Viewing No Show - Big Frustration

[Ron Rohrssen]

Scheduling viewings on rental properties and not having a prospective applicant show up is a pretty big problem for me. In my latest round of rental turnovers I averaged over 50% NO SHOWs. Of 8 appointments I had scheduled in 1 day for a SFH, 4 of them didn't show up, stopped answering their phone, and in NO way attempted to let me know their plans had changed.

This is a representative sample of my experiences for the last few years. Obviously this is aggravating and a big waste of time. I'll explain my process and I'd love to hear feedback on how others have dealt with this.

1. I advertise exclusively online through Zillow, Zumper, Facebook, Hotpads, and Apartments.com. I track every response that I receive to know that about 52% of my responses come from Zillow, around 23% on Apartments.com, and 20% on Zumper.

2. If the respondent disqualifies themselves by self-disclosing pets, or no income (yes that's correct they tell me they are unemployed), I send them my standard rental criteria and tell them the rental does not allow pets. 

3. For everyone else I respond with an email that thanks them for their interest, explains the rental criteria, and then invites them to use an online scheduling system (Calendly) to choose a date/time for viewing the home at their convenience. I typically offer 9AM - 6:30 PM on weekdays and 10AM to 3 PM on weekends.

I configured Calendly to give email and text reminders at 24 hours, 3 hours, and 1 hour before the appointment.

4. This year I started choosing about half of the respondents to also follow up with a personal phone call to see if they have any questions and invite them to verbally schedule a date/time for viewing. I simply enter the Calendly appointment information myself. They still get the email and text notifications about the appointment.

I wanted to see if technology (Calendly) is an issue for some people. The results showed me that I can get more people to commit to a scheduled viewing after answering all of their questions or concerns. But, this didn't affect the NO SHOW rate. That is still around 50%.

5. A respondent that views the apartment may become an applicant. The rate of conversion of a respondent to an applicant varies a lot and seems to be higher in the class C properties.

6. An applicant becomes a tenant. This might take a guarantor, a change in the security deposit, or some other change.

When I started with our first rental around 10 years ago, I NEVER had someone not show for an appointment. My listings were in Craigslist, Facebook, and the occasional poster at the grocery store.

Have people really become this much less considerate? I'm open to suggestions on how to reduce the NO SHOW numbers.

By the way, housing in our area is extremely competitive due to the Derecho which damaged or destroyed so many homes last year. My most recent SFH rental opening at nearly 200 interested people from the online sources I listed above. I did fill it on day 1 of showings; which was 1 of the 4 people that did show up.