How Accurate Are Manual Market Surveys?

Long hours. Standardization inconsistencies. Cumbersome processes. This is how your leasing teams see manual market surveys. 

As the industry adapts to automation, the way you produce market surveys should too. No, the manual way of doing market surveys isn’t accurate–it’s riddled with erroneous and fragmented data that can cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars in business each year. 

Your on-site staff have enough to handle as is. It’s time to move away from the antiquated approach and into a more modern process using AI.

Your Manual Market Survey Can’t Keep Up

Company stakeholders expect fast, detailed, and accurate reports. There’s a substantial amount of data to aggregate and analyze– a traditional process just can’t keep pace with those expectations. Manual market surveys pose several challenges: 

Outdated Information

Manual market surveys take days or weeks to complete. Because of this, the data collected is already outdated. You’re not getting up-to-date, realistic concessions or unit availability when calling up properties. 

The timing of market surveys is everything. Turnover is high in the industry, and training to conduct manual market surveys is time-consuming. As new employees come on board, property managers have to make time to show them the process of pulling information for their market and submarket competitors.  

If you’re calling a property to get data, you may have missed pertinent information by a day - possibly a few hours - when their property management system reset. Additionally, calling as a secret shopper can only get you unit pricing and details that a prospective renter might ask. 

Valuable Time Wasted 

Leasing staff have a lot to manage around their communities. While admin support is a large responsibility, teams are wasting valuable time dredging up (poor quality) data for cumbersome manual market surveys. 

Your team is spending hours placing calls to neighboring apartment communities and copying/pasting information into a spreadsheet. All this time being wasted on the traditional survey could be allocated towards exceeding tenants' needs.

Lack of Standardization

Excel and Google Sheets have their place in business. It’s a great program for exporting and analyzing data sets. 

The inefficiency lies with the manual feed process, or the inputting of market survey data. Version tracking becomes chaotic as more team members access and modify spreadsheet contents. With so many files shared among the organization, it’s hard to effectively use spreadsheets as a standard single source of truth for business decision-making. You’re often dealing with siloed workflows and bottlenecks. 

Prone to Errors and Liability

Multifamily businesses are at greater risk of human error when manually sourcing and capturing data. Mistakes are costly and can lead to data misrepresentation, negatively impacting business revenue. 

Furthermore, there’s the risk of inadvertently using private data. Property details and metrics from anonymized sources can potentially open companies to compliance issues.

AI Reinvents Market Survey Production 

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is there to assist and automate your data aggregation process. This capability allows you to reinvent your market survey production, modernizing your system so you can have confidence in your data again. 

AI capability delivers several benefits for operators and their teams, including: 

1. Accuracy. AI gathers data from a diverse set of sources at greater speeds than manual processes. It can cross-reference applications and verify metrics to return the most precise and accurate insights in record time. 
2. Full transparency. AI can be programmed or trained to crawl only reliable public sources, avoiding biased and incomplete data sets that skew results. This provides objective and transparent data for users. 
3. Accelerate workflow. AI capability makes it easier to scale and streamline data management processes. Adaptable workflows mean you can pull and optimize data instantly, as it’s already been aggregated for you. 
4. Hands-off standardization. AI handles the tediousness and repetitive nature of data aggregation and standardization.

AI-Driven Software Fuels Efficient Market Surveys

Work expectations are increasingly demanding–there’s no time to spare for traditional methods. Your teams are taking care of day-to-day operations at the property. A more modern solution to market surveys gives them time back to manage their apartment communities. 

AI-driven software fuels efficient market surveys–that’s ApartmentIQ. With AI technology and public data, ApartmentIQ accelerates daily market surveys, ensuring accurate and compliant insights to help drive more informed decisions across your operations. 

Learn more about the platform →