Glossary of Multifamily Marketing Technology

In multifamily rental properties, this metric measures the rate at which available units are rented (typically over 12 months), and is adjusted to reflect a property’s turnover rates during the specified period.

The rate that available units that are expected to rent.  It is calculated as the total number of units rented divided by the total number of units listed (e.g., 42 units rented ÷ 60 units for rent = 70% absorption).

Refers to 1) the rate at which users leave your site after viewing a single page; and 2) the percentage of undeliverable emails in a campaign.  This can be used to indicate any issues concerning your webpage, as high bounce rates are equated with poor-quality content, design, user experience, etc.

How recognizable your brand is with consumers, and the utilization of all available marketing channels (i.e., radio, television, print, social media, etc.) to increase your exposure to your target audience.

Metric for the average number of click-throughs per hundred impressions, measured as a percentage.  The CTR expresses the immediate audience response to a particular ad, email or call-to-action, but it’s not indicative of an impression’s overall success.

The comparable price of rent in a market area.  Also known as “fair market” rent, there are various factors that determine fair rental prices, with calculations based on scientific regression analysis of rental units in a given vicinity.

An rental agreement (lease) between a landlord and tenant, with rental costs determined by the property owner (aka “street” rent).

Metric used to determine the percentage of users that perform a specific call-to-action in a specific timeframe, generally resulting in sales. The conversion rate is calculated by dividing your number of goal achievements by the total number of visitors (e.g., 50 sales ÷ 1000 visitors = 5% conversion).

The maximum gross rent that can be covered by government subsidies for HUD Section 8 housing in a particular area. This can also be used to determine tax rates in appraisal districts.

Metric that measures the viewership of a single display of a particular ad on a webpage, and is used to determine advertising fees on some search engines.

An array of metrics – also known as “Key Success Indicators” – used to determine the strategic and operational goals of a given campaign.  Actual key indicators can vary depending on the industry, but generally are used to track growth and performance. In digital marketing, indicators may measure unique website visitors, bounce rate, average on-site user-time, average page-viewership, conversion rate, brand persuasion score, search engine ranking, and much more.

Using regression analysis, rent is determined as comparable to an area’s commercial markets (e.g., the tech industry in San Diego, CA), in which unit rental costs are affected by the current state of a particular market (i.e., the stronger the market, the higher the rents).

A geographical region with high population density.  As a metric, it is used to identify the real estate market associated with a statistical urban area, and is calculated by the Office of Management and Budget and utilized by Federal agencies including the U.S. Census Bureau.

Measure of the total amount of occupied space (in square-footage) less the total vacated space in a rental property (not including sublets, pre-leases or lease renewals) during the applicable rental period.

SEO metric that measures [unpaid] search engine results based on keywords, links, and content relevancy rather than results generated by paid-advertising.  In the context of social media marketing, this is the result of sharability by users as opposed to pay-per-click advertising or buying ‘Likes’ on Facebook.

A link that directs users from your website to an external domain. Many SEO experts agree that these are the primary contributor to page rankings.  SEO best practices dictates that you never stuff a site with outbound links or risk losing page rankings.

The number of unique users that view a webpage and/or content on your website.  This metric is used to determine the amount of traffic coming to your site, and it plays a major factor in measuring other data including clickthroughs, user retention and bounce rates, even content value.

Marketing metric that measures the percentage of users that receive and share a branded message or content (e.g., coupon, promotional email, social media).  Also known as the metric for “word-of-mouth” marketing.  This can also be used to identify “brand evangelists” within an audience.

Digital marketing tactic used to direct traffic via ads on a webpage, in which advertisers pay the host site for every click received.  With SERPs, advertisers can bid on keywords relevant to their target audiences.  Also known as “sponsored links.”

Digital advertisement that “pops up” in a new browser window or tab, usually disrupting the user experience.  Pop-up ads have long been considered the bane of users’ collective online existence because of their intrusive nature.  Traffic and conversion metrics may be inaccurate due to “false-positives” of users mistakenly clicking on the ad when attempting to close it.

The geographical area whose value is determined by the proposed development of multifamily rental units within a particularly strong real estate market.

Metric used to measure a particular area surrounding a property site.  The proposed area of analysis is circular, extending anywhere from one to ten miles from the center of the location. The analysis does not consider factors such as mobility, geography or socioeconomic disparity as it may differ from areas outside the analytic parameters.

Metric used to survey the median rent in a given area based on the available types of rental units and a property’s comparability rating to allow property owners and landlords to forecast rent for a particular rental property.  Calculated as Y ≈ f(X, β); x=independent variables, y=dependent variables.

Metric used to calculate the number of tenants needed to sign leases in order to offset the losses associated with tenants that have either broken or not renewed their leases.

Metric used to determine the effectiveness of a marketing campaign by tracking traffic and conversions generated across multiple channels, audience engagement and other factors, against the hard costs of executing the campaign.  ROI is calculated as total profits divided by the total investment (e.g., $1000 profit ÷ $5000 investment = 20% ROI).

The upper-25% over the median rental prices in a given area over a specified period of time.  For example, a multi-unit rental property has a total of 40 apartments; 10 of these apartments will have higher-than-average rent in comparison to the other 30 units.

Metric that measures the number of visitors going to and from websites.  This includes any user data sent and/or received via a domain.  In digital marketing, this is crucial to your analytics and one of several key performance indicators (KPIs).