Stop Grading Leads That Never Become Leases
Digible published Part 1 of a conversation between Reid and Scott Hill, CEO and co-founder of PERQ, about why most multifamily marketing metrics stop measuring right before they'd tell you anything useful.
The problem isn't that you don't have data. It's that you have data from six places that were never built to talk to each other. Your ILS says one thing, your CRM says another, your ad platform grades its own homework and hands you an A. Every vendor reports the number that makes their line item look good, and none of them report the number you actually need: did the lead turn into a tour, and did the tour turn into a lease.
Cost-per-lead is the industry's favorite vanity metric because it's easy to pull and easy to defend in a budget meeting. It also tells you almost nothing about occupancy. A source that generates cheap leads that never tour is worse than a source with a higher cost and a real conversion rate, but most reporting dashboards can't make that comparison because the data dies at the lead.
What Hill's describing is the accountability gap this industry has quietly tolerated for years: everyone optimizes for the metric they control and nobody owns the one that matters. If you're running marketing spend on trust in vendor dashboards, ask each one a blunt question. Not "how many leads," but "how many of your leads leased." If they can't answer, that's your answer.
Source: Digible, September 24, 2026
A weekly for the people who run apartment marketing.
Get it Tuesdays