We all have one or two too many things to keep an eye on, and the idea  of adding more “stuff” to our list of ongoing maintenance is a painful prospect. However, maintenance has real meaning when it comes to successful leasing operations. And I’m not talking about maintenance like cutting the grass or caulking the windows.

I was reading a series of questions/statements followed by answers/rebuttals on a real estate website today and ran across the following claim:

Survey after survey confirms this: people who place an inquiry online expect to be responded to immediately. Not “tomorrow,” but immediately. Those same surveys confirm that when those inquiries are responded to within four hours, in the vast majority of cases, the buyer stays with the agent who responded into the sale (that is, more than 82% of the time-Source: CAR)… A prompt response sets the stage for a successful conversion from inquiry to interested party. In an on-demand world, you need to be available immediately when that first inquiry is made. (source: Mike Parker, www.rismedia.com)

Now, granted, this is a for sale real estate site, so there’s no pure apples-to-apples comparison. Maybe it’s different when a prospective renter hears back from a property. Or maybe it’s not. Would anyone deny that the Internet (along with cell phones, faxes, instant messaging and Twitter) has made us more demanding?

Everyone who is an Internet shopper, even apartment hunters, think that there might be someone on the other end of that email they send at 11:30 at night asking about the one-bedroom plus den. So how quickly does your leasing team get back to the email leads that come in? We know we have a lot of users who indicate that they’re moving ASAP. A quick response to them might just be a winning response!

So a maintenance task that might have a lot of meaning is to make time every day to respond to email leads. Are some of them just fishing expeditions? Yes. But some of them are in a hurry and need to move – so hurry them right into your place.

We had a conversation earlier this year with a large community who told us they respond to NO email leads. Hmmmm. I don’t know what their occupancy rate is, but it would have to improve if they changed their policy on email leads. Maybe now that leads are getting harder to find, they will.