What it is: You pay when a qualified lead actually steps foot into your community.
What I like about it: The pay-per-tour model is one of my personal favorite pricing models because it puts the burden to generate a quality lead squarely on the ILS partner.
Put another way, the pay-per-tour model gives you, in essence, an extension of your leasing office, helping to qualify prospects and bring customers down the leasing funnel one step further. So, your on-site team doesn’t have to split its time between managing online prospects and everything else that’s happening in the leasing office.
Instead, your on-site team has fewer leads to manage, so it can better focus on on-site traffic, conducting tours and taking care of residents. And if your team is performing well, like ours at Greystar, you can actually convert those leads and have a lower cost per tour than you would have with some of the other pricing models that are out there.
In multifamily marketing, we talk a lot about the concept of partnership, but the pay-per-tour pricing model is the only pricing model that is really a true partnership, providing a fair balance of responsibility between the property management company and the ILS provider. Both share an equal burden in the lead-to-lease process; one partner creates a qualified prospect and gets them to the community while the other converts that lead to a lease.
Biggest drawback: The pay-per-tour model has the same challenges as some other models including establishing standards for a “qualified” prospect, and occasional difficulty tracking a lead back to its online source. And while the pay-per-tour reduces the number of leads your on-site team has to manage, it still relies on a high-performing on-site team to turn those qualified prospects in to signed leases.
Greg Benson is senior director of property marketing at Greystar.
