Lead Smarter, Lease Faster: Inside Entrata’s Marketing Upgrades

If you’ve felt apartment marketing changing under your feet, you’re not imagining it. At Summit, Entrata’s Billy Mungovan (VP, Digital Marketing Product & Services) and Hannah-Marie Evans (Sr. Product Education Manager) pulled back the curtain on where renter discovery is headed and how Entrata is positioning operators to win. The conversation wasn’t a feature tour so much as a blueprint for modern growth: automate the busywork, honor transparency, and personalize at scale to lower Cost Per Approved Lease (CPAL). That’s the north star guiding Entrata’s roadmap.

Mungovan framed the work in two simple themes: First, work differently: let the platform take on the repetitive, error-prone tasks so teams can focus on strategy and service. Second, lead smarter to lease faster: apply data and targeted experiences to move qualified prospects through the funnel at the lowest viable cost. Every upgrade showcased fits securely in one of those buckets.

Consider Multi-Property Websites. As Evans put it, renters don’t experience your portfolio as a patchwork of pages, they expect one coherent brand. The new experience delivers exactly that: one unified site where prospects filter across communities by what matters most (price, beds/baths, availability) and even favorite, compare, and come back to floor plans they love. In Mungovan’s words, the design intentionally feels “as familiar as Airbnb,” so the substantive information like pricing, amenities, specials, and calls-to-action, stays front and center. The payoff is strategic as well as practical: consistent branding can lift revenue by up to 23%, a reminder that brand coherence isn’t cosmetic; it’s commercial.

Transparency is the second pillar, and it’s not optional anymore. With fee-transparency mandates proliferating (26 state laws and four local proposals require full-price disclosure) Entrata’s Cost Estimation Calculator meets the moment by surfacing an always-accurate, legally aligned total before a renter ever applies. Because the calculator is native to the Entrata platform, it pulls the same authoritative data that powers applications and renewals. There are no brittle syncs, no lag, no surprises. In practice, that means the “Total Monthly Leasing Price” is continuously accurate as prospects add parking, pets, or storage, with inline explanations to maintain trust.

Where transparency builds trust, personalization builds momentum. Entrata’s Audience Builder is the backbone. It groups people by traits and behaviors such as“started an application,” “viewed one-bedroom floor plans,” “pet owner,” and then lets teams act: trigger a targeted message, tune a landing page, or test a different offer. Evans contrasted this with the old blast-email pattern most consumers now ignore; the goal is to make renters feel seen. Research backs the upside: personalized web experiences drive 10 -15% average revenue lift, with even higher gains for well-executed programs.

In ProspectPortal, those audiences can power personalized homepages. A page featuring pet-friendly imagery and copy only for likely pet owners is one example. This turns relevance into conversion and, ultimately, lower CPAL.

All of this lands in a market where search itself is changing. Renters are asking ChatGPT or Gemini to “find me a two-bedroom in northeast Dallas under $1,800” as LLM-based discovery rapidly becomes the new normal. As noted, LLM search on U.S. desktops has doubled in a year to 5.6% of activity, a meaningful shift in how renters find information. Entrata-site traffic from ChatGPT is trending sharply up, reinforcing the practical impact of this shift. Entrata’s response is twofold: on the platform side, ProspectPortal is engineered so property and pricing data can be reliably understood by LLMs; on the content side, the team is building auto-generated FAQs and other context that help AI systems return richer, property-accurate results.

None of these advances sit off to the side. As Mungovan emphasized, they’re built into the products operators already use: Multi-Property Websites in ProspectPortal, Cost Estimation Calculator in the leasing flow, Audience Builder across Lead Manager, Message Center, and ProspectPortal experiences. The objective isn’t to add another tool to manage; it’s to make the tools you use every day materially smarter.

The session closed with a future-facing challenge. If yesterday’s advantage was ranking on a search engine results page, tomorrow’s is being the trusted answer inside an AI conversation—and then handing that prospect a seamless path to book, tour, apply, and lease. Entrata’s bet is that operators who automate routine tasks, surface transparent pricing at every step, and deliver truly personal experiences will be the ones who keep their CPAL low while competitors chase yesterday’s clicks. That’s what it means to lead smarter and lease faster in 2025.