North American Properties

North American Properties is a privately-held, multi-regional, real estate operating company that has been in business since 1954. With a portfolio of retail, multifamily, mixed use, and office properties across the United States, the company is valued at more than $5 billion.
How does a real estate operating company become so successful at a national level?
Beyond building an impressive portfolio of existing properties and properties in development, North American Properties differentiates themselves from their competition through a customer-centric approach to their property management. By maintaining a constant focus on the needs and wants of their clients, they create properties that their guests love to call home.
Northern American Properties is an established, successful, real estate operating company, but they needed support effectively leveraging digital marketing to help them achieve their business goals.

The Challenge

North American Properties began their partnership with All Points Digital in order to obtain insight into the marketing dollars they spend to lease an apartment unit and maintain their goal of 95% occupancy across all properties.

They needed marketing strategies that were simple, nimble, and scalable, but also required clear and accessible reports on the investment of these marketing activities and the effectiveness of each of these strategies. Furthermore, North American Properties required analytics regarding where their online marketing dollars were being spent and which strategy allowed for the cheapest cost per lease. Finally, North American Properties needed to increase organic traffic to their website property pages, as opposed to relying on Internet Listing Services (ILS), as the main avenue for promoting their available units.

North American Properties also identified a disconnect in their data. Potential tenants (leads) that called to speak with the sales team (property managers) were not properly tracked to determine the quality of the leads or which digital marketing efforts influenced the most qualified leads.

In summary, North American Properties faced a universal challenge: they needed to understand their marketing spend and to analyze the performance of these marketing strategies in order to determine which activities to continue, and discontinue, along with the allocation of their online advertising budget to the most effective strategies.

The Solution

All Points Digital (APD) clearly understood the strategic challenges that North American Properties was facing and recommended an approach to look at the digital marketing budget differently than had ever been done before. APD understands that all sales calls must be analyzed for cost and quality. Furthermore, every potential sales call must be evaluated and analyzed to compare the cost of ILS and brokerage fees.

Based on North American Properties’ goals, APD implemented three distinct strategies.

1) Call Tracking

  • Implementing proper call tracking (via CallRail) allowed APD and North American Properties to identify the original source of each sales call to better understand the marketing campaign performance
  • Leveraging call recordings and working with the property managers of each property allowed APD to determine which calls were the highest quality leads and, in turn, highlighted which digital marketing activities to dial-up and which to dial down

2) Google Analytics

  • Properly leveraging Google Analytics to improve tagging on each property site so that North American Properties’ website performance could be reviewed and understood in more detail
  • Analyzing which search engine optimization (SEO) tactics lead to an increase in organic traffic to their property pages

3) Paid Ads (PPC)

  • Creating a paid ad strategy allowed North American Properties to be more flexible with their marketing budget
  • Tracking the performance of each advertisement helped determine which ads had the highest conversion rates and lowest cost-per-click
  • Tying advertisement data with the insights from CallRail helped clarify which ads lead to qualified sales leads, so that North American Properties could re-allocate lower-performing ad spending to the higher-performing campaigns

The partnership between North American Properties and APD allowed the company to reduce their online marketing spend and achieve a $180 cost per lease, while the industry average is $400 in online marketing spend per lease.

The Result

All Points Digital clearly understood North American Properties’ goals and developed strategies and tools to help them meet these business goals. The company routinely maintains their stated 95% occupancy across their portfolio of properties. The sustained occupancy rates allows North American Properties to maintain their strong financial positioning because they are not overspending their marketing budget. Additionally, based on the deployed tactics, North American Properties quickly leases up new residential buildings, which adds to their financial strength. Furthermore, by understanding the cost per lease of these digital marketing channels, North American Properties was able to reduce their reliance on ILS listings. This is important because typically the ILS channel averages about $1,200 cost per lease. By working with APD, North American Properties was able to shift their spending to maintain their 95% occupancy rate and run ads to help the property managers build a pipeline of quality tenants. In comparison, working with ILS holds companies to a contractual rate, even when their services are not necessary.

APD helped North American Properties achieve their goals for the following reasons:

  • APD scales their work based on vacancy and exposure in order to maintain a 95% occupancy rate.
  • APD analyzes the lead-to-lease time in order to activate campaigns at the right time to achieve 95% occupancy rate.
  • APD helps address budget needs across all channels, including ILS.

In summary, in a market where omnichannel strategies will see on average a cost of $400 per lease, APD was able to get those costs below $180 per lease for North American Properties. The partnership with APD saved the property managers marketing budget while maintaining high occupancy targets.