Which channels filled lots, and for how long?

A community's value moves with occupancy, and filling a vacant site is expensive and slow: either a home is sold and set on it, or a home owner is persuaded to move theirs in. Both routes start with an enquiry and end months later.

Because site rent then continues for years, a single filled lot is worth far more than any per-lead number implies. Matching on the resident means every year of that rent credits the campaign that produced them, which changes the ranking of channels that produce fewer but stickier residents.

Selling a home into a community is a large one-off amount. Leasing the lot beneath it is a small recurring one. The same paid search campaign usually produces both, and blending them hides which is really being generated.

A revenue-type column separates the home sale from the site rent so each can be judged, and so a community that leads with home sales can compare itself against one that leads with lot leases without the averages colliding.

There are two ways to occupy a vacant site, and they cost very different amounts. The community can buy a home, transport it, set it and sell or rent it, which ties up capital for months and carries a real risk of sitting unsold. Or it can persuade somebody who already owns a home to move it in, or buy one from a departing resident, which costs almost nothing in capital and a good deal more in marketing effort. Both routes end with a household paying site rent, and they are almost never costed against each other.

Most operators run both and account for them separately, so nobody ever compares the two on the same axis. The infill programme is a capital line reported to the owner, and the advertising is an operating line reported to the regional manager, and the question of which produces an occupied lot more cheaply is never actually asked in one place. They are also reported at different frequencies to different people, which is how a community can run an expensive infill programme and a cheap advertising budget for years without anybody comparing the two on a cost per occupied lot.

Attaching site rent and home sale revenue to the source that produced each resident puts both routes on one page. A revenue-type column separates the home sale from the rent beneath it, and the comparison becomes concrete: what a filled lot costs through the advertising against what it costs through the chequebook. In a business where occupancy drives valuation, that is not a small thing to be able to state. It is the kind of number that changes a capital plan rather than a media plan, which is a larger conversation than most marketing reports are invited into.

Tenancies in a land-lease community are unusually long, because moving a home is expensive and disruptive in a way that moving out of an apartment is not. A resident who arrives this year may still be paying site rent in a decade, at a rate that has been reviewed annually throughout. The first year's rent is therefore the smallest number that resident will ever represent. By the time a tenancy ends, the campaign that produced it has usually been switched off for the better part of a decade.

Any measurement built on the initial lease values the acquisition at its lowest possible point, which pushes every channel toward looking marginal and makes the marketing budget an easy target. It also flattens the difference between sources, because the variation between channels is not in the opening rate — it is in how long the residents stay and how many increases they sit through without leaving. A source that produces residents who leave after two years and one that produces residents who stay for twelve can be indistinguishable on the day they sign, and are not remotely equivalent to the community's valuation.

Because later rent credits the source that produced the resident, the report accumulates that value instead of discarding it. Upload several years of rent roll and the ranking reflects tenure rather than arrival. Communities that do this usually find the ordering changes, and that the source producing the fewest enquiries has produced the residents who are still there. That is not a projection or a lifetime value estimate. It is the rent actually billed, added up, against the source that produced the household in the first place.

A fifty-five-plus community is selling a retirement decision to somebody with equity from a house sale, often relocating from another state, and the enquiry cycle runs for months. An all-age community is housing working families who need somewhere within reach of a job and a school, and the cycle can be a fortnight. The rents differ, the turnover differs, and the advertising that works in one is largely irrelevant in the other. A single campaign written for one of them will usually underperform in the other, and the blended report will report it as mediocre everywhere.

Portfolios containing both routinely report them together, which produces a blended cost per lease that matches no community in the portfolio. Worse, it hides the sources that only work in one setting: a channel doing excellent work across four family communities is dragged down by six retirement ones where it does nothing, and gets cut for everybody. The community that needed the budget never gets it, and the one that did not keeps spending, because both are being managed off the same average. Nobody involved is making a mistake; the number is.

A community column, and where possible a community-type column, splits the ranking properly. Each site's budget can then follow evidence drawn from its own residents and its own rent roll, which is the level at which a regional manager actually makes decisions. The portfolio view remains available and is mostly useful for spotting which sites are unlike the rest. A site that behaves unlike its neighbours is worth knowing about in itself, and an averaged report is precisely the thing that conceals it.