44%
In an Apartments.com survey of multifamily marketing decision-makers, most held or grew their budgets: 44% increasing, 48% steady, 8% cutting.
Source: Apartments.com (sponsored article on Multifamily Dive)
Learn · Plan and defend your budget
Plan and defend your budget
Owners fund what they can see working. Build the budget from your leasing goal, report cost per lease by channel, and show what a vacant unit costs compared with the marketing that would fill it.
Start here · 6 min readThe prove-your-value playbookOwners fund what they can see working. Six steps to connect marketing to leases, report it on one page, and ask for budget with numbers behind you.Read the playbook
Free tools
Free worksheet · Excel
Build your marketing budget from your leasing goal
Start from the leases you need and work back to tours, leads and spend by channel, using your own numbers.
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Free worksheet · Excel
Cost per lease by channel
Spend, leads and leases by channel, turned into the cost per lease owners ask about.
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Free template · Word
Make the case for your marketing budget
A one-page template that translates your channel plan into the numbers owners care about: occupancy, concessions and cost per lease.
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Free worksheet · Excel
The one-page monthly marketing report
Website, search and paid search side by side, in one page your regional or owner will actually read.
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The numbers
89%
Google's own 2011 study across many advertisers: most clicks from search ads were not replaced by organic clicks when the ads were paused. It is not apartment specific and is dated.
Source: Google Research
50%
Even when an advertiser already ranks first organically, Google found about half of ad clicks were incremental (2012 study).
Source: Google Research
All the statistics, with sources
Straight answers
- How much should an apartment community spend on marketing per unit?There is no single correct per-unit number, because the right spend depends on your market, product class, occupancy and how much new supply you compete with. A more defensible way to set a budget is to start from how many leases you need and work backward to the spend required to produce them.
- How do I build a marketing budget from my leasing goal?Work backward: decide how many leases you need, divide by your tour-to-lease rate to get tours needed, divide by your lead-to-tour rate to get leads needed, then price those leads using your cost per lead for each channel.
- How do I justify a bigger marketing budget to an owner?Show the owner what vacancy is costing compared with what the extra marketing would cost, and show how you will measure whether the added spend produces leases.
- Are concessions a marketing cost?Concessions are usually a discount on rent, such as weeks or months free, rather than money paid to a marketing vendor, so many teams track them separately from the marketing budget.
- How should I split my budget across channels?There is no universal split; the best mix is the one your own lead and lease data supports, so track results by source and move money toward channels that produce leases at a lower cost.
- What is a good cost per lease for paid search?There is no reliable public benchmark that applies to every market, so set your target by comparing paid search cost per lease with your other channels and with the cost of a vacant unit.
- Should I bid on my own property name in Google Ads?Test it with your own numbers. A branded campaign lets you control what shows on searches for your name, but how many of those clicks you would get anyway varies by property, and Google's older research on this is not specific to property names.
- Can competitors bid on my apartment community's name?Yes, Google generally allows trademarks as keywords, but it restricts trademark use in the ad text in some cases.
- What is Quality Score in Google Ads?Quality Score is a diagnostic rating that shows how your ad quality compares with other advertisers, based on expected clickthrough rate, ad relevance and landing page experience.
- How does my website affect what I pay for ads?Your landing page is part of ad quality, and Google says higher quality ads typically cost less per click than lower quality ads.
- What marketing metrics do owners care about most?Owners often focus on outcomes: leases, occupancy, cost per lease and how fast vacant units are filled, more than clicks or impressions. This is practitioner guidance, not a study finding.
- How do I calculate cost per lease by channel?Divide what you spent on a channel in a period by the number of signed leases you can trace to that channel in the same period.
- What should a monthly apartment marketing report include?A short summary of results against goal, then leases and cost per lease by channel, lead and tour trends, website and search performance, reputation, and what you will change next month.
- What is marketing attribution, in plain terms?Attribution is how you decide which marketing touch gets credit for a lead or lease when a renter interacted with several channels.
- What are UTM tags and why do they matter for reporting?UTM tags are short labels added to the end of a link that tell Google Analytics where a visitor came from, such as which campaign or listing site.