Note: ShowMojo has made this article available because we believe it contains information valuable to all property managers and owners. We recognize there are references to specific ShowMojo features, and we did include these to assist our user base. However, we believe that non-ShowMojo-users reading the article can readily envision how they might take similar actions in their own leasing environments -- to everyone's benefit.

Open a New Source of Revenue and Profit

Do you – or does your company – rely on co-broker relationships for most of your residential rentals? If so, did you know that you are leaving serious money on the table?

In a co-broker environment, your company is the conduit from which money leaves the hands of your owners and ends up in the hands of co-brokers. A leasing automation platform (like ShowMojo) lets companies tap into that conduit, and generate more profit.

While technology and automation make this process much simpler to implement, there's nothing truly new to this practice. Many companies in strong co-broker environments have taken this approach.

Go Direct to the Prospect and Build Profit

Co-broker environments are all about broker-to-broker interactions. They evolved into being because, historically, it was hard to capture and conduct a showing with each qualified prospect. 

But what happens when — without a co-broker —  it becomes extremely low effort to market to the public, to qualify prospects and to get those qualified prospects at a showing?

Suddenly, you are looking at an entirely new revenue stream. You can collect leasing commissions directly from your owners.

Furthermore, and a little less intuitively, you are looking at a staff retention and morale booster. That’s because -- if queuing up qualified prospects for in-person showings is really that easy -- then your leasing-qualified staff can also partake in and benefit from this activity.

Leasing Automation Makes It Easy

An automated leasing platform (such as ShowMojo) makes this easy. Once configured (or built) an automated leasing platform will:

• Market all of your listings to the public.
• Automatically field all public inquiries about your listings.
• Perform an automated pre-showing screen of all prospects using your company-specific and listing-specific requirements.
• Schedule your prospects for showings — based on your showing style or the individualized showing style of each of your staff members. This includes group showings or individually clustered showings or just about any other practical approach to scheduling showings. (Note: we are still in automation-land. Please keep all hands and belongings within the vehicle.)
• Communicate with all third parties about upcoming showings (including current tenants).
• Confirm the prospect will attend the showing.
• Follow up by text message or an email after the showing.
• Cancel showings when a property is rented.
• Automatically (again, everything up to this point has been automatic) nurture your prospects by directing them to your other relevant, on-market listings and notifying them about rent reductions on the listings that they have already expressed interest in.

There are tons of options to preconfigure, so everything happens in this sort of manner and style you would expect from your company. One important item is to pre-configure a screening question "restrictor" that clearly asks whether the prospect is already represented by a broker and, if so, does not allow that prospect to schedule.

Additionally, there is one big option you can either choose to use or not. And that is whether to conduct the showings in-person versus allowing the prospect to “self show” the listing using a secure digital lockbox.

Realizing the Profit

So, if you have gotten this far, hopefully you have at least bought into the idea of increasing your profit by working directly with prospects.

The first thing to understand is this does not start as an “all in” activity. You’ll want to continue co-brokering while you move forward with direct-to-prospect leasing. This way you do not unnecessarily increase effort and stress worrying whether everything will be leased the “new way”. Rather, this is a very low-risk activity where you’ll always have the co-broker system to fall back on.

Then getting to the profit has everything to do with the size and the nature of your company.

For Lockbox-Based Self Showings

If you and your owners are willing to let prospects conduct self-showings, then you just need digital lockboxes and the correct configurations in place. After that you let the showings happen on their own and you can first engage when prospects are ready to apply.

Note: by listing this option first, we don’t mean to explicitly recommend it above any other. This option is just the simplest to explain. All the additional options assume in-person showings.

For In-Person Showings

Keep in mind that one of the big bonuses to conducting in-person showings is that you can show occupied units. Some owners and managers are wary of letting outside brokers show their listings when still tenant occupied. But that concern is greatly reduced when it's the manager (or the manager's own staff) showing the occupied listings.

If you are a one person shop, renting direct-to-prospect is very straightforward. With an automated leasing platform like ShowMojo, you would set yourself up to take whatever prospect showings automatically flow through, and keep the commissions for yourself and your company.

If you have other leasing-qualified staff on your team, the next simplest option is to offer your staff a fixed bounty for signed leases. Each of your leasing-qualified staff members can make themselves available to show listings when they have time. Each staff member will automatically receive showings. They only need to professionally conduct the showings -- and they will share in the reward alongside you.

If you have an internal leasing team that is compensated based on commission, then you have a little more effort to set everything up, but there is still a huge upside. An automated leasing platform can double or even triple the productivity of any leasing agent. So introducing an automated leasing platform can truly benefit both the company and the individual leasing agent. The benefit is not simply financial, either. In addition to a financial boost:

• The benefit for the company includes higher retention rates, fewer staff to manage (if that’s desirable), and a simpler and more cost-effective approach to growth.
• The benefit to the leasing agent includes a higher number of showings, significantly more time to focus on high-value prospects after the showing, and the immeasurable quality-of-life benefit of not needing to constantly answer the phone at any time of the day.

Getting Started

As noted above, you should continue to fall back on the co-broker system. This makes it quite simple to set up a direct-to-prospect leasing approach. You just need to subscribe to a leasing automation platform (like ShowMojo), to configure it for your listings and company, and to start doing the showings.