How do you handle high lease volumes?

[Phil Gardner]

We've been growing the service side of our business significantly lately and begun doing a fairly high volume of sales and renovations for our clients here in Toronto.  Most of these properties our clients are buying are 3-4 units all coming to us vacant.  

The current weak link of the company seems to be on the leasing side, with all of these new properties closing or renovations coming to completion we had a ton of leases that now needed to be done for our clients.  We hit an all time high of 16 vacant units in September that were to be leased by October 1 and while we are just about done all of them at this, it took all hands on deck and significantly slowed down some of the rest of the team as they had to help out keeping our lone leasing agent afloat this month. 

Obviously we would like to see this volume of leasing continue as it provides a significant income stream for the business.  That being said I could definitely use some suggestions for streamlining the process to allow for one guy to efficiently handle that many leases.

We are lucky enough to have a majority of our portfolio concentrated in a tight pocket of the city. That being said, high volumes of showings, application review, reference calls, lease drafting, and chasing people for money still takes a significant amount of time.  Any ideas, tips, tricks to cut down on this time would be greatly appreciated!