Measuring Success in Multifamily

You’ve probably seen this popular quote while scrolling through your LinkedIn feed: “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.” It’s become a trope in the multifamily industry, but there is so much truth behind it—especially when it comes to leasing team performance. Multifamily owners and managers are spending thousands of dollars in advertising to make the phone ring at their communities in order to capture qualified prospects. However, most of them don’t actually know how well their leasing teams handle these valuable calls. If you’re not measuring the performance of your leasing teams, then it can be incredibly difficult to help them improve their sales techniques or to recognize the behaviors that are driving positive results, such as successfully converting prospects to tours.

By keeping a regular cadence of tracking and measuring the performance of your leasing agents, you are ensuring that your properties provide the best customer experience possible, and your ad dollars are not wasted. Plus, it provides an opportunity to recognize your best leasing talent and identify areas for training opportunities.

When it comes to measuring your leasing team’s performance, keep these do’s and don’ts top-of-mind.

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The Do's:

Do: Use a Third-Party to Measure Your Leasing Team’s Performance

To decrease the chance of any bias or subjection while measuring a leasing team, we suggest that you always use a third-party, or vendor, to evaluate your leasing team. This ensures that each member of your team is evaluated fairly without any personal influence.

By using a third-party, it can also save you countless hours of work. Instead of having to listen to hundreds of phone calls to monitor your team’s performance, a vendor can do this for you on a regular basis to ensure you have a large pool of data and information pertaining to your team’s performance.

Do: Use a Structured Approach for Measuring Performance

There are many variables that need to be accounted for when measuring your team’s performance—especially if you decide to use a mystery shopping service or secret shopper. A person pretending to be a customer can pose a lot of issues for your properties. Did the shopper fit your customer profile? Was it cost-effective? Was the small sample size statistically relevant? Was the shop report accurate? Did the employee figure out it was a shop and alter behavior? 

That’s why we recommend taking a more structured and quantitative approach to measuring performance. Use a service that evaluates your employees on interactions with real prospects, not actors. This will give you a more data-rich and holistic view into how your team performs.

Do: Seize Every Opportunity to Coach and Mentor

Investing in your teams’ professional skills and openly assessing their performance can keep them focused on providing exceptional customer experiences. A good employee performance evaluation tool should provide comprehensive reporting and access to recordings of the employee-customer interaction. This allows you to objectively manage your team’s performance by using data to explain areas of concern and then coach and watch for signs of improvement.  

Listening to call recordings is also a great coaching opportunity. Top performers, like professional athletes and musicians watch and listen to their performance so they can identify areas that need improvement.  Having the ability to listen to actual calls with prospects gives you great insight into how well your leasing team performs on calls.  It is also a great way to recognize top performers by sharing a recording where a leasing consultant really nailed it.

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The Don'ts:

Don’t: Be Secretive in Your Evaluation Process

Transparency is crucial when it comes to performance evaluations. When you decide to begin monitoring your leasing team, it’s important that are you up-front with your team regarding the process of how they will be evaluated. Distribute any scoring materials and information about the vendor you are using to help build trust in the process you have chosen.  

Employees should feel empowered to use an evaluation program to grow professionally. Share why you have decided to begin evaluating their performance, such as to help build their leasing skills, identify training opportunities, or to start a fun recognition program. They will appreciate being kept in-the-loop.

Don’t: Have Unrealistic Expectations

Data collected by LeaseHawk shows that leasing professionals converted nearly 54% of qualified prospect calls to appointments in Q4-2020. This information is published quarterly by LeaseHawk in the Industry Report Card (IRC). It is an objective report that benchmarks how effectively multifamily professionals handle incoming telephone calls. The data is pulled from thousands of multifamily properties from across the county.  

With access to a report like the LeaseHawk IRC, you able to create realistic benchmarks and goals for your leasing team. It also allows you to compare your team’s performance to the rest of the multifamily industry.

Don’t: Conceal Results from Your Leasing Team

Don’t hide your team’s results—celebrate them! Recognize the growing talent and skills developed by your leasing team by sharing the top results of individual team members and communities. By celebrating their victories, everyone is able to learn from the methods that are proven to be working, plus it creates a fun culture of recognition and friendly competition.

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LeaseHawk Measures Agent Performance  

LeaseHawk has been measuring leasing agent performance on phone calls for over 9 years and has evaluated more than 66,000 multifamily professionals. Our evaluation process scores the performance of leasing teams on actual prospect calls—no secret shoppers here! We offer a quantitative approach to scoring your leasing team’s performance, so you can get an accurate and holistic view of their performance.

We have standardized the process of evaluating leasing team call performance, allowing our clients to rank results, quickly detect changes, recognize their top leasing talent, and to ensure every prospect call receives the best customer experience.  

To learn about LeaseHawk and how we measure agent performance, visit leasehawk.com/platform/agent-performance.

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