Cost per signed lease came out to $1,270 when the leasing fee was cheaper

The comparison you ran is cleaner than most, because you had a real alternative price for the same outcome. What I would add is that the $575 leasing fee also buys you her waiting list and her screening time, which never shows up in the cost per lease number. Paid traffic hands you unscreened strangers and the labor of sorting them stays with you.

Vacancy days are missing from the arithmetic. If the campaign filled three units two weeks faster than a leasing agent would have, that is roughly $1,725 of rent at your numbers and it changes the conclusion. If it filled them at the same speed or slower, the $1,270 is the whole story. Do you know the timing well enough to say?

@dpatel_re that is the question worth pressing on. Six weeks of media for four units reads slow for a small market, and without a reference point for what normal timing looks like there, it is hard to say whether that pace is a warning sign or just how that market moves.

Rural and small town lease up runs on the same mechanism you described, people telling people. In towns that size the effective channels are the local buy and sell group, a yard sign, and whoever manages the other buildings on the street. Paid search on the town name plus apartments works because the search volume is tiny and cheap, so you own the whole term for very little. The Meta half of your spend is probably where the 50 minute drive applicants came from. The rerun worth testing is the Google side alone at a fraction of the budget with the agent kept on, and the cost per lease should look completely different when the media number is $300 instead of $2,900.