The challenge
Marchetti manages roughly 1,400 residential units and spent almost its entire marketing budget on filling vacancies: listings, paid search and portal fees. Renewals were handled by a letter mailed thirty days before lease end. The economics were upside down: replacing a tenant cost several weeks of vacancy plus turnover and re-leasing fees, while keeping one cost a conversation. Nobody had put those two numbers side by side, so acquisition kept getting the budget.
What we did
Priced a renewal against a replacement
We modeled the full cost of losing a tenant (vacant days, cleaning and repair, re-leasing fees, portal spend and the discount often needed to fill a unit quickly) against the cost of retaining one. The gap was large enough that the first meeting ended the debate about where budget should sit.
Moved the renewal conversation months earlier
By thirty days out, most residents who intend to leave have already viewed other properties. We rebuilt the sequence to begin at month nine of a twelve-month lease, opening with maintenance responsiveness and renewal options, not a price. The letter was the last step, not the first.
Made maintenance response the retention lever
Cohorting residents by how quickly their maintenance requests had been resolved showed the clearest split in renewal behavior of anything we measured. That turned an operations metric into a marketing one, and the reporting we built put it in front of the leadership team weekly.
Rebuilt listings around what renters filter on
Search and portal listings were written like property descriptions, not answers to the filters people actually use: pet policy, parking, laundry, commute and deposit. Restructuring around those cut time-to-lease noticeably without changing a single advertised price.
The result
Lease renewal rate rose 31% over three quarters, which took a large slice of demand out of the acquisition funnel entirely. Cost per filled unit fell 44% mostly because fewer units needed filling. Average vacancy days dropped 29%. Resident review ratings moved from 3.4 to 4.7 stars, which we attribute less to the marketing than to maintenance responsiveness becoming a number that leadership saw every week.
What result did Marchetti Residential get? +31% in lease renewal rate over 9 months, completed in 2026.
“We had two spreadsheets that had never met: what it costs to fill a unit, and what it costs to keep one. Putting them on the same page changed where our money goes. The uncomfortable part was learning our renewal problem was really a maintenance problem.”
Figures reflect real engagement outcomes at the time they were measured. This is a demonstration build — the client name and identifying details above are illustrative.