Self-Guided Tours: Why Do Prospects Use Them?

Many apartment owners and operators may be leery of offering self-guided tours, but the data indicates prospects want and use them. 
Intuitively, this makes sense. Self-service has become more and more a part of the consumer experience. Go into a fast-food restaurant and you can order and pay for your meal at a kiosk, and an employee will bring your food to you in a matter of minutes. You can order something on Amazon and it’s on your doorstep the next day.
Increasingly, prospects want to experience an apartment community on their terms. Properties that don’t give prospects the option to self-tour risk alienating prospective renters and may find it difficult to convert leads into new residents.
So, what’s the specific appeal of self-guided tours? Statistics point to a number of possibilities.
Digging into the Numbers
First off, data convincingly demonstrates the popularity of self-guided tours.
According to an Anyone Home analysis of the 2018 leasing activity of all of its single-family-rental clients, 24.4 percent of all prospects booked a tour. Of those that booked a tour, 61.3 percent chose only a self-guided one, while 30.1 percent chose only a tour with an associate. The other 8.6 percent of prospects booked both tour types.
Secondly, the numbers also show that prospects like to take self-guided tours during normal business hours.
Another Anyone Home study of its single-family-rental clients shows that, during the latter portion of 2018, only 21.2 percent of prospects requested a self-guided tour outside of office hours, while the other……