Here is how you keep apartment occupancy above 95%

Occupancy is the number everyone watches and the one you cannot act on. By the time it reads 92, the decisions that produced it were made sixty days ago: a renewal nobody called about, a lead that waited two days for a reply, a unit that photographed badly and never got toured.

So the useful question is not how to raise occupancy. It is which upstream number to work this week so the occupancy number takes care of itself. There are three.

1. The 60-day renewal window

Every resident who leaves costs you the vacant days, the turn, and the marketing to replace them. Every resident who stays costs a conversation. That asymmetry is the single largest lever on the occupancy number and it is almost entirely a matter of timing.

Sixty days out is early enough that the resident has not started looking. Thirty days out, they have already toured somewhere else and you are now competing against a property they have physically stood in. The renewal conversation is cheap at 60 days and expensive at 30.

Ask what would make them stay before you send a number. Many answers are not rent: a parking spot, a washer, permission for a dog, a maintenance issue that never got closed. Those are cheaper than a turn.

2. The leads you already paid for

Most properties below target do not have a lead problem. They have a response problem. The lead came in from a listing site you are already paying for, and it sat.

Renters shop four or five properties in the same afternoon. The tour goes to whoever answers first, and a slow reply is read as a signal about the building: if leasing takes two days to answer while they are trying to give you money, maintenance will take a week once they live there.

Before buying more traffic, measure how long your average lead waits for a first reply. If that number is over an hour during business hours, more traffic will not help, because the leads you have are already leaking.

3. Whether the listing earns a tour

A prospect decides whether to tour from a phone screen, in a feed of near-identical listings, based on photos of a unit that looks like the last four they scrolled past. Almost every property in your submarket has the same amenity list and the same beige photo set.

What differentiates is showing the unit in motion. Not a slideshow of the same stills with a slow zoom, which reads instantly as a photo montage, but actual movement through the space: the hallway opening into the living room, the light from the window as the camera passes it, the depth of the kitchen relative to the island.

The effect is not usually more leads. It is better ones. A prospect who has already seen the unit move arrives having filtered themselves in, so your leasing team spends fewer tours on people who were never going to sign. Occupancy responds to leasing velocity, and velocity responds to tour quality.

You do not need a shoot for this. If the units have already been photographed, you have what a video needs. Slungshots builds the motion from your existing photo set and floor plan, human-reviewed before delivery, with no invented footage of a unit that does not exist. One video per floor plan covers a whole building, and it stays useful across every season the plan is available.

What to do this week

Pull the renewals expiring in the next 60 days and call them, starting with the units you would least like to turn. Then measure the average first-reply time on last month’s leads. Then take your worst-performing floor plan, the one that gets impressions but no tours, and put it in motion.

Those three moves are all upstream of the occupancy number, which is the only place it can actually be changed. For the wider picture on formats and cost, see the complete guide.