Why Ignoring Lag Measures is Preventing You from Hitting Your Leasing Goals

Measuring reliable metrics are an essential part of any business, including the multifamily industry.

It makes sense, but what if you’re measuring them and still aren't hitting your leasing goals?

Knowing you need to measure metrics isn't the issue. Only focusing on leading indicators and ignoring lagging measures often derails our goals.

Think of leading indicators as data to make predictive decisions about your community and how your marketing will perform. They measure change, progress, and how likely you are to reach your goal–but they're also hard to nail down and quantify.

Lagging indicators are measurable values and the impact from previous marketing campaigns that could include:

👉 Lease renewals from a social media campaign

👉 Positive online reviews after launching a campaign to respond to all of them

👉 Request for a tour after a community event

Lagging indicators are similar to KPIs (key point indicators) that you can measure and use to help shape your marketing campaigns.

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Truth 💣: When you ignore lag measures, it just creates a hyper-reactive sense of urgency in your multifamily marketing.

Instead of thinking long-term, it's tempting to focus on short-term decisions that can actually hurt your community.

Before you work on your next outreach or renewal campaign, here's what to know about ignoring lag measures in marketing.

Sunk Cost Fallacy Takes Over

When you're not focused on your lag measures and your community’s long-term success, it's easy to let sunk cost fallacy take over.

Sunk cost fallacy is the idea that you dedicated so much time or money to a marketing initiative that you possibly can't turn back now.

Letting sunk costs is a slippery slope–it gets into your head and can prevent you from pivoting to a place where you identify a weakness and work on fixing it.

For example, you may realize that the PPC advertising you're spending money on isn't doing much of anything to bring in more leads.

Instead of making changes, you keep pressing forward and hoping for the best. 🤞

Or you may decide to pull the plug altogether instead of letting its AI capabilities learn more about your audience and make changes.

Focusing on lag measures can save you time and money in the long run.

When you see what's working (and what's not), you can make corrections to help shape the success of your future initiatives.

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You Suffer from Confirmation Bias

With so much marketing info out there, it's pretty easy to find something online that supports your ideas about a campaign for your community.

Confirmation bias means you give more importance or weight to whatever you already believe.

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You may decide there's no value in social media and chalk up any positive changes or sudden engagement to a fluke.

Confirmation bias could keep you from realizing that your most loyal residents are answering questions on social media because they love living in your community.

Yet with a little more motivation and an incentive, they could end up supercharging your results.

Or you may stick to hosting quarterly neighborhood events that are poorly attended, thinking that's just the way it goes in marketing.

Instead of tweaking the theme, asking for input from residents, or teaming up with local businesses to cross-promote, you keep watching the leases slowly trickle in from those events and decide that's as good as it will get.

Here's the thing. Everyone experiences confirmation bias in business and personal life–and that's exactly why you need to measure your lag indicators.

A lag indicator, like how many people are inquiring about your business through your Google Business Profile, is measurable and can shape your marketing efforts.

Measuring the number of requests for tours after launching a Google ads campaign is also a lag indicator worth measuring.

You're Too Distracted by Leading Indicators

There's nothing wrong with throwing some weight to leading indicators in community marketing.

They're also valuable and worth measuring but should work in tandem with your lag indicators.

When you're too focused on leading indicators, it could look something like:

✅ My leads went up 8% this year! - But we don't know why or where they came from.

✅ Our occupancy rate is way up! - But we don’t know which marketing campaigns caused the spike.

Or maybe your leads went down, but you had a higher percentage of renewals from a resident referral program.

It's important to focus on the outcome of your lag indicators and how they performed.

Make sure you know what drove your results in the first place and how to leverage them for your next marketing campaign.

How to Embrace Lag Measures in Multifamily Marketing

The good news is there are plenty of ways to focus more on lag measures to create a sustainable foundation for your community.

Start by investing in first-party data to better understand where you get your best residents from.

Dig into your PPC campaigns to see what's converting, and ask your leasing agents where they're seeing the most interest and leads coming from.

When it comes to multifamily marketing, manual attribution is essential to getting to the bottom of your lag measures, lead quality, and conversions that all impact your community.

Where is your foot traffic coming from? Did they see a billboard? Learn about a lease special from a current resident? See an online review?

Make sure to manually attribute all of those leads to the right source for the most accurate data.

The results?

When you're investing time and attention to your lag measures and indicators, you're staying ahead of your marketing strategy instead of trying to fix anything and everything whenever your occupancy goes down.

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