Half of all rental leads go untouched.
While leasing agent Mallorie zips around Silverstein’s property, giving tours and investing in high-intent prospects, hundreds of inquiries from StreetEasy pile up in her inbox. At the end of the day, it’s a massive challenge to reply to every one, and even harder to prioritize which leads are worth engaging sooner rather than later.
On top of this, the COVID-driven influx of site unseen applicants means far more basic questions - “how large are the windows?” - to answer over and over again. Mallorie has to field 33 of these inquiries on average to sign just one lease. The consequences of all this wasted time are significant, but hard to see. Traditionally, the solution has been to add additional staff. However, this can be an expensive and inefficient approach.
Enter Peek.
In summer of 2020, Silverstein implemented Peek’s virtual tour and staging software. Now, instead of drowning in unanswered calls and emails, Mallorie starts her month by scanning her newly-available units, a simple process that takes 15 minutes or less. She uploads them to StreetEasy, where her listings are automatically integrated with Peek’s virtual tour technology, and then waits as well-qualified leads start to come in. The technology has had a major impact on website engagement - since launching Peek, Silverstein has achieved a 60% increase in organic leads.
For Mallorie, the value is clear. “We've significantly reduced the amount of time touring low intent prospective tenants and conducting virtual meetings,” she says. “Instead, we can use Peek tours to showcase our inventory. The best part is that the clients love it too - it saves them time and they can begin the process from anywhere. It's much more efficient and we get back a lot of the time needed to focus on all of our other responsibilities."
“It saves an invaluable amount of time. The UI/UX is fantastic. It's clean, it's simple and easy… The quality of the video and the images you can produce from it are stellar. It's easy for clients to maneuver through it; it is so user-friendly.”
Mallorie Ekstrom
Peek delights tenants as well; the staging feature lets them paint a picture of their new home’s look and feel, helping them imagine themselves there before even seeing the unit live.“The quality of the virtual tours and the ease of being incredibly user-friendly has made renting apartments in New York City better than ever,” Mallorie goes on.
“Our old virtual tours [with one of Peek’s competitors] looked like a terrible bootleg version of a Beastie Boys music video. Peek is very clean and professional.”How is all of this possible? Peek’s proprietary tech creates the leasing funnel of the future for Silverstein, letting prospects move through the process easily and at their own speed.
Prospects that do inquire are more familiar with the space; they’ve seen the actual unit and determined they’re interested. This sanity checking allows prospective tenants to tour just 2-3 apartments during their search, versus 6-8 apartments before virtual tour technology.
“People look at virtual tours and say ‘I don’t like the finishes...this isn’t the right building for me’ and that keeps the process moving,” says Mallorie.
Using Peek to free up Mallorie’s time leads to the last piece of the leasing funnel of the future: the end of lead fatigue. Goodbye to the days where half of all inquiries into leasing offices go unanswered. It’s a simple equation: if a given lead only has a 3% chance of converting, spending 20-30 minutes on the phone isn’t worth the time if that agent has a few other leads in the funnel already.
Now, instead of 33 inquiries per lease signed, Mallorie only has to field nine inquiries per conversion, reducing the number of showings needed to turn a prospect to a resident by 71%.A virtual leasing strategy not only creates a better resident experience, but positively impacts the leasing office when it comes to conversion rates (lead to lease) and productivity. This is a direct benefit to property managers’ bottom lines. In a time of unprecedented changes in consumer demands, which create significant opportunities to drive efficiencies, a robust virtual leasing experience is no longer a nice-to-have; it’s a need-to-have.
