How this Property Manager Slashed Drive Times, No-Shows, and Pointless Leasing Calls

www.arhomesandrentals.com

Key Results

Reduced no-shows to property showings by 50%

Automated scheduling and security screening

Cut agent headcount up to 50% during peak rental season

Jarod Puckett bought his first rental in 2016 and his partner owned about 80 at that time. Today, he and his partners own and manage about 800 rented units and 200 properties in various stages of rehabilitation in and around Little Rock, Arkansas. They also invest in new construction.

Their joint venture, Arkansas Homes and Rentals, employs about 55 W-2 employees and hundreds of plumbers, electricians, and HVAC companies.

When they started, Puckett and his partners used spreadsheets to manage it all — but that became unsustainable.

We had all these different accounting tools. And we didn’t really have a true property management system. We had a spreadsheet and we’d check it off each time we got a payment. It was a pain.
Jarod Puckett, Arkansas Homes and Rentals

While it didn’t happen overnight, Puckett assembled a tech stack featuring ShowMojo that has:

Automated all showing scheduling and security checks.
Reduced leasing calls and no-show rates by half.
Expanded leasing capacity while reducing showing agent headcount by 50%.

Searching for the Right Mix

Puckett and his partners started with a property management system which they loved for its marketing capabilities. But it didn’t meet their accounting needs for their construction business, so they switched to a different one.

That worked great for accounting, but not for leasing.

Simply posting houses on our website was a nightmare. It was also hard to syndicate to Zillow and Zumper and all of the listing sites consistently.
Jarod Puckett, Arkansas Homes and Rentals

So Puckett looked for another solution. And after narrowing his choice to three options that would all be easier to syndicate listings with, he decided on ShowMojo for its:

Superior flexibility in handling multi and single-family properties.
Simple payment structure for access devices.
Ability to standardize the leasing process and make it more consistent.

Puckett and his team were also intrigued that ShowMojo could Schedule Showings in Location-Aware Clusters.

First, Simplified Listings. Next, Self-Serve Scheduling.

After a 7-day setup with ShowMojo, Arkansas Homes and Rentals had its listings live and syndicated.

With that problem solved, Puckett decided to set up ShowMojo to solve one of his showing agents’ number one gripes: too much unnecessary driving.

Until then, Puckett and his partners relied on an offshore team to schedule showings. But the remote team struggled to coordinate showings efficiently.

As a result, agents racked up unnecessary mileage, which made it impossible to maximize the showings they could do. But that all changed when Arkansas Homes and Rentals switched Autonomous Scheduling on.

The remote team really struggled to be efficient with how they scheduled agents. They would schedule somebody in Little Rock and 30 minutes later they’re driving to Searcy.” [Autonomous Scheduling] made our leasing agents a lot more efficient.
Jarod Puckett, Arkansas Homes and Rentals

But that was far from the end of it.

No-Shows No More

Since handing scheduling over to ShowMojo, Puckett’s agents noticed a huge decrease in no-shows.

Before ShowMojo, Puckett estimates that somewhere between 30% and 40% of prospective renters who scheduled a showing actually showed up.

I don’t know that we’re at a hundred percent now. I know we still get ghosted sometimes, but I think we’re up there in the 80, 90% of the people show up for their appointments.
Jarod Puckett, Arkansas Homes and Rentals

Put another way: On every 100 showings, Arkansas Homes and Rentals has about 50 fewer no-shows now that ShowMojo is their scheduler.

Puckett openly admits that he doesn’t know how this happened. He said he knows well enough to not ask too many questions when something’s going well. But the trick is the follow-up:

When the prospective renter schedules the showing, ShowMojo automatically sends them an email with showing details.
24 hours in advance of the showing, ShowMojo sends a confirmation via email.
If the prospect doesn’t confirm the showing, ShowMojo tries to confirm again a few hours before the showing. If there’s still no response, the showing is canceled.

Plus, even if you do have a couple of no-shows, Smart Show ensures you’ll have other showings immediately before or after the no-show.

50% Fewer Pointless Leasing Calls

Agents at Arkansas Homes and Rentals weren’t the only ones to see their efficiency skyrocket when ShowMojo took over scheduling. The remote team also got a major boost.

This offshore team’s role is to help process applications, collections, and accounting, as well as coordinate unit turns and maintenance.

But oftentimes they were buried in phone calls.

We got hundreds and hundreds of calls per day sometimes. And the number one question you get asked is, what’s the rent rate? What’s the bed and bath? But I know that [with ShowMojo] our total calls per day is cut down by at least a half or a third.
Jarod Puckett, Arkansas Homes and Rentals

This is thanks to the fact that ShowMojo intercepts these leasing calls and provides basic information about listings. Only the more complex questions get through now.

Self-Showings Help AHR Meet Seasonal Demands

By cutting no-shows, unnecessary driving, and repetitive leasing calls, ShowMojo helped agents and admins at Arkansas Homes and Rentals win their days.

But Puckett didn’t want to just win the day. He wanted to win the year.

Our biggest bottleneck was you had three leasing agents and they had a finite number of showings that they could physically do.
Jarod Puckett, Arkansas Homes and Rentals

While Puckett was skeptical about Self-Showings, the potential to ease his agents’ workload and make the business more flexible was compelling. So he and his team tried it.

Now, self-showings are a core part of the business.

I definitely feel like the workload is more manageable with the self-showings. You never miss a showing. And it opens it up for the weekends and other times when we don’t have [agent] coverage. And the security piece which we used to do manually is automated.
Jarod Puckett, Arkansas Homes and Rentals

At Arkansas Homes and Rentals, self-showings have been a game changer for their leasing process.

During the busy times of the year, they’d need up to seven full-time agents in the peak season. With self-showings, they can stick with three full-time agents and one hybrid agent who’s also an administrator.

The Final Tally

What started as an effort to simplify listing management transformed Arkansas Homes and Rentals’ leasing processes. After switching to ShowMojo:

No-shows have decreased by 50%.
Agents spend significantly less time driving.
Listing syndication is now easy and pain-free.
Remote team members field 50% fewer calls.
Scheduling and security screening are now automated.
Showing capacity increased and agent headcount decreased up to 50% during peak season.

Of course, Puckett and his team aren’t done growing and optimizing the business. But what they’ve done so far with ShowMojo is a testament to their talent and perseverance as real estate investors.