CRM Data

A prospect's first inbound contact with your property. This includes emails, phone calls, walk-in inquiries, online form submissions, chatbot conversations, and ILS-generated contact cards.

• One Lead per prospect regardless of how many times they reach out
• The lead source is captured at this moment for attribution
• Follow-up contacts (agent callbacks, reminder emails) are not counted as new leads — see Funnel Data Cleanup below

A prospect who actually visited the property — in-person tours, walk-in visits, self-guided tours, or virtual tours all qualify. Scheduling an appointment alone does not count — the prospect must have shown up.

• Counted once per prospect even if they tour multiple times
• Both in-person and virtual tours count toward this stage
• AI-guided and self-guided tours are included
• A scheduled appointment with no corresponding visit is not a Tour

A prospect who submitted a formal rental application. This is the commitment signal — the prospect is ready to move forward.

• Counted at first submission per prospect
• Resubmissions and co-applicant additions are not double-counted

A prospect who signed a lease. This is the successful end of the funnel — the prospect became a resident.

• Only new leases from the CRM funnel are counted here
• Renewals and transfers are tracked separately in the Renewals category

A prospect who dropped out at any stage — canceled tours, withdrawn applications, or denied applications.

• Tracked to identify where prospects fall off in the process
• Helps distinguish between demand problems (low leads) and conversion problems (high cancels)

Every funnel metric uses first-touch attribution: each prospect is counted exactly once per stage, based on their earliest qualifying event. This prevents double-counting from repeat interactions and gives you a clean view of how many unique individuals are moving through each stage.

• A prospect who emails three times and calls twice = 1 Lead
• A prospect who tours on Monday and again on Friday = 1 Tour
• The lead source is locked at first contact and does not change if the prospect later arrives through a different channel

Tours / Leads — Measures how effectively your team converts initial interest into property visits. Influenced by response time, follow-up quality, and whether the property matches what the prospect is looking for.

Applications / Tours — Measures the property's ability to close interest into commitment. A low rate may point to pricing, unit condition, or tour experience issues.

Leases / Leads — The single most important funnel efficiency metric. Captures the full leasing journey in one number. Track this over time to see whether your leasing operation is improving.

Funnel metrics use a 90-day rolling window by default. This means you're always looking at the most recent 90 days of leasing activity, which smooths out weekly noise while staying responsive to seasonal trends.

• Prospects who first contacted the property within the last 90 days are included
• A prospect who entered the funnel 80 days ago but signed a lease yesterday is counted in the current window
• Custom date ranges are available for period-specific analysis

Agent attribution is tracked per event, not per prospect. The agent who handled the initial call may differ from the agent who conducted the tour or processed the application, so each funnel stage is attributed independently to the agent who performed it.

• A single prospect may involve multiple agents across stages — credit goes to whoever handled each step
• Activity volume: leads handled, tours conducted, and applications processed per agent
• Conversion rates by agent: which team members convert at the highest rate at each stage
• AI vs. human split: automated interactions (chatbots, self-guided tours) are tracked separately from human-led interactions
• Response time tracking: how quickly agents follow up on new leads

Listing platforms where renters search for apartments. Includes Apartments.com, Zillow, Rent.com, ApartmentList, Zumper, and similar services. Typically the highest-volume lead source for most properties.

Pay-per-click advertising on search engines. Includes Google Ads, Bing Ads, and other paid search campaigns. Leads are attributed when the prospect clicks a paid ad and submits an inquiry.

Prospects who found the property through unpaid search engine results. Includes Google organic, Bing organic, and other search engines.

Leads originating from social platforms — Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and others. Includes both organic posts and paid social campaigns.

Direct traffic to your property or management company website. Prospects who typed the URL directly, used a bookmark, or arrived through an untagged link.

Leads referred by current residents, other properties in the portfolio, or partner organizations. Often the highest-converting source category.

Professional apartment locator services and relocation companies that connect renters with properties, typically earning a referral fee on signed leases.

Walk-in traffic driven by on-site signage, banners, and physical marketing at or near the property. Includes drive-by visibility and yard signs.

Outbound marketing efforts including email campaigns, direct mail, flyers, and targeted outreach. The property initiated contact rather than the prospect.

Leads generated through automated channels — AI chatbots, self-guided tour platforms, and virtual tour technologies where no human agent was involved in the initial interaction.

Transfers from other properties in the portfolio, employee referrals, and corporate housing placements. Internal to the management company.

CRM systems capture lead sources inconsistently — one property might tag a lead as "Zillow," another as "Zillow.com," and a third as "ILS - Zillow Group." BubbleGum BI applies a normalization layer that maps all variations to the correct category and brand.

• Raw source values are matched against a curated lookup of known brand names and common misspellings
• Each brand maps to one of the 11 categories above — for example, "Zillow," "Zillow Rental Manager," and "Trulia" all map to the ILS category under the Zillow brand
• Sources that can't be automatically matched are flagged for review and default to the most reasonable category
• Walk-in prospects with no digital trail are attributed to the Signage category by default

Lead volume alone is misleading. A source that sends 100 leads but converts 2% is less valuable than a source that sends 20 leads and converts 25%. BubbleGum BI pairs source attribution with funnel conversion rates so you can evaluate channels by their actual impact on signed leases.

• Compare lead-to-lease conversion rates across all 11 source categories
• Identify high-volume, low-conversion channels that may be inflating your lead counts without contributing to occupancy
• Spot undervalued channels — Referrals and Direct Marketing often have small volume but industry-leading conversion rates
• Make informed decisions about marketing spend by understanding cost per lead alongside conversion per lead

When leasing teams merge duplicate prospect records in the CRM (e.g., the same person created two guest cards), the merged record is excluded from funnel counts. Only the surviving primary record is counted.

• Prevents a single prospect from being counted as two leads, two tours, etc.
• The primary record inherits the earliest first-contact date from the merged records
• Source attribution follows the earliest contact — if the first record came from Zillow and the duplicate from Apartments.com, the lead is attributed to Zillow

Once a prospect signs a lease, any subsequent CRM events are considered operational activity (maintenance requests, move-in coordination, etc.) rather than leasing funnel activity. These events are filtered out of funnel metrics.

• A resident who emails about parking after signing a lease does not generate a new "Lead"
• Post-lease contacts are available in operational reporting but excluded from funnel conversion calculations
• This prevents inflated lead counts from existing residents interacting with the leasing office

When a leasing agent follows up with a prospect — returning a missed call, sending a reminder email, or scheduling a tour — that outbound contact is not counted as a new lead. Only inbound, prospect-initiated contacts qualify as leads.

• Outbound agent activity (calls, emails, texts) is excluded from lead counts
• This prevents properties with aggressive follow-up processes from appearing to have more leads than they actually received
• Agent follow-up volume is tracked separately in agent performance metrics

A prospect only enters the funnel if they have a clear, attributable first contact. Records without a qualifying lead event are excluded from funnel metrics — they may appear in the CRM but are not counted as funnel leads.

• Prevents "phantom leads" — prospects created by system imports, data migrations, or manual entry without an actual inquiry
• A prospect who shows up for a tour but has no prior lead record is flagged as a walk-in and attributed to the Signage source category
• This ensures lead counts accurately reflect genuine inbound demand — see Lead Source Attribution above for how sources are assigned

A single prospect often generates multiple contact events — an email on Monday, a phone call on Wednesday, and a walk-in on Friday. First-touch deduplication counts this as one Lead, attributed to the earliest contact.

• The same deduplication applies at every funnel stage — multiple tour visits = one Tour, multiple application submissions = one Application
• The earliest qualifying event sets the timestamp and source attribution
• This is the foundation of the first-touch counting model described above

When an existing resident renews their lease, their renewal activity can look identical to a new prospect moving through the funnel — they call the leasing office (Lead), visit the property (Tour), and sign a lease (Lease). Without filtering, these renewals inflate both lead counts and conversion rates.

• Prospects with any renewal-related event in the CRM are excluded from the leasing funnel entirely — their activity is tracked in Renewals reporting instead
• This is necessary because the CRM only stores recent event history. A resident who has lived at the property for years will not have their original lead event from years ago — only their recent interactions. Without this filter, a renewal phone call would appear as a "new lead" followed by a "new lease," inflating conversion rates
• The post-conversion filter (Step 2) alone cannot catch renewals because the original lease signing predates the available event history — there is no lease date to filter against

After all five cleanup steps, the funnel metrics in BubbleGum BI represent genuine, unique prospect journeys — not inflated counts from data noise. This means:

• Lead counts reflect real inbound demand, not agent activity or system artifacts
• Conversion rates are calculated on a consistent, deduplicated base
• Source attribution is reliable — each lead is mapped to one channel, and that attribution carries through the entire funnel
• Property-to-property and period-to-period comparisons are apples-to-apples