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SightMap has that ‘wow factor.’ It’s beautiful to look at, intuitive and a fun, productive resource. One of Venterra’s biggest goals is to create a really great customer experience.
They can pull SightMap up right from their desks, and it’s nice because it highlights the vacants. They can show exactly where in the community each available home is located, and they can also zoom out and show how close we are to schools or bus stops. We get a lot of questions like that, and SightMap provides a great visual.
With the tool, you can get even more granular with floor types, units and several other factors. If I can price homes with a mountain view $100 more but have to price the building facing the street $50 less, it’s a valuable insight that leads to an extra $50 we never would have had.
That was my first interaction with Engrain and I was blown away with the technology. It made a lot of sense to integrate interactive mapping technology with the 55-inch touch screens we use during the touring experience, and even for hosting on our websites. SightMap really helps prospects visualize what their experience would be like upon move-in and paints a more complete picture.
Once prospects can view these spaces on a map, it adds more value. Our journey orchestration is much more powerful with visuals. We can see customer feedback in our surveys, so we know the interactive maps are not only advantageous, but differentiating.
It’s much quicker to pull up a property map on SightMap and visualize the green boxes where there is vacancy and which units meet the particular criteria a customer is looking for.
People want specific things and SightMap really streamlines that process by narrowing their apartment search through embedded SightMap filters based on what they're interested in and what's important to them. People are inherently visual. Instead of telling a prospect that an apartment faces the pool, actualy showing them the exact location and view on a map is a far better customer experience. It allows customers to really dial in to what they want.
We’ve replaced all the spreadsheets with a fully integrated, interactive map of each community suited with custom dashboards that exhibit specific and vital information. We can easily aggregate and access leasing percentages, financial components, resident feedback and really any other data-centric information we may be looking for.
It made a pronounced year-over-year impact simply based on the level of interaction and engagement we were getting through the system.
Being specific in what you’re looking at is crucial to operations and asset value. If we want to know what’s happening within a particular building, map visualization and resident feedback gives us a more detailed picture of why residents are more likely to renew there than other buildings. When you see that information visually, it really speaks to you.
For the onsite team, it just makes it so much easier to narrow down the units that they're going to show.
Maps are a commodity feature in most software applications in the storage space, but the key feature we were missing was the interactive component. The self-storage industry has used static map files that need to be updated by the vendor and they’re very limited in how customers or teams can interact with them.
Village Green is seeing huge benefits and it attracts potential clients interested in data analytics when our portfolio is starting to reflect that. From that standpoint, we’re seeing a solid ROI on our client engagement and those buying into our business intelligence team.”
Asset Intelligence easily allows us to speak to absorption by unit type, view or floor preference. I use it when discussing new pricing strategies with our management companies and when I have internal conversations with our developers. They are often curious about what floor plans lease well or those that might not move quite as fast so we can use the information on future sites.
They’ve worked with us a lot to review the data behind TouchTour and SightMap and help us reimagine our processes with the technology features and upgrades.
TouchTour has made us more branded and memorable. One of the main reasons why we added it is that it made us different from our competitors. It sets us apart.
We added touchscreens to three of our newer communities, and anything new from here forward will have TouchTour screens. All of our leaseups will have them.
We wanted to make sure we weren’t just blanketing specials across the board and leaving money on the table. We needed the insight to quickly adjust rents as we see absorption pick up on certain unit types. The SightMap AI tool was the first thing that provided us with these capabilities and really started to help with that conversation.
Engrain’s SightMap has not only created a higher caliber self-service experience for our customers, but it has also helped us gain a much deeper understanding of our properties, premium locations and the overall layout.
We really wanted to go with a touchscreen kiosk that would create a unique leasing experience. We wanted to deliver some of the ‘wow factor’ that the comps in the area did not have.
Our leasing teams also love the map as a tool to use while communicating with prospects both virtually and in the leasing office. The new Blue Dot location feature within the interactive SightMap is something that many of our teams are excited about, as it proves an especially useful feature for sites that are offering self-guided tours.
We get lots of people who walk in the door at our lease-ups, and when leasing agents are busy we hope that they’ll get directed to our touchscreens and can kind of help themselves until a leasing agent is available, it’s a really nice feature to have in our lobby or clubhouse.
Whenever a new product or software feature is released at Engrain, the Engrain team always meets with Griffis to demo the product and let us try it out. I’ve always been very impressed not only with Engrain’s technology, but also their customer service.
Griffis’ company motto is, ‘it’s about you,’ and both SightMap and TouchTour align with our company goals and support that vision.
We are empowered to make informed decisions with a flexible, innovative tool that’s intuitive and user friendly,” she added, “Engrain had just the solution we needed and the team has been wonderful to work with and extremely helpful.
But Power BI also presents an opportunity for our clients to see what we’re doing that’s different from our competitors. That also provides them peace of mind that their investments are generating higher rates of income via value-add tools like Engrain’s Power BI plug-in.
We use Engrain’s TouchTour and SightMap at all of our communities and wanted to enhance the interactive maps so customers on self-guided tours had the ability to seamlessly navigate communities on their own.
One of the things that has really helped is that with TouchTour, you can aggregate pictures and floor plans while you're talking to your prospect and send a follow-up email easily and quickly right from the screen before the prospect has even left the property.
It’s a much better process, especially when going from a lease-up to a stabilized community,
These are unique properties and we don’t have standard layouts and sometimes it’s very confusing how we number our units. Giving people a navigable point of reference where they can get from a gate, an office or a kiosk to their unit is the primary enhanced experience.
We genuinely liked the in-person experience and the pricing component made sense.
We really wanted to go with a touchscreen kiosk that would create a unique leasing experience. We wanted to deliver some of the ‘wow factor’ that the comps in the area did not have.
Griffis’ company motto is, ‘it’s about you,’ and both SightMap and TouchTour align with our company goals and support that vision.
We needed the insight to quickly adjust rents as we see absorption pick up on certain unit types. It enables us to make better decisions on what types of units and sizes we’re putting into our new developments.
I’ve always asked the team what they consider their number one leasing tool, and it’s always Engrain’s TouchTour for iPad for them. They love it—they feel like it’s a big iPhone. Parents love it, students love it, it’s easy to interact with and they get it.
SightMap was really concise and efficient compared to some of the other interactive maps we looked at that seemed clunky and already outdated. The interactive property map provided easily digestible information that gave our leasing team pricing insight and our prospects a better understanding of exactly what they’re getting.
The wayfinding really enhances the customer journey because they’re getting a more comprehensive tour of the community. Not only can they navigate the property on their own, but they can see where their potential apartment might be, how far it is from parking and other key details they’ll want to know before applying.”
I just felt the level of customer service execution and personalization options were better with this product.
These technologies are really about the customer and providing a more seamless and visually rich apartment leasing and touring experience. That consistency is really important to our brand and Engrain helped us establish that to create a better experience for each potential resident.
It can be challenging to take data and make it visually impactful and productive. Data can be difficult to read or understand. But showing rather than telling actually says a million words. SightMap really fills that gap.
For our websites, we wanted that real-time availability for prospects. SightMap definitely has the real-time availability, and the fact that it integrates with our software is huge.”
For one, it’s a great enhancement for older or templated sites where the floor plan search experience isn’t reflective of best practices. And two, it provides additional opportunity for engagement on newer sites, extending the time on site with an easy-to-use, visual search tool.
Bozzuto was able to seamlessly integrate the SightMap platform to its community site to offer prospects a more granular and interactive floor plan search. For instance, if a prospect wanted to view all one-bedroom homes on the ground floor or all two bedroom homes with a balcony, they could do so.
We’re experiencing results that indicate not only increased efficiencies, but also revenue growth at Village Green communities,”
SightMap gets prospects further along the journey than they normally would be without visuals prior to a property tour.
As we’re looking at which unit types are going to lease the best, square footages and potential demographic needs, the ability to retrieve the Asset Intelligence reporting for previous communities in the area really helps.
It allows us to show real-time availability on the screen and to push guest card information back to our CRM so it doesn’t have to be entered multiple times.
You can turn the map around to the customer and show them what’s available to see what will work best for them. It changes not just the rental journey, but also the reporting, walk-through tasks and lock checks that the site managers are required to do as well.
TouchTour builds confidence, in that the senior client literally sees that the owner/community sponsor already has the logistics and details of the full project all figured out. They can envision themselves moving in tomorrow even though the property is not built yet. TouchTour really brought those visuals together, as well as emphasizes the urgency component to the sales process.
The first year after adding TouchTour for iPad, we had 81% leased before opening, portfolio-wide.
We use Engrain’s TouchTour and SightMap at all of our communities and wanted to enhance the interactive maps so customers on self-guided tours had the ability to seamlessly navigate communities on their own.
Our relationship with Engrain goes back several years. Fast-forward to 2019, and Engrain’s interactive SightMap was exactly what we were seeking. It provided a cost-effective and easy-to-implement solution to help improve the online floor-plan search experience for our tech-savvy prospects.
I've really noticed the burden of uncertainty lifted from prospects and an added confidence to apply.
Based on Griffis' data, customers spend 20.7% more time engaging with the SightMap when they are searching for a new apartment.
It’s a huge time saver and gives us much more insight into marketing apartments.
The automatic pricing and real-time availability has been a huge help for the leasing team, and now they don’t have to contact multiple people or log in to multiple platforms to do their jobs.
SightMap gives renters all the information they need to make a buying decision. They get to choose which method is best for them – if they want to look by unit, floor plan, or see a visual map of where the home is located within the community.
We look at charge codes by apartment, so if a community has a parking garage, utility, trash and pet charges, we can isolate and filter out only one of those charges and the map will react.
We needed a way to show prospects that things were reserving quickly and that they needed to get on board, or they might lose the opportunity to have the floor plan in the location of the building that they want.
Data can be difficult to read or understand. But showing rather than telling actually says a million words. SightMap really fills that gap.”
Based on the immediate success leasing teams experienced with TouchTour, we've developed a new policy that all tours should begin with a TouchTour presentation.
The leasing teams love SightMap because they’re able to pull it up and walk through a community with a prospect and know exactly which units they can show while giving an exact price and move-in date.
The interactivity of a map, real-time occupancy and vacancy data and pricing affect the journey in a way we’ve never implemented before at Extra Space. It really is a novel and invaluable tool for us.
The Engrain team came out to our office and we could tell they were very passionate about what they were doing, willing to work with us and could implement our suggestions very quickly.
The beauty of SightMap is that we can distinctly show photos attached to exact apartment homes, so that customers can look at the photos and 3D tours of the specific home they’re interested in.
Since partnering with Engrain, we’ve spent more time looking at the data and actually understanding what it’s telling us versus digging through the data and attempting to understand. We can quickly adjust and make confident decisions.
We’re seeing trends that we’ve never been able to visualize before in real-time and gaining the information required to make better decisions,”
The dynamic pricing allows customers to select their lease length and move-in date with an exact price. Our customers know exactly what they’re getting and that alone really enhances the customer journey and overall resident experience.
Using TouchTour, we actually achieved presale an eight-week timeframe, so that was a very significant acceleration, considering the entry fees for these independent-living apartment homes were anywhere from $350,000 up to $800,000.
I love the Engrain Touch Tour! I've used it at multiple communities and it always serves its purpose very well. My favorite features are the ability to view where your potential new home is within the community on the sitemap and the option to layout your furniture on the floor plan to see where you'll place everything when you move in! It's simple and makes the touring process that much more convenient for our prospective residents.
Whenever a new product or software feature is released at Engrain, the Engrain team always meets with Griffis to demo the product and let us try it out. I’ve always been very impressed not only with Engrain’s technology, but also their customer service.
Using TouchTour, we actually achieved presale in an eight-week timeframe, so that was a very significant acceleration, considering the entry fees for these independent-living apartment homes were anywhere from $350,000 up to $800,000.
We’re seeing trends that we’ve never been able to visualize before in real-time and gaining the information required to make better decisions.
It provides a better experience for customers and we wanted to enhance some of our leasing processes to modernize the customer journey.
We needed a way to show prospects that things were reserving quickly and that they needed to get on board, or they might lose the opportunity to have the floor plan in the location of the building that they want.
We look at Engrain’s SightMap as a critical component for how we enhance both the user experience and the employee experience at all of our locations. It’s now a permanent extension of how Extra Space does business.
When we know where pets are within a community and we can see it on a virtual map versus just a spreadsheet, we don’t have to comb through multiple documents and it saves a lot of valuable time.
The integration was a significant component to our data model. Integration can be a large barrier for many new technologies or products, but Engrain’s integration was seamless. Power BI is amazingly intuitive and there’s nothing else like it in the market for multifamily.
People want specific things and SightMap really streamlines that process by narrowing their apartment search through embedded SightMap filters based on what they’re interested in and what’s important to them.
It’s a huge time saver and gives us much more insight into marketing apartments. We never have to wonder or second guess our pricing decisions and when to push concessions if we need to.
We see customer feedback in our surveys, so we know the interactive maps are not only advantageous, but differentiating.
The wayfinding really enhances the customer journey because they’re getting a more comprehensive tour of the community. Not only can they navigate the property on their own, but they can see where their potential apartment might be, how far it is from parking and other key details they’ll want to know before applying.
The biggest benefit is looking at trends based on location within a community. It’s extremely helpful for us internally when we look at the information and consume it in that visual format, but on the other end of it, we’re building out visuals for our clients as well and they really appreciate that level of insight and context.
RiverWoods Durham (in Durham, N.H.) was able to meet presale targets in five weeks. Hitting that threshold allowed our community to institute financing and begin the construction process rapidly, saving millions in financial outlay for the presale process. It also enables Greystone to inform investors that the target number of homes (70% in this case) have already presold.
The process is so streamlined when you’re giving prospects only the information that they need,” she said “while also giving them all of the information that they need.
We can start out with a collection of lifestyle videos and sub them out for actual clips of the community once we’re up and running. The mixtape has been a huge timesaver, and from the marketing perspective, that’s one of the biggest advancements in the Engrain iteration of our software.
It really is a novel and invaluable tool for us. Many Extra Space properties have thousands of units. We can now let customers know where their unit is located and give them a better idea of whether or not their truck can get down a particular aisle, or if they need to take an elevator or go up a flight of stairs and around three corners with a couch.
We knew we needed this type of technology to facilitate more of the self-service experiences our customers were looking for and make selecting a storage unit and navigating properties as seamless and intuitive as possible. It’s also a much easier way to visualize our properties and understand vacancy, premium unit locations and how our properties are laid out.
When a prospect finishes a tour, we refer them back to our website so that they can finish the process online if they didn’t leave a deposit. They can still see what’s available, what’s been taken, and go apply.
We want to make informed decisions when it comes to pricing and really understand the nuances of the apartments. It’s critical to identify why some are more expensive than others and if there are any patterns for apartments that are taking longer to lease so we can market all our homes effectively.
If prospects want to lease Apartment 632, they want to see exactly where it’s at. Having the map feature to zoom in and show them exactly where they’re at relative to 1,032 units has really helped.
Overall, Engrain has proved a valued and progressive partner to Bozzuto over the past several years. They have offered innovative solutions and strong customer service.”
