Promoted Listings: How to Counteract Vacancies and Sign More Leases

“If you have high vacancies, and you require more leads, then promoted listings can provide up to 5x more leads than a standard listing.” - Wesley Burgess, Director of Sales & Operations at Rentsync

As the weather improves leading into the summer months, many properties are ramping up in preparation for the leasing season. Warmer weather, and longer days, come with an increasing willingness to relocate. Typically, covering the months of May through September, this period represents peak leasing activity, and should therefore be a focus for those looking to stabilize high vacancy properties or lease-up new properties.

To effectively take advantage of the first full leasing season since 2019, without various restrictions limiting Canadians’ ability to move, property managers and marketers need to be ready. Of course, there are the traditional methods such as: 

• Training your leasing team. This ensures that your leasing team hits the ground running with the tools available to them, whether they be objection handling, or simply how and when to respond to inquiries.
   
• Updating and modernizing your property. Whether that’s a fresh coat of paint, reviewing amenities, or doing full renovations if time permits.
   
• Improve your online listings. This can include something as simple as sprucing up your property descriptions, to having new property photos professionally taken.
   
• Embracing virtual leasing tools. Enabling your team to offer superior service by pre-qualifying prospects through virtual tours, video walkthroughs, and online applications. 

Although quite expansive, this list does not cover all the potential steps available to property owners, most importantly, the use of promoted listings. 

Beneath all of the various tools available to leasing professionals, the most basic and important one is that no leases can be signed without first attracting leads to the property. There is only so much you can do to improve leasing activity if prospects simply aren't seeing your property. At the end of the day, driving leads is the most basic and important part of leasing a property.

You only have one chance to make a first impression which in the leasing industry means that the lease can either be won or lost within the first few minutes. Of course, the first method to ensure this goes well is to properly train and prepare your leasing staff, but the next best method is to increase the number of first impressions made on your property. 

Promoted listings can more than double the number of leads you generate which can lead to a significant increase in actually booked property tours, and subsequently signed leases.

Through analysis, we have found that promoted listings on average increase lead volume by over 2.5x.

Do everything in your power to help your property achieve strong leasing results by empowering the leasing staff, and ensuring steady lead flow.

What’s the ROI of promoted listings?

The value of promoted listings applies to all properties but is doubly important to those pushing their rental rates. For every dollar increase in rent above the market average, there is an associated reduction of incoming leads. This can negatively impact leasing by reducing the number of prospects touring your property which ultimately leads to an impact to a property's bottom line. Purchasing promoted listings for these properties can reverse this trend by generating additional leads which can help leasing staff fill vacancies more quickly. 

Promoted listings help lease units faster.

Below are comparisons of the average lead volume per building of standard and promoted listings. Each map uses the same range of values and colours to properly showcase the power of promoted listings. Lead data was aggregated at the FSA (Forward Sortation Area) level and displayed above Google Hybrid maps for reference. The markets included below are intended to provide a reference to the lead-generating capabilities of promoted listings and were selected based on the availability of listing data throughout their entire geographic extents.
 

Above are maps showing the average number of leads per building using standard, and promoted listings within the City of Calgary. They show that promoted listings generate a substantially higher number of leads for those buildings which have them enabled. Promoted listings had the greatest effect in Southwest Calgary, the Beltline, and Bridgeland-Riverside by more than doubling the number of incoming leads per property. On average, promoted listings increased average lead volume by 1.36x over comparable standard listings in Calgary. 
 

Above are maps displaying average leads per building of both standard and promoted listings within the City of Edmonton. Promoted listings have a substantially greater effect on actual lead volume with an average increase of 3.2x. This increase is substantial suggesting that more competitive markets are likely to benefit more from promoted listings than those which are less competitive. 
 

*Gaps in the data are due to a lack of data availability during the sample period. 

Promoted listings are more commonly used in Toronto which has resulted in a significant increase in the number of available FSAs for visualization. The common trend seen is that promoted listings have a significant increase in the number of leads generated. The highest relative increases were seen in the Gabbagedale, St James Town, Victoria Village, St. Clair Village, Dovercourt Village, and Dufferin Grove. These communities all share a high prevalence of apartment living, meaning that even though there are more renters available, there are also more properties competing within this pool of potential renters. 

To gain a competitive advantage many properties use promoted listings as a means of getting preferred placement on various rental listing sites,  which helps them increase their overall lead generation and subsequently improve their leasing. With an average increase of over 2.5x in lead volume, promoted listings can help improve traffic, and hasten a lease-up.

This leasing season make sure that your properties are given the full benefit of the tools available to better compete amidst tightening market conditions.

If you are interested in learning more about any of the topics discussed in the article, such as the effects of rental rates on lead generation, or more broad rental market statistics please follow the following link.