Marketing Should Be for Renewals too, Not Just New Leases
Across every portfolio of properties and communities is an opportunity to keep a promise. A brand promise. By keeping the brand’s personality and resident experience consistent, a brand can keep its promise. And when the promise is kept beyond the lease signing and throughout the full resident lifecycle, the benefits can be seen right in the bottom line.
Benefits like: better renewal rates, more referrals, and reduced turnover costs.
Take a look at your perfectly polished marketing speak. Hold it up against your true resident experience—are residents actually having the experience you promised? Maintaining consistency sounds a lot more like a “must-have” now, doesn’t it? Brand consistency is a revenue tactic.
Let’s learn how to maintain that consistency, and the amount of money you could stand to save if you prioritize the community’s brand promise.
Keep Branding Consistent: A Resident Journey Brand Audit
Across a resident experience there are multiple places where a brand must stay consistent. It’s not just from brochure to lease signing. It’s possible that you’ve got the brand consistently covered in all the obvious places. But, there are always other opportunities!
If you want to improve your brand consistency throughout the resident lifecycle (pro tip: you do), audit your brand from marketing to prospects all the way through to lease renewal for current residents. Ask “Would this make me want to renew as a resident, or move out?”
Move-In Experience – Make the whole process stress-free. Make sure the unit’s clean, the on-site staff is welcoming, and the move-in packet you pass out is comprehensive and fully on-brand with colors, fonts, patterns, imagery, and content. Allow your residents to feel like they were expected (rather than taking your property staff by surprise). Their move-in date isn’t a secret, after all! Minimize stress, maximize memories, and build up loyalty.
Maintenance Communications – You’ve taken care to keep your marketing language and tone all perfectly spunky, casual, and fun. Make it seamless. Use branded cards to let them know maintenance came and went, and send detailed email communication about what was addressed.
Polished Marketing Website, Meet Thoughtful Announcements/Branded Emails – Beautiful community websites are an amazing way to show off logos, colors, fonts, patterns, photo styles, and of course: brand voice. Determine where prospects and residents are interacting with the brand in the digital sphere, too. Social media, website, ad campaigns, ILSs, Google reviews—meet them there. But when your residents use the elevator and see an announcement for a planned construction impacting their floor, provide more than a misspelled all-caps statement signed “-MGMT”. Bring your brand everywhere your residents go so announcements and emails aren’t an afterthought. Align align align, (and add the logo) every time.
Consistent Service Standards (Over Time) – At the start a property may have incredible rapport with its residents, right at signing the lease. Keep up the effort! The customer service you provide should outlast the ink drying on the lease—for as long as they’re living there!
Well-Planned and Well-Executed Community Events – Residents can tell the difference between a Sunday Sundae party and a sustainability-focused workshop (i.e. How to shop more zero-waste or reduce/reuse/recycle more effectively). Plan your resident events to be part of the brand experience by focusing on their interests, and putting a little more effort into it. (Also consider how the brand appears to the outer community. Partner with other local businesses and gather feedback to build up a good rep in the neighborhood.)
Crisis Communication – creating a plan and, once again, being proactive, the brand can keep its promise of comfortable living (or whatever may be the specific mainstay of the brand). If a resident doesn’t feel taken care of, they don’t feel comfortable and at home. Keep your brand promise intact by developing a strategy ahead of time.
Sounds like a lot of work. But not nearly as much work (or as much money) as getting new residents to replace the ones that could have simply renewed.
How so?
This is…
The Financial Reality
Replacing one resident costs $4,200-$4,900 vs. $100-$500 to renew.
For a 225-unit property, a 10% renewal improvement saves nearly $100K annually.
Here’s the logic and the math.
Renewal rates are climbing but still have room for improvement. The latest data shows renewal rates hovering around 54% for market rate apartment renters, with some markets seeing rates as high as 55-58%. While this is up from the pre-pandemic average of 50%, it means nearly half of your residents are still choosing to leave.
Getting new residents costs a lot more than keeping the residents you’ve got. According to NAA, a 225-unit community with a 40% turnover rate (that’s if renewals are at a generous 60%!) would cost $162,000 every year at an average cost of $1,800 per new resident.
If you get your move outs down by just one each month—from the average 7.5 to 6.5—your community saves $20,000 annually and maintenance saves 96 hours of their time. Sweet!
Plus: Think about your advertising costs. Industry standard for lead-to-lease conversion is 10:4:1, i.e. only 1 signed lease is coming from 4 touring prospects out of 10 total leads. How much did you spend to get those 10 leads through Google ads? Might be somewhere in the $350 range ($35.52 CPL x 10). And that’s just one channel—for a 10% success rate, at best.
For every 1% improvement in renewal rate, that’s tens of thousands in combined cost savings every year. Make the marketing budget sing by focusing on current resident renewals—not new leads. Another cool fact? Renewed residents often stay 28+ months, which reduces future turnover frequency. More money saved. Keep it going.
Basically: It’s more important than ever to get your brand aligned to maintain loyalty, trust, and a renewed lease. Sounds a lot better than having a unit sit vacant for 29 days (the average time it takes for units to be leased after listing), right?
How To Keep the Brand Promise: Steps to Take
If the property’s “lost the plot” on the brand promise, there’s a few actions that can help fix it.
Brand standards – Brand standards, branding guidelines, call it what you like. But it should include the resident experience among all the HEX codes and font weights listed in the guidelines. After all, who are you doing this for? Residents! Learn how to maintain brand consistency with the right tools and guidelines to keep your team aligned.
Staff training beyond the leasing team – The leasing team’s important. But having the maintenance crew join your training can help them embody the “why” behind everything the team is doing. (Plus, when someone feels like part of the team, that same someone’s more willing to buy into the whole mission and vision and values they may have been disconnected from.) On top of this, train your team to view current residents as prospects, too, always “selling” to them to snag a lease renewal!
Branded communication templates – Don’t settle for basic emails. Get nice signature templates. Creating color/logo/pattern-rich templates, even for crisis communications or general announcements, helps keep up the brand recognition—when residents see it, they instantly know it’s that brand.
Regular brand audits across resident touchpoints – Secret shop yourself. See where the brand is falling through the cracks. Blah social media DM responses? Overly formal maintenance request confirmation emails? Fix it! And go back to make sure that level of brand consistency is maintained, not just while you’re conducting an announced audit.
Physical environment – Is this the place? Sure is. Get your signs in order. Colors, fonts, patterns, messaging, everything should add up to Your Brand.
Feedback integration systems – All that feedback, all those reviews—the perfect opportunity for improvement. Ensure that it’s captured AND acted upon so your brand is seen as one that listens. Don’t forget to respond in the brand voice, maintaining the values of the community, and keeping the brand’s promise.
Let’s stop leaving money on the table. Consider refocusing on keeping your brand promise through careful audits, consistent training, and better community connection—and see how resident trust and loyalty that leads to renewals positively affects your budget.
Looking to strengthen your brand promise and boost resident retention? Our multifamily branding experts specialize in creating consistent brand experiences that drive lease renewals and reduce turnover costs. Let’s talk about building a brand strategy that keeps residents coming back.
