Getting people to keep apartment showings

Getting people to keep apartment showings
by James Miller

.

It happened to me again yesterday.

I had a 5:30 showing set up at one of our vacant apartments. I arrived promptly, unlocked the place flipped on all the lights and set out the applications.

The guy never showed up to look at the apartment.

I waited for him to show for 20 minutes and then decided to take off.

It may or may not surprise you, but the events I just described are not that uncommon for property managers. I am pretty diligent about calling people the day of a showing appointment to remind them, but even with that measure in place, I still get around a 50% no show rate.

It really blows my mind that people will take the time to ask you about a place, set up an appointment and get directions, then decide not to show…or even call.

I have to admit I didn’t call this guy the day of the showing, but I had talked to him the night before.

Here is what I think happens in these situations and some of the steps I am going to take to try to resolve them. If you have any suggestions or ideas, please let me know..

1)The person I am talking to forgot about the appointment… although in this guys case, I doubt that you can forget about it that easily. We set the appointment  just the day before.

2) The person I am talking to is too polite to tell me on the phone that they are not interested in the apartment, so they set up a showing, knowing they will not show.

3) they may have looked at an apartment earlier that day and decided to take that one, blowing off the rest of the showings they had set up.

4) They knew about the appointment, but after a day of work were just too lazy and decided the couch or a trip to the bar sounded better.

There are probably a lot of other reasons that they won’t show as well.

Here are a few of the things I am going to start implementing:

1) I am going to call them back and ask why they didn’t show.My girlfriend was a recruiter for an insurance company. She would have the same problem with potential candidates and it drove her crazy. she would go so far as to call up people who blew appointments (and didn’t call) and tear into them, telling them that they just blew their chance to ever get a job there and that they should have at least called.
While I am not sure that affected her no show ratio, it apparently made her feel better.

2) I am going to start letting them know that I get a no show rate of 50% and if they can’t make it to call me.
I currently tell them to call if they can’t make it, and they have my cel phone number, but it doesn’t seem to make a difference. I will also point out that if they don’t show and don’t call, I will be calling them back to find out what happened.

One part of the problem, as I see it, is that they have nothing to lose by not showing. Since there is no realistic way for me to get a deposit over the phone, the only thing I can leverage against them is their contact information. I am not going to harass them or anything, but I will let them know that I was waiting for them at the apartment and it wasn’t cool to blow me off.

3) I am going to start letting the apartments show themselves.
While I like to meet the potential tenants, I have, in the past, been so busy that I had to unlock an apartment to let people through to see it without me being there. It works pretty well as I let them walk through and grab an application if they are interested and I think people like to be able to take their time when looking at a place.

I have been doing this with a lot of our lease option houses, as before the market slowed we would get so many requests to see the places it was virtually impossible to handle them.

I would like to hear from other landlords, property managers, and real estate agents, or anyone who has to set appointments with the general public. .

What are your no show/show ratios?

How do you prevent people from not showing up?