Making a Meaningful Difference in Property Management
by Carole VanSickle Ellis
According to data released in 2023 by the U.S. Census Bureau, when the “typical” U.S. renter decides to move, they tend to find a new place to live in less than one month. In fact, of the nearly 82% of renters who reported finding a new place to live relatively quickly, more than half ended their searches “early” and conducted their move.
On the property leasing side of the equation, however, the process is a little more challenging. Finding a new tenant for a property often takes six weeks or more, not including the time spent restoring the property to “base” level when the previous resident departs.
Furthermore, according to the National Apartment Association, 98% of today’s renters use online listings to find their next rental residence, and most of them explore at least three platforms in the process.
To Vanessa Anderson, CEO of leasing automation platforms ShowMojo and Tenant Turner (both owned by PropertyTek), these statistics mean it has become imperative property owners find workable solutions to minimize friction and streamline processes between the time at which a space becomes available and the time that a new lease on that space is signed.
“Both ShowMojo and Tenant Turner provide the automation and services needed to handle syndication, self-qualification, self-guided showings, follow-ups, and nurturing to either move a potential resident into a property or retarget with another property,” said Anderson. She explained both platforms fill the support space for property owners seeking to find and retain tenants, but noted Tenant Turner “really leans toward simplicity and ease of use” while ShowMojo “leans more toward customizability.” Tenant Turner recently was voted “Easiest-to-Use Leasing Platform” by PropertyManagement.com.
Both platforms serve single-family and small-multifamily properties, and ShowMojo also is ideally positioned to handle unique and large multifamily properties using “different layers of organizational structures” and “combinations of in-house and third-party agents,” Anderson said. “They are platforms that have different personalities, but they both fill the same need in the market,” she concluded. Both companies were consolidated under PropertyTek in 2024. The two platforms are the oldest leasing automation companies in the industry and are considered pioneers in the space.
John Squires, vice president of operations for ShowMojo, said the growth the platform has experienced since he started demonstrates how innovative the platform remains. “Every lead that comes in is more and more valuable, and we are always adding more ways to nurture leads and make sure that clients’ listings are looking good and performing well,” he said.
Squires continued, “ShowMojo invented leasing automation nearly 15 years ago. We called it ‘leasing with a personal touch,’ and it frees up your time for strategic, personal outreach without sacrificing that timely response and proactive contact.”
Working with History to Build the Better Systems
It might be tempting to think a tech company that has been around “from the beginning” could begin to lag in innovation over time, but Squires said that type of concern is entirely inapplicable when it comes to ShowMojo and Tenant Turner. In fact, the platforms’ longevity gives them a unique advantage over competitors newer to the space.
“We have years of incremental updates, customer feedback, and data all revolving around property managers’ needs, specifically,” Squires said. “We have always listened to feedback and responded with updates and solutions based on the changing markets and how people are doing business. We have fine-tuned this product over the years.”
Anderson agreed. She continued, “Our customer base is often scrappy and always entrepreneurial.” Anderson spends much of her time meeting the brands’ roughly 4,500 customers “face-to-face” in order to bring data and strategic ideas directly to property managers who need that information for their businesses. The company aggregates and anonymizes data from its leasing systems to identify how leads and listings are performing, including timeframes to leasing, the ideal scenarios for converting leads to tours, tours to applications, and applications to leasing, and a vast array of rates and rental trends. All of this data is analyzed and made available to clients.
“We have tons and tons of rich data around the leasing process,” Anderson said. “You can see activity and also identify if is something in your listing is wrong or driving up your days-on-market. It could be poor photos or a bad description, but it could also be that a property owner has too many qualification questions. We report those key velocity metrics each quarter and really drill into something tactile that property managers can walk away with.”
The companies also maintain a customer advisory board, Squires said. The board provides feedback on various service offerings and, in response, the platforms are updated to address requests and concerns. “Board members serve a one-year term, meet quarterly, and participate in a round table,” Squires said. He continued, “We tell them what we are working on going forward, talk about cool stuff we have released, and get their feedback and input so they have an actual ‘say’ in our roadmap moving forward.”
Squires noted this advisory board and interactive feedback loop enable Tenant Turner and ShowMojo to continue to innovate and add to the platforms’ functionality. Recently, the company added more features to address the current state of the market as it shifts quickly into different conditions.
“Our clients are experts in all areas of their businesses, and they are ready to jump in and learn or try something different at any pain point,” Anderson said. She continued, “One thing I love is when property managers reach out to me after we have talked and tell me about [custom] changes they have made in their systems and how it has helped them. They want information, know how to use the data, and consistently put it into practice because these are nimble organizations. Working with them has been really interesting and rewarding.”
Anderson recalled a client who wanted to begin offering self-showings but was nervous about the process and wondering if it would be worth it. She worked with him to run conversion-rate analyses on his properties to demonstrate how self-showings would likely perform versus accompanied showings. Not surprisingly, the improvement when self-showings became an option was substantial.
“When you offer self-show, virtually no time is blocked out unless someone else is looking at the property,” Anderson said. “We did a follow-up for that client showing how much more activity he could get if he moved to a fully self-guided touring model and a hybrid option, and he was able to make the decision to go ahead and move forward with the self-show option for potential tenants.”
Using Tech to Protect & Improve the Entire Leasing Process
Anderson said many ShowMojo and Tenant Turner clients are apprehensive about self-showing strategies at first, but they quickly become fans of the option when they see how it can shorten days-on-market and increase the likelihood of leasing.
“We hear from property managers all the time how they have done thousands of self-show tours and never had an issue, and we believe that is because these types of tours are best conducted with the participation of a technology provider who can protect the potential resident, the property, and the property owner from fraud, vandalism, identity theft, and a host of other potential issues. An experienced and effective tech provider helps prevent the incidents that make property managers nervous, and it is a fantastic way to enhance your leasing outcomes,” Anderson said.
Squires also recalled an instance in which a client requested a specific customization that ultimately led to a platform-wide benefit. A customer’s business model required multiple agents to show the same portfolio of units, and, upon leasing, the agent who showed the unit would receive a commission. The client was using a “round robin” method to assign agents to showings. However, the automation did not account for residents who attended multiple showings before opting to sign, and so the original showing agents were not always receiving commissions for leads they had introduced to the funnel and shown a property.
“At the request of the customer, we updated the system so there is a setting that ensures a lead is assigned to the original showing agent for subsequent showings, and they were very happy,” Squires said.
ShowMojo utilizes an autonomous scheduling system that “smartly clusters showings together and accounts for drive times,” Squires said, noting the method is “incredibly complex” and patented. However, he added, “When a request like that is made, if it is a good option for every customer, then we do the work to get it queued up and ready to go for anyone who might need it.”
Bringing Experience & Innovation Together to Make Every Business Better
Despite holding the title of “pioneer” in the automated-property-management space, ShowMojo and Tenant Turner have not rested on their laurels in recent years. Instead, the companies’ research and development divisions are dedicated to incorporating what Squires refers to as “usable” AI into the platforms to not just streamline processes but improve employee experience and effectiveness as well.
“We use AI to ‘open the top of the funnel’ for property managers to bring in and nurture leads,” Anderson explained. “70% of prospective renter activity happens after-hours and on weekends, so leasing automation, powered by AI, can help answer questions however a potential resident reaches out: via email, text message, or even voicemail.”
Anderson described the platforms’ AI functions as “closing the gap” for potential residents who want to ask questions before scheduling a showing. “Many of the questions people ask are answerable via AI, and the system can also retrieve information about local amenities and tell you about the neighborhood,” she said. “This keeps the process moving and enables our property managers to provide exceptional customer support.”
Anderson said automating these types of inquiries is particularly beneficial in smaller businesses where employees lack bandwidth to fulfill all essential functions. “A lot of times, clients tell me they are able to use our platforms to increase their bandwidth without increasing their head count, and that makes a huge difference in terms of the customer experience,” she said.
“We are just getting more efficient with the way we do things,” Squires added. “It helps good people do their jobs even better.” He described this as part of what his part of the company, ShowMojo, calls the “ShowMojo Way.” This concept refers to the idea that processes can and should be remade in the event they can be remade in a way that improves the process for all parties involved.
“Whether your processes and pain points are simple or complex, we are dedicated to tweak the process, add the technology, and make everything more efficient and better,” he said.
Anderson agreed. “We are here to help you take the administrative burden off your plate so you can do things that really differentiate your business,” she said.
“Our goal is to provide you with the tools and bandwidth to make that difference.”
SIDEBAR 1
By the Numbers
24/7 // Prospects receive answers 24 hours, seven days a week so that every prospect receives professional support regardless of the time the query is submitted
50 // ShowMojo has up to 50 syndication and listing partners to help keep properties visible everywhere renters search for them
75% // Tenant Turner reports its flexible showing options reduce no-shows by 75%
80% // ShowMojo clients spend 80% less time on scheduling and coordination thanks to fully automated showings
60 Million // Tenant Turner has sourced more than 60 million qualified leads for clients “without any extra work” TenantTurner.com
21% // ShowMojo-enabled properties spend 21% fewer days on market than non-ShowMojo-enabled properties
1.3 Million // More than 1.3 million property managers, investors, and leasing agents use ShowMojo to fill vacancies faster with less effort
111,000 // ShowMojo and Tenant Turner have completed 111,000 AI conversations since the May launch of Virtual Agent
54% // ShowMojo and Tenant Turner have a 54% lead-to-showing conversion rate
SIDEBAR 2
Where Are All the Leasing Leads
In the early 2020s, it felt to many property owners as if there was an insurmountable shortage of housing units for a desperate population of would-be renters. Just six years later, however, those potential tenants are in high demand, and the competition to bring in leasing leads and nurture them, thus creating a steady stream of solid residents for rental properties, is tougher than ever.
“Right now, lead volume is the lowest that we have ever seen it, and our data goes back to 2017,” said Vanessa Anderson, CEO of Tenant Turner and ShowMojo. “This makes it more important than ever to really make sure we know, on an individual basis for our clients, what is affecting their days-on-market, rental rates, and leasing rates.”
She explained that part of ShowMojo and Tenant Turner’s services include helping clients determine how many leads they need in order to lease a unit with their current listings and how changes like rental-rate increases or reductions, photography, qualification questions, and listing descriptions might affect those metrics.
ShowMojo and Tenant Turner report on what they call “key velocity metrics” to clients regularly, drilling into a “really tactile” element of the data each quarter for the company’s “data talk,” Anderson said. “We always want them to walk away with something actionable to deploy in their business, whether it is how to adjust asking rates, what types of photography are best, and what interests renters most at a given time,” she explained.
“We capture tons of rich data around the leasing process,” she concluded. “We want to be sure our clients get the most value possible from working with us.”
Learn more about Tenant Turner and ShowMojo data talks and other automation and leasing services at TenantTurner.com and Hello.ShowMojo.com.
