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The Unit-Centered Multifamily
A Deep Dive Into Website Transformation
A Deep Dive Into Website Transformation
Renters slog through pop-ups while teams work in silos—no wonder everyone’s frustrated.
Copy-cat hotel logic and averages-only pricing keep apartments bland, pricey, and hard to lease.
Centroid makes every apartment the star, with click-easy filters and rich, unit-level media.
Marketing, sales, and pricing finally sync so teams move fast and vacancies vanish.
See exactly which features renters crave, predict demand, and stop guessing.
Slash marketing 30-67 %, fill units quicker, and capture premium rents—simultaneously.
Launch in days and watch engagement spike, costs dive, and leases roll in.
Side-by-side scorecard: Centroid outclasses old-school sites on every front.
Properties that put the apartment first will own the future of multifamily.
The fundamental problem in multifamily is painfully clear: customers cannot search for what they actually want. Let's examine this broken ecosystem in detail:
When we look at search behavior, approximately 80% of all apartment searches are simply "apartments near me" or variations of proximity-based generic terms. Another 8-10% are city-based generic terms like "apartments in Minneapolis." Only 5-6% include bedroom counts with city names, and a mere 2-3% incorporate price terms like "luxury" or "affordable."
This isn't just a minor inconvenience—it's a total collapse of consumer expectations. Consumers have been so demoralized by the apartment search experience that they've never been exposed to the concept of searching based on feature attributes that would get them to something they actually desire. There's no way for them to search for specific unit features, unique floor plan layouts, or even basic filtering beyond bedrooms and bathrooms.
Internet Listing Services (ILS) have effectively "overwhelmed the informational environment," forcing property managers onto their platforms while presenting consumers with a deliberately overwhelming experience—dropping them onto maps with thousands of rentals without any meaningful way to filter what matters.
The ILS model creates a critical flaw: it's a "pay to play" system where "the best don't rise to the top" and there's no organic process to help customers find apartments that match their needs. Instead, visibility is purely determined by who pays the most money.
Let's break down what each level of unit-centricity actually looks like and the consequences for both properties and customers:
At this minimal level, you might have a website with just a couple floor plans shown and no availability information whatsoever. There's no pricing, no features information, and possibly not even photos. Customers are expected to contact the property just to get the most basic information.
Consequences: Customers must exert enormous effort just to gather baseline information. They make multiple phone calls, send emails, and ultimately schedule tours for properties that may not even have what they want. This creates massive inefficiency for both consumers and leasing teams.
At the 50% level, websites offer some live availability but in a gallery-style floor plan listing that requires filtering by unit type. After clicking, you see a generic list of available apartments with prices, but virtually no apartment-specific information. If there are promotions, you don't know which units they apply to. Features, views, and unique elements aren't displayed at the unit level.
Example: A customer looking for a one-bedroom with a balcony must click through every floor plan type, then scroll through long lists of available units with no way to filter for balconies, forcing them to ultimately schedule multiple tours just to find units with the features they want.
At this level, websites add a site map view that allows customers to see where units are located within the building—near elevators, stairs, or amenity spaces. There might be a compass to indicate direction. But the same limitations remain: you hover and click to see the 2D floor plan, with limited virtual assets, and still no information about which units have special pricing or specific features.
Consequences: The location information is helpful but customers still can't filter based on what matters to them. The expectation remains that customers must physically tour to make a decision, resulting in the industry's notoriously low tour-to-application conversion rates (often just 10-35%).
This approach organizes information at the floor plan level rather than the building level. Customers click into floor plans and see walkthrough videos, photos, and a list of available units for that floor plan type. It's "generally reminiscent of that ILS look and experience" with collapsible sections and generic information. The experience remains cumbersome but at least creates a cleaner journey.
Marketing Impact: This approach allows for slightly better advertising because you can direct people to specific floor plans rather than just the general property, but the conversion remains inefficient because customers still cannot find specific features they want.
Centroid represents the first product with a comprehensive vision that puts the apartment unit at the center of the shopping experience. It creates a personalized filtering mechanism where, for example, in a lease-up with hundreds of available units, you can filter from 50 one-bedrooms down to just three by selecting specific features.
Let's break down the specific mechanics and consequences:
When a customer lands on a Centroid website looking for one-bedrooms, they immediately see a visual filter interface. With one click on "balcony," the available units might instantly filter from 32 down to just 2. For more specific needs, like "courtyard view + balcony," the filter would show only units with both features.
The power of this approach becomes clear when you consider the combination potential. In a real example, clicking "courtyard view" reduces 54 apartments to 26, and adding "courtyard access" further reduces to just 5. This creates a personalized, efficient search experience previously impossible in multifamily.
Customer Experience Transform: Rather than spending 30-90 minutes touring multiple properties and units to find what they want, customers can quickly identify the specific apartments that match their needs before ever visiting. This transforms the tour experience from a "discovery" process to a "confirmation" process, dramatically increasing tour-to-lease conversion rates.
The unit-centered approach creates powerful new marketing capabilities:
Every filter selection, feature combination, or unit view generates a dynamic URL that can be captured and used in marketing. For example, if a customer is looking for "one-bedrooms with extra storage closets," a leasing agent can go to the Centroid, activate those filters, and send the exact URL that shows only the matching units.
Marketing Application: This works across the marketing ecosystem: Google ads with sitelinks for specific features, email campaigns with links to targeted units, social media posts linking to specific floor plans with promotions, and CRM communications that directly solve customer needs.
For properties with dominant floor plans (like most new construction), the platform enables dynamic campaigns that always display currently available units of that type with current pricing and promotions. This creates "always-on" marketing that never needs updating because it draws live data from the property management system.
Operational Benefit: This means leasing teams can build link trees in emails, CRMs, and digital campaigns that are always updated automatically. The dynamic nature eliminates the constant need to update marketing materials and ensures consistency across customer touchpoints.
The unit-centered approach transforms how pricing and promotions work. Instead of generic "two months free" messaging, each unit displays its specific promotional stack. For example, one unit might show both "two months free" and "one month free parking," while another shows only "two months free." The crossed-out original price and new effective price are clearly displayed at the unit level.
Customer Experience Impact: This clarity addresses one of the biggest pain points in apartment shopping: understanding what you'll actually pay. Instead of confusing market rents, concessions, and distribution methods, customers see exactly what a specific apartment will cost them with all promotions applied.
Rather than generic property photos, the platform enables unit-specific assets: videos, virtual walkthroughs, and photography for every floor plan. These aren't just amenity photos but assets that show the actual living experience in each unit type. The platform integrates products like Giraffe (a UK-based virtual tour platform) to create better walkthroughs than traditional options like Matterport.
Marketing ROI Transformation: This approach makes content exponentially more valuable. While social media posts might get minimal engagement, the same content delivered through dynamic unit-centered pages gets "10x more traffic, views, and activation" because it's presented at the moment of decision-making.
The most profound impact may be on property operations:
The multifamily industry operates in "tactical hell" with an overwhelming volume of meetings, emails, reports, and strategic discussions that rarely translate effectively to the customer experience. "95% of what happens in multifamily is in communication" that occurs constantly between owners, property management companies, regional managers, and site teams.
The disconnect comes when all this strategic thinking needs to reach consumers:
When information moves from strategy to consumer-facing implementation, "it completely falls apart and gets shrunk down to just being one month or two months free." This creates a fundamentally broken process where sophisticated strategies and careful analysis result in a simple pop-up on a website.
This broken communication flow leads to a vicious cycle: ownership gets frustrated by poor performance, property management companies exert more pressure, and site teams burn out. The result is high turnover, replaced staff, and continued underperformance because the fundamental disconnect hasn't been addressed.
The traditional approach creates "critical shortcomings" including "generic, property-centered marketing that fails to showcase actual apartments," "limited search functionality," and "information barriers preventing prospects from finding specific features." The result is "wasted tours and longer vacancies" that directly impact NOI.
A unit-centered platform creates operational integration that bridges the gap between strategy and consumer experience. It connects every department around a common unit-centered framework, reducing meeting time and improving execution. It enables property management teams to implement sophisticated unit-specific strategies that were previously impossible.
Example in Action: When revenue managers develop unit-specific pricing strategies based on features like premium views or corner locations, these can be immediately visible to consumers rather than hidden. This allows for true value-based pricing instead of treating all units of the same floor plan as identical commodities.
The financial impact extends far beyond marketing efficiencies:
A fully unit-centered approach decreases cost per net application by 25-50%, reduces per unit marketing cost by 32-65%, shortens vacancy periods through better matching, increases conversion rates throughout the funnel, and enables premium pricing for high-demand features.
But the operational benefits create additional financial impact:
The operational benefits include connecting revenue management directly to consumer-facing implementation, smoothing communication between departments, reducing meeting load, enabling targeted marketing for specific inventory segments, and creating transparent accountability through direct strategy-to-implementation.
Perhaps most importantly, this approach fundamentally transforms how customers experience apartment hunting:
When customers interact with video and virtual assets on a unit-centered platform, they begin forming connections with the property and staff before ever visiting. They recognize leasing agents from videos, understand the property layout, and arrive for tours with specific units in mind—dramatically increasing conversion probabilities.
Rather than forcing customers to spend time touring 10+ properties and units, the unit-centered approach lets them make informed decisions from home. This eliminates the "slowest moving industry on the planet" problem where logistics and inefficiency create poor experiences for both customers and properties.
The implications extend beyond websites into the broader multifamily ecosystem:
Unit-centered discovery represents "the first piece" of a larger transformation to "really transform this industry." The goal is to create tools where "everybody in the operational chain can finally work together" and have a place to implement strategies effectively.
The traditional multifamily website approach is "fundamentally broken because it treats apartments as generic commodities rather than unique homes with specific attributes that matter to prospects." This creates problems for both prospects (who can't find what they want) and properties (whose marketing fails to highlight differentiators).
At its core, this transformation recognizes a fundamental truth: "most people are deeply concerned about what they're going to be paying each month. People don't make a lot of money... if they're going to rent at an apartment, they want to know what they're paying."
Customers want to know "this apartment at this building is in my budget. And here's all the different things I'm going to receive, and here's the floor plan and what it's going to be like, and how big it is, and how my current stuff is going to fit in there when I move."
The unit-centered approach represents the most significant opportunity to transform multifamily operations in decades:
By putting "the individual apartment—the actual product being marketed and sold—at the center of the entire operational framework," properties can create alignment between strategy and implementation, give prospects tools to find exactly what they want, and transform results across every functional area.
The goal is to finally give property management "a tool where everybody in the operational chain can finally work together and then have a place to put information. It's a place to brainstorm. It's a place to think... Hey, consumer one apartment. You want it, we got it. You can find it very easily."
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