The push for centralization in multifamily is growing, and it’s all about fixing one key issue: inefficiency. By consolidating operations and standardizing processes, you can break free from the limitations of managing each property as its own silo.
This article breaks down what centralized leasing is, and why it’s worth it. You’ll also learn about the technologies that make it possible and what steps you need to take to get started.
Let’s dive in.
Why is everyone talking about multifamily centralization?
Unlike other sectors, multifamily operators have struggled to capitalize on economies of scale.
They’ve traditionally run each building as a separate entity with a generalist onsite team that manages leasing inquiries, renewals, maintenance requests, and everything in between. This fragmented approach leads to duplicated efforts, inflated operational costs, scattered (and often missing) data, and inconsistent experiences for both prospects and residents.
By centralizing you shift from managing individual properties to overseeing a unified portfolio – with standardized practices and specialized roles.
This strategic move allows multifamily leaders to optimize operations, reduce redundancies, and better allocate shared resources across properties. Plus, it enables you to expand your portfolio without a proportional increase in overhead.
📊 Stat Spotlight
According to the “20for20 Report – 2024 Edition,” over half of the interviewed multifamily leaders revealed that their companies are at least planning or piloting the centralization of one of three key functions – Administrative tasks (such as renewals/collections), leasing, or maintenance.
Centralization isn’t an all-or-nothing deal.
While centralization can cover the entire renter lifecycle – from lead management to lease renewal and maintenance – it can, and in fact should be rolled out in stages or through a hybrid model. This way, you can maintain a reduced or limited onsite presence while centralizing core functions, providing the flexibility needed to ease the transition for both staff and managers.
Centralized leasing is often the ideal first step. Centralizing the leasing operations involves setting up a robust CRM, connected to your PMS and a central phone system, and establishing routing logics. These foundational elements pave the way for centralizing maintenance and administrative processes in the future.
What is centralized leasing?
Centralized leasing consolidates key leasing functions across multiple properties into a unified system that serves the entire portfolio.
Instead of each property managing its own leasing activities independently, all leads – emails, calls, and online inquiries – funnel into a unified CRM with a team inbox. A call center or Virtual Leasing Agent (VLA) handles every inquiry, books tours, and ensures no leads fall through the cracks. And then, your predefined routing logic assigns each lead to the right leasing agent.
Leasing agents typically cover multiple properties within a region and can focus on converting leads to leases without being bogged down by initial inquiries or manual follow-ups. Approvals and lease finalization are also centralized, handled by a dedicated team member who ensures that applications are processed efficiently and accurately.
This approach is facilitated by integrated technologies such as a CRM platform, AI Virtual Leasing Agents, and smart scheduling tools to streamline operations.
What makes centralized leasing worth it?
Leasing efficiency at scale
Managing a large portfolio comes with significant operational demands. For example, to maintain occupancy in a 10k-door portfolio, a leasing team needs to close 2.5K leases every year. This means they need to handle 200K leads, conduct 20K tours, screen 3K applicants, and send 3 Million communications every year.
Handling this volume manually is daunting and resource-intensive. Centralizing your leasing operations helps you manage this scale efficiently by:
- Boosting team productivity with AI and automated sequences that handle routine follow-ups and lead inquiries
- Streamlining processes and eliminating redundancies, so you can manage the same number of doors with a leaner team and lower overhead costs.
Granular visibility into every leasing step and interaction
In traditional leasing models, critical data is often buried in personal inboxes or scattered across spreadsheets, making it difficult to track true performance, hold teams accountable, and optimize processes.
Centralized leasing solves these issues by bringing all data points—such as leads, inquiries, and communications—into one unified system, where everything can be tracked, analyzed, and optimized.
- Leasing funnel metrics: Centralized data allows you to break down the leasing funnel into smaller steps. Rather than just looking at leads and leases, you can analyze key metrics like lead-to-tour ratio and see which Internet Listing Services (ILS) or ad campaigns drive the most leases. This level of detail helps you spot bottlenecks, improve each step of the process, and create an end-to-end efficient system.
- Team and individual performance: You can also gain visibility into your leasing team’s day-to-day activities and responsibilities. With clear data on each team member’s performance, you can assess productivity, provide targeted training, and foster accountability.
💡Pro Tip
After centralizing, you should expect up to 185% improvement in lead-to-tour conversion rate and a 50% reduction in your no-show rate.
Improved conversion rates come from process optimizations such as:
- 24/7 responsiveness: Providing immediate responses to inquiries, even after hours, generates more tours.
- Cross-property referrals: Directing prospects to sister properties when the initial property doesn’t meet their needs ensures no lead is wasted.
When occupancy is low, optimizing conversions lets you close more leases from the same leads, so no need to increase your marketing spend. And when vacancies are minimal, you can still benefit – fewer leads will secure the same leases, helping you cut marketing costs.
Scalable processes for sustainable portfolio expansion
Centralization lets you expand your portfolio without a proportional increase in staffing or marketing costs.
Adding new properties is seamless. They plug into your existing systems without the need for significant investments. And with many tasks handled through AI and automation, centralized systems and teams can absorb a bigger workload, meaning you won’t need to expand your team with every new property.
Specialized roles, happier staff, long-term retention
Centralized leasing enables role specialization and establishes clear career paths, addressing the industry-wide problem of high staff turnover and the constant cycle of staff onboarding.
- Elimination of repetitive and mundane admin tasks frees up your team to handle more engaging work and solve complex issues, leading to higher job satisfaction and less burnout.
- Role specialization provides staff with opportunities for professional growth within the company and makes it easier to retain talent and ensure long-term team stability.
Consistent, high-end, and trackable customer experience
With a centralized leasing process, you ensure that every interaction meets your standards. Human errors are minimized, and prospects get the same great service whether they’re interested in Property A or Property Z, whether they contact your team during working hours or at 2 am.
Centralization also means all communications are funneled through unified systems. You can track every email, and call, giving you valuable data on response times and follow-up rates to further optimize your customer experience.
Portfolios best suited for centralization
Large portfolios with 2000+ units
Centralization allows you to unlock economies of scale and leverage AI and advanced technologies to efficiently manage large volumes of leads.
Portfolios expanding rapidly
With centralization, you avoid duplicating leasing functions at each property. The extra workload is absorbed by the centralized team, reducing the need for additional hires or significant increases in operating costs.
Clusters of nearby properties
Centralization works best for portfolios with hubs of properties in close proximity, where leasing agents can cover multiple locations with fewer logistical challenges.
Targeting tech-savvy renters
Centralization supports the digital-first, seamless experiences that younger, tech-savvy tenants expect.
Does centralized leasing kill the personal touch?
A common concern when implementing centralized leasing is whether the shift to automation and AI will diminish the personal touch that prospects and residents value.
True personalization has never been about having a human on the other end of the line – it’s about delivering the right assistance and information accurately, and quickly. In fact, centralization can scale personalized services in a way that’s never possible with traditional leasing.
AI-enabled Virtual Leasing Agents, when integrated with a centralized CRM, can access a wealth of information – from the prospect’s previous interactions to unit-specific details like amenities and availability. This level of data visibility enables AI to offer personalized responses, recommend suitable properties, and provide custom offers based on each prospect’s unique preferences and requirements.
AI ensures that inquiries are responded to instantly, 24/7. It can handle routine questions and schedule tours without making prospects wait for a human to become available. And when an edge case arises or the prospect asks for human assistance, AI seamlessly routes the inquiry to a human agent who is best equipped to help.
The goal of centralization isn’t to eliminate human involvement but to reserve it for the moments that matter most.
Core technologies that power centralized leasing
To effectively centralize leasing, your tech stack must support every step of the leasing process – from lead generation to lease signing. Here’s what you need:
Multifamily-specific CRM: A CRM that integrates with syndication platforms and communication systems, centralizing all leads, inquiries, and conversations in one system. It should provide a single source of truth for property information, prospect requirements, and the history of your conversations with the prospect.
This unified approach streamlines the handoff process to leasing agents and enables seamless teamwork. If a team member is unavailable due to sickness or turnover, another teammate can easily step in to ensure no lead slips through the cracks and maintain continuity in the leasing process.
AI-enabled Virtual Leasing Agent: An AI-powered VLA that supports your team by providing 24/7 assistance, answering inquiries, and scheduling tours without human intervention. This ensures faster response times and more efficient lead handling.
Smart scheduling system: A scheduling tool that syncs in real-time with leasing agents’ calendars, showing up-to-date availability while accounting for travel time between properties to optimize agent capacity.
Instant tenant screening: Technology that allows for immediate and thorough tenant screening to accelerate the application process and minimize bottlenecks in approvals.
Automated work assignment and tracking: Centralized systems for assigning tasks and tracking progress across functions, from leasing agents to the approval team.
Unlike traditional leasing, where one person manages the entire process, centralized leasing breaks down each step and assigns it to a specialist. This makes it essential to have task assignments that keep everyone informed about their responsibilities and what’s added to their pipeline. For example, leasing agents should be able to see all the leads assigned to them and track progress, while the approvals team can easily view applications awaiting screening and approval.
Seamless PMS Integration: All your tools need to sync seamlessly with your Property Management Software to ensure data accuracy, eliminate redundant entries, and support workflow automation.
💡Pro Tip
When shopping for tech solutions, choose vendors that:
- Offer an all-in-one platform that not only covers the entire renter lifecycle—from lead generation to lease renewal – but also includes essential technologies like a CRM, scheduling tools, tenant screening, and a Virtual Leasing Agent. This eliminates the need for multiple integrations, simplifies your processes and minimizes data inconsistencies.
- Provide robust onboarding and support. During negotiations, ask for the vendor’s detailed implementation plan and the onboarding and training resources they offer for your team. Effective onboarding should tailor the system to your specific needs, while ongoing support ensures your team can smoothly adapt as your requirements evolve.
Why does AI need centralized leasing to work?
AI has become a hot topic in multifamily operations – with the promise of automating repetitive tasks like responding to inquiries and scheduling tours. The ROI potential is clear, especially for scaled portfolios managing a large volume of leads and communications. But AI can only perform as well as the data it’s given and the instructions it receives.
Centralization provides the structure AI needs to work effectively by:
One. Implementing a centralized CRM as the single source of truth
Before AI can make an impact, you need a unified Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. This CRM should integrate with your property management software and leasing agents’ calendars, serving as the single source of truth for everything—inventory details, amenities, available units, and leasing agents’ real-time availability.
Without this centralized data hub, AI has no reliable information to work from.
Two. Defining specialized roles and responsibilities
AI performs well only in environments where processes are well-defined and structured. To prepare for AI integration, you must:
Create specialized roles: Move from generalists wearing multiple hats to specific functions.
Clarify responsibilities: Document what each role entails, including key tasks and outcomes.
With specialized roles, you create a clear framework that AI can augment. Without this structure, AI won’t be able to handle tasks accurately.
Three. Leveraging AI to automate repetitive tasks
With centralized data and well-defined roles, AI can now be used to:
- Automate routine tasks like handling initial inquiries, answering questions, and scheduling tours.
- Increase team productivity by freeing staff to focus on relationship-building and closing leases.
