents to fill all of the available apartments in an area, you have to get more than your share. You can’t do that by using the same old methods you and everyone else has used and continues to use.
Our Leasing Experts use techniques that result in a traffic increase and a higher closing rate to get you more than just your share of the available residents.
Sales, Inc. will focus on the property’s positive, selling attributes in advertising, marketing, and meeting with potential leads. Rather than investing in enhancing the property, you can improve your occupancy rates by calling in help from the pros. Our focus on sales and rigorous training are a winning combination to making sure your property reaches maximum occupancy as quickly as possible.
Challenges of Leasing in the Class C Property Market
While there may not be as much competition as the Class B market, there is still a great deal of competition among C properties in urban and suburban markets. Add to that the influx of investors who are smartly buying up distressed properties, and you can see how important it is to ensure you make leasing a top priority.
One of the biggest struggles owners of Class C properties we work with experience is the challenge of finding quality staff. Oftentimes, the only people applying are those with no property experience who see it as a stepping stone to break into the business. Their concern is to get something they can put on their resume to get them to their next property. As a result, they are less concerned with attending to the needs of prospects and residents and more concerned with getting a few months under their belt.
Sales, Inc. Solutions to Leasing Class C Properties
Everybody needs a place to live, and our ability to keep that in the forefront of our Leasing Experts minds ensures they will give the highest level of service to every qualified prospect they contact. When management firms see the benefit to having Sales, Inc. on a property, they can fully turn their attention to maintenance and other issues more common on C properties.
Sales, Inc. has a successful record leasing C properties because our techniques allow our Leasing Experts to truly serve the prospective residents of this property type. We frequently find that C properties deliver lower quality service because they think they can.
What Sales, Inc. sees when we get contacted about a C property is the opportunity to win over prospects with great service and the proper use of sales techniques that promote this high level of service.
The benefits of our focus being strictly leasing provide our Leasing Experts the ability to focus on a person’s needs, and to spend quality time with each prospect rather than quickly answering a few of their questions and getting back to other pressing duties.
We have seen this happen on literally hundreds of properties where our approach doubles or even triples the applications and signed leases. In addition, our techniques often “rub off” on the existing staff at C properties and they begin to understand why their quick, haphazard handling of prospects will lead to low closing rates.
Unique Student Housing Challenges
If you are an owner or operator of Student Housing Properties, you already know the supply can outweigh the demand in many markets and developers are continuing to bring new product onto the market at an alarming rate. A property that was constructed only 4 or 5 years ago, may now be considered outdated with the emergence of new properties tailored entirely to the social desires of students.
Oftentimes you may be turning over the success of your investment to student workers whose priority is not going to be your occupancy. Their standards for success or acceptable performance probably don’t align with your high sales goals, but ours do.
Student housing owners know they have a very tight window to achieve pre-leasing for an entire school year. One small misstep in any of the critical areas, can lead to a quick decline in your numbers being where you want and need them to be.
Sales, Inc. Solutions to Successful Student Housing Leasing
If you don’t have a great sales staff in place at the right time (oftentimes at the start of the spring semester), you risk losing pre-leases to new product or better located communities. The Sales, Inc. program is designed to impact student housing in virtually every way possible for you as an owner.
Our daily guerrilla marketing efforts make a huge impact on student properties. Our Leasing Experts focus their attention on getting your property name in front of as many students as possible as quickly as possible.
Colleges & Universities We Have Worked Near Include:
- Baylor University
- Virginia Commonwealth University
- University of Arizona
- University of Minnesota
- Texas State Technical College
- University of Georgia
- University of Virginia
- University of Maryland
- Radford University
- University of North Carolina
- Duke University
- University of Texas-Tyler
- Texas A&M
- Texas Tech
- University of Nevada-Las Vegas
- University of Arkansas-Little Rock
- University of Mississippi
Tax Credit (Section 42) Property Solutions
Since 1988, we’ve frequently leased Tax Credit, or Section 42 properties, but over the past 5 years Sales, Inc. has become the de facto Lease Up company for Tax Credit properties across the nation. We have extensive experience leasing Tax Credit/Section 42 properties, and have recently implemented Tax Credit training into every one of our Training Classes to ensure that all of our Leasing Experts understand the unique challenges and guidelines on these properties.
In 2012, Sales, Inc. was selected by one of the largest and most progressive Tax Credit developers in the country to be their sole provider of Accelerated Leasing Services. Since that time, we’ve successfully leased up over 50 tax credit properties just for them, and continue to work with that developer and many others. Our ability and willingness to train and maintain our team of Leasing Experts in their understanding of the tax credit property application process and leasing requirements is a great attraction to Tax Credit owners and managers across the country.