They say
“We already have lead source reporting.”
We say
On the source recorded against the guest card. This adds the campaign and keyword behind it and ranks everything on billed rent.
For RealPage
Which sources produced leases, ranked on rent?
Export signed leases and billed rent, and rank every demand source on the money rather than on the leads it delivered.
No API key Nothing to install in RealPage No card required
The gap
Every source in your mix reports its own performance in its own unit. None of them reports rent, which is the only unit the asset is judged in.
RealPage sees
What was sold, to whom, and for how much.
no shared row
Your ad account sees
The click, the keyword, the call, and what each one cost.
The file
What the export needs in it.
Three things carry the match: who, how much, and when. Anything else is optional and only changes how the report can be sliced.
- Needed
Resident or applicant contact detail
Phone or email on the guest card or the lease. Export both where available — applicants use a personal address and residents are billed at the unit.
- Needed
Billed rent
What was actually charged, so concessions are already accounted for.
- Needed
Lease start or billing date
Consistent across uploads. Lease start measures acquisition; billing dates measure the tenancy.
- Optional
Property and floor plan
Assets and unit types differ enough that a portfolio average is not actionable.
Step by step
Getting the file out of RealPage.
Written for somebody with RealPage open in the next tab. Report names vary by edition, so each step says what to look for.
-
Export signed leases or the rent roll
One row per lease or billing period, carrying the resident's contact detail, the amount and a date.
-
Keep the guest card contact details
The applicant's phone or email is what joins the lease to a click or a call. Unit and lease numbers cannot be matched.
-
Cover a full lease cycle
Twelve months minimum so renewals and the seasonal pattern are both inside the file.
-
Export CSV and upload
Mapping is suggested and confirmed by you; manual mapping is always available.
-
Upload every source
Paid search, paid social, syndication feeds, locators and broker referrals. All of them are ranked on rent.
What comes back
The page RealPage cannot show you.
Revenue by channel, the count of sales behind each figure, and an honest bucket for the ones nobody could trace. Sample figures, from the worked example on the Apartment Communities page — not from a RealPage account.
Traced to a channel$756,00060% of $1,260,000
Sales matched360 of 601high confidence only
Average sale$2,100per paid sale
| Channel | Share | Sales | Revenue |
|---|---|---|---|
| ILS portals | 204 | $428,400 | |
| Google Ads | 107 | $226,800 | |
| Meta Ads | 49 | $100,800 | |
| Direct / Unknown | 241 | $504,000 |
Unmatched sales stay in Direct / Unknown. They are never spread across the paid channels to make the total look better.
The argument
What changes when the lease and the ad share a row.
Every source reports in its own currency
A multifamily marketing mix routinely carries syndication feeds, paid search, paid social, a locator service and sometimes a broker. Each reports its own performance in its own unit: impressions, enquiries, tours, leads delivered, placements.
None of those units is rent, and rent is the only unit the asset manager cares about. So the mix is optimised on five incomparable metrics and reconciled to none, and the source that shouts loudest about lead volume tends to keep its budget.
Reconciling signed leases against the source lists converts everything into one currency. A locator's placements, a feed's enquiries and a campaign's clicks are all ranked on the rent that followed, with an honest count of the leases that traced to nothing.
Lead-to-lease is the number the feeds cannot compute
A feed knows how many enquiries it sent. It does not know how many signed, because the lease is in RealPage and never travels back. Lead-to-lease ratios by source are therefore either estimated or tracked by hand in a leasing office spreadsheet.
Uploading both the enquiry export and the lease export produces the ratio directly, per source, per property. For most operators this is the single most useful output, because the sources with the best lead-to-lease are rarely the ones with the best cost per lead.
Concessions and renewals both change the answer
Advertised rent is not billed rent once a free month is applied, and concession policy varies by property, by season and by how urgently a unit needs filling. Ranking on lease value overstates every source and does it unevenly.
Renewals cut the other way: a resident who renews twice is worth three leases to the asset and one lease to the marketing report. Matching on the resident attaches the whole tenancy to the source that produced them, which separates sources that bring residents who stay from those that do not.
Property level, not portfolio level
A portfolio spanning markets and vintages has no useful average. The value of this report is at the property, where the leasing team and the budget actually sit.
A property column splits it. On Growth and above the same mechanism supports comparing regions or asset classes, which is where portfolio-level decisions genuinely belong.
What this replaces is a spreadsheet in the leasing office
Most well-run properties already do a version of this by hand. Somebody in the leasing office keeps a sheet of where enquiries came from and which ones signed, and the regional manager asks for it monthly.
That sheet is genuinely useful and it has three problems: it depends on somebody remembering, it records the source as the leasing agent understood it rather than as the campaign, and it stops at the lease rather than following the rent.
Reconciling the exports does the same job without the dependency, at the campaign level, on billed rent. The leasing team stops maintaining it, which is usually the argument that gets this adopted rather than the accuracy one.
Fair questions
“RealPage already does that.” Not quite.
They say
“Feeds are most of our volume.”
We say
Then the report will show that on revenue, which is the first time they can be compared with paid search on a common unit.
They say
“Our leasing team will not change process.”
We say
Nothing changes. This reads exports and requires nothing new from the office.
Signed leases or the rent roll: a resident phone or email, the amount, and a date.
Yes, by uploading the enquiry export alongside the lease export.
Billed rent, because it accounts for concessions.
Yes, credited to the source that produced the resident originally.
Yes, with a property column, on Growth and above.
Yes — their placement lists are source files and rank on rent.
A full lease cycle, twelve months at minimum.
No. This works from a CSV export.
Reported as Direct / Unknown and never redistributed.
Encrypted in transit and at rest, isolated per workspace, deletable in one click, DPA available.
That is the usual reason properties adopt it. The report covers the same ground at campaign level and on billed rent.
Yes, if tours are exported as a stage alongside signed leases.
Yes. Both become source files and are ranked on billed rent, which is the only unit they share.
Yes, with a floor plan column. Studios and three-bedrooms rarely come from the same channels.
Yes, with a lease-type column, so a three-month corporate let is not averaged with an annual resident lease.
They are one person. The lease credits the channel that produced the original enquiry, wherever they eventually signed, which is the honest answer for a portfolio.
Yes, by uploading renewal offers as a source file. Renewal marketing is cheap and rarely measured, and the comparison against acquisition cost is usually stark.
By trade
Trades that run RealPage.
What the report looks like once the export is in, written for each one.
- Apartment CommunitiesWhich channels produced signed leases?
- Student HousingWhich channels signed beds during the pre-leasing window?
- Build-to-Rent CommunitiesWhich channels leased up the community, and how fast?
- Property ManagementWhich channels produced signed management contracts?
- Affordable Housing CommunitiesWhich channels produced households that actually qualified?
Other systems
Also worth reading.
Running more than one system, or comparing? The method is the same and the columns are not.
Closed-sales file Yardi Multifamily and senior housing operators Closed-sales file What to export Closed-sales file AppFolio Property managers and small multifamily Closed-sales file What to export Lead and call file CallRail Businesses whose sales close on the phone Lead and call file What to export
All 20 systems 
RealPage and the other product names and logos on this page belong to their owners and are shown to identify the software a file comes from. CloseRev is not affiliated with or endorsed by them, and connects to none of them: it reads a file you export.
Start today
Two exports, and you will know.
Nothing to install in RealPage, no API key, and no need to have been tracking anything until now. Last year works as well as this month.