Setting up your leasing office for success

Today I would like to evaluate the use of 7 techniques that will create a pleasant work environment for your staff and have a great impact on the success of your lease. These 7 techniques are meant to help you give a prospective tenant that great first impression that means a lot in $$$.

  1. Curb appeal – When a prospective resident walks by your property, they have to say WOW! Some of the cheapest ways to make this happen are: keeping the property clean, regular landscape maintenance, and every 1-3 years (depending on need) pressure washing the exterior of your apartment and leasing office. Not only will this attract potential residents, it will help with resident retention and make it a more pleasant place to work for your staff.
  2. Lighting – The type of light and the location of light fixtures are important both within your leasing office and throughout your property.
    1. First, let’s tackle the topic of outdoor lighting. It is important that your property has lighting throughout for a number of reasons, but the two most important are safety and careful lighting of your apartment’s curbside sign (if you don’t have one, you should) will add aesthetic value to your apartment at night.
    2. The lighting fixture should be placed higher than eye level, because low-lamp type fixtures can cast direct light into people’s eyes. There are several types of light, but the best and most relaxing is natural light (which is why skylights are great). The natural physiological response of the human body to light is general awareness and the general psychological response is happiness. Physiological arousal elicits a psychological response of happiness. The best way to explain this is: What is a good day? Sunny and warm or dark and gloomy? When it’s a nice day outside, people tend to be more active and generally have more fun.
  3. Color – Colors are a second important component of the environment. Dark colors and red colors (similar to fire) are the worst option. You will want to have light pastel colors that promote feelings of calm and security. Thoughtful color selections can make prospective residents happy right when they walk in the door and will keep your staff happy for a longer period of time. Read more about the psychological response to colors.
  4. Smell – This should be pretty self explanatory, but I’ve been to dozens of apartment offices that are musty! If your office doesn’t smell good, there’s a big problem. The physiological response to bad musty odors is to leave the area! When you smell something old, moldy, bad, etc., your brain’s sensory nerves trigger a “get the hell out of here” or “don’t eat this” response. So please find a happy and relaxing fragrance, it will do wonders for your prospective resident’s first impression, not to mention your staff will enjoy it too.
  5. Sound: Soothing sounds, like running water, have evolutionarily become a source of happy thoughts for humans. As a college student, I participated in a study (as a test subject) in which we were asked to sit in a waiting room for 30 minutes before being asked random questions about our week and day. There were two test groups. One was placed in a “waiting” room with sounds, such as flowing water (like from a fountain) and light music. The second test group sat in the same empty “waiting” room without the soothing sounds. Six hundred students and teachers participated in this study (300 in each setting). As you may have guessed, the people waiting in the room with soothing sounds answered the questions positively 80% of the time, while the people sitting in the room without the sound answered the questions positively only 48% of the time. times. So hopefully, if you follow this logic, your staff and prospective tenants will respond positively 80% of the time.
  6. Comfy Seating – Okay, this is a big deal, especially when you want a prospective resident to fill out an application or lease. Sitting comfortably elicits a response from the parasympathetic system (or in other words, a calming effect). It’s also smart to have snacks nearby, because when the parasympathetic system is stimulated, a secondary response is mild hunger (so a bowl of different kinds of candy works pretty well).
  7. A mirror: This tip came from one of my neighbors. For more than 25 years, he has been a customer service consultant for various companies, including Ford and GMC. Having a wall-sized mirror behind your front desk in your leasing office will do a lot of good things. First, it will make your office look much larger than it really is (this is great for properties with small leasing offices), this also positively affects your prospective resident’s first impression of the property because they won’t feel as cramped in a small office as they would. normally I would. Second, having a wall-sized mirror will help you deal with angry residents. Placing a large (full wall) mirror behind the customer service counter will dramatically reduce residents’ outbursts of anger. The reason it works: People don’t like to see themselves angry (just like you don’t like to see them get angry), it’s a subconscious psychological reflex of seeing your anger staring back at you. Simple and effective goal.

I hope you enjoyed it,

Sergio Navarrete

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