Proponents say centralized leasing allows apartment owners to widen the base for their most aggressive leasing agents, while also streamlining responsibilities. However, to focus these salespeople on leasing—and only leasing—you have to take away other responsibilities while changing the mind-set of your employees and on-site staffs. And some apartment companies aren’t eager to make that jump just yet.
The Leasing Hub
If you really think about it, it doesn’t make much sense to tie up a skilled seller with paperwork, credit checks, rent collections, and other back-office functions. At least, that’s what senior vice president of property operations Jerry Davis and the executives at UDR thought. So they identified properties that were close enough together in places like Southern California; Richmond, Va.; and Dallas (Davis says they shouldn’t be farther than seven minutes apart), took the best leasing agents from across those properties, and put them together. The teams are mobile and can work out of the office of any of the properties they serve.
Davis says centralized leasing not only improves the closing ratio (because less skilled closers are removed from the mix), but it also gives leasing agents a wider menu of options to sell. For instance, if a customer comes in wanting a state-of-the-art gym and the property has a closet-turned-gym, the leasing agent now has the option of introducing the potential resident to other properties that may have a better fitness center. But for this to work, the leasing agent needs to have a mix of properties to sell. “You don’t want to have a bunch of properties that are identical twins,” Davis says. “You want a variety of options to cater to different tastes.”
Post is happy with its almost-two-decade-old model in Dallas, where it eschews the conventional on-site leasing model and rents out a storefront to serve as its leasing hub for its 10 properties within close proximity, but it hasn’t duplicated that template elsewhere. “The key to success is the close proximity of the properties,” says Laura VanLoh, the senior vice president overseeing Texas operations for Post.
In effect, they’ve created an office that is dedicated to sales rather than a traditional office where both leasing and management are conducted. “It’s a one-stop shop for us,” VanLoh says. “It gives us the ability to have someone walk in and give us their search criteria, then we’re able to narrow that search down to two or three communities that they can see in one visit.”
