The next hurdle to successfully managing your vacancy and stabilizing your occupancy is your Hold Time Management. Hold times are critically important because they are directly holding your revenue back by keeping apartment units unoccupied. The time you are holding apartments vacant is costing revenue.
The Strategic Mandate for Hold Time Optimization
Each property has its own unique profile for how soon and in what percentage of total applications before move-in day they prefer. You must optimize revenue by optimizing your hold time settings to match that profile.
The Seasonal Shift Trap: Is Hold Time Elasticity a Factor?
Something you should also consider is identifying if hold times have elasticity to them based on the season of leasing. For example, a property next to a university may have longer historical hold times close to when school starts. Similarly, a lease up’s historical data may change part way through the actual lease up when the first movers have all come in.
Deepen Your Analysis: Identifying Sub-Optimal Hold Times
The key to diagnosing your hold time issue lies in the spread between your occupancy and leased percent metrics.
Hold Time That is Too Long
When your hold time is too long, units stay unoccupied longer, and your leased percent climbs (if you include rented units in this metric, which most do).
- The First Indicator: The properties with the biggest and most consistent spread between occupancy and leased percent is usually a key hint that your hold times are too long.
Hold Time That is Too Short
Conversely, hold times that are too short are quickly identified by looking at the same metrics.
- The Quickest Way to Identify: If your occupancy and leased percentages are too close together, it likely means you are trying to force a demographic to behave differently by moving in earlier than they can.
Revenue. Accelerated.
Every operations team wants to see supply and demand balanced. This balance ensures you have the right inventory when the customer wants it and prevents over- or under-pricing units. We don’t guess. We optimize.
Ready to stop guessing at Hold Times and start growing revenue? Don’t wait another week to optimize your revenue strategy.
Contact Bryan Pierce today at bpierce@IgniteRevs.com to schedule your personalized revenue assessment and put Revenue Intelligence with Velocity to work for your portfolio.
Curated by Bryan Pierce, Founder of IgniteRevs
