Live Chat Drives 70 Leases in Student Housing

The Situation

A private student housing community near the University of Illinois needed a scalable way to convert website visitors into leads, tours, and leases. They realized that students preferred gathering information and communicating with the community online before visiting the building in person. The community’s marketing manager sought a software solution that could capture prospects’ contact information, respond to student inquiries, and schedule appointments on behalf of the leasing team.

The Solution

The property management team launched The Conversion Cloud® on the community’s website. They activated Live Chat and Schedule Genie on every page of their site to help the team collect lead information, respond to leads, and schedule tour appointments. They outsourced Live Chat conversations to CLX's team to free up the leasing team to follow through with tours and signed contracts. This strategy helped the community schedule 96 new tours and answer 291 chat conversations within a three-month period.

Once the community gathered new leads and tours on the platform, they matched these leads to their resident list using the platform’s Matchback feature to identify how many signed leases. The results revealed that 70 renters engaged in a Live Chat conversation before signing a lease, and 25 renters scheduled a tour in Schedule Genie.

The Strategy

Live chat agents responded to students within seconds and provided relevant and personalized answers to inquiries. They captured students' contact information during live chat conversations and encouraged them to schedule a tour in Schedule Genie whenever possible.

All of the live chat conversations were recorded and stored in The Conversion Cloud dashboard, which made it easy for the leasing team to see the questions that prospective residents had before they reached out for a follow-up. This helped the leasing team create a more personalized sales experience, leading to a 24-26% lead-to-lease conversion rate from Conversion Cloud leads.