Centralized leasing across a portfolio, or a person in the office at every property?

Hardware failure rate is what the centralized model tends to underprice. Smart locks on 120 units, battery replacement, the two doors that stop reporting every winter, and someone still has to physically go fix them. If you've cut the on-site headcount to a manager and one tech, that's the tech's afternoon, and his afternoon was supposed to be a work order.

I'd also say older product is where remote leasing hurts most, and it's not about sunlight. It's that on a 1970s building the units aren't the same. Unit 204 has the good kitchen and 206 doesn't, and a centralized agent quoting off a floor plan code will put someone in 206 at 204's price and you'll hear about it at renewal.

I've been going around on this for weeks in my model, so I'll give the numbers that changed my mind rather than an opinion.

On a 120-unit at 45% turnover you need 54 new leases a year. At a 20% tour-to-lease rate that's 270 tours, so about 22 a month. A leasing consultant does that in maybe six working days. You're paying for availability, not for volume.

But the centralized version only saves you money if you actually remove the salary, and every version I've priced keeps a community manager who ends up doing tours anyway when the self-tour breaks. So you save maybe $30k and spend $18k a year on software and hardware amortization, plus you've made the community manager's job worse. Under about 200 doors on a single site I couldn't make the savings look like more than noise. Over three sites in the same submarket it flips hard, because then one centralized team covers 400 doors and you've genuinely deleted two salaries.

So my answer is geography, not unit count. If your doors are in one drive time, centralize. If they're scattered, you're paying for both models.

Asking the thing I'd be embarrassed to ask in a room: who shows up when a prospect on a self-guided tour finds a resident's door propped open, or worse? I understand the payroll math, I just can't picture the liability side of letting strangers into a building with a code and nobody there. @parcel did either of your partners get an answer on that from an insurer? Feels like the kind of question that has a state-by-state answer and an underwriting answer that don't match.