Cost per lease, by ILS
What you paid each ILS, divided by the number of its leads that signed a lease. This is the number to bring to a renewal negotiation, and it comes from your own records.
Use Case
Optimize your ILS spend
You pay several ILSs every month. Each one reports the leads it sent, and none can tell you which of those leads signed a lease. Match leads to leases, then cut spend where it underperforms and add it where the return is higher.
To optimize ILS spend you need to know which ILS leads convert into leases, and an ILS cannot tell you. Propexo lands your ILS leads, your CRM and your PMS in a warehouse you own, and Data Map matches the same renter across all of them. You then see cost per lease for each ILS, so you can reduce spend where it underperforms and increase it where the return is higher.
For marketing and leasing teams
What does ILS renewal season look like for a marketing team?
It is renewal season for your ILS contracts. Like most portfolios, you advertise on several internet listing services at once: Apartments.com, Zillow, Apartment List and a few more. Each ILS sends a report showing how many leads it delivered. None of them shows how many of those leads signed a lease, because the ILS never finds out. That part is your job.
It is a hard job, because renters do not use one listing site. The same person enquires through two ILSs on Monday and your own website on Wednesday, and shows up as three leads. Your CRM records one source on the guest card and drops the other two.
Then that person tours, applies and signs. The lease is in the PMS, and its source field holds whatever the guest card had when it synced, or nothing. To connect an ILS's leads to signed leases, someone on your team exports both lists and matches names by hand.
Most teams do not have time for that, so every contract gets renewed at the same level. You cannot tell which ILS you could cut without losing leases, or which one would bring in more leases if you spent more on it. The invoices are approved, and a year later you are looking at the same reports.
What do your ILSs cost you per lease?
Example inputs. Replace with yours.
- ILS spend per new lease
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- ILS spend per lead
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- Leads per new lease
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- Average spend per ILS
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Why can't the ILS, the CRM or the PMS answer this?
Each system holds one part of the picture. An ILS knows about the enquiry it sent and nothing that happened afterwards. The CRM has the lead and the tour, with one source field for a renter who came through three listing sites. The PMS has the lease. No shared ID connects them, and the same renter often appears with a different email address or a shortened name in each one.
| System | Enquiry | Tour | Apply | Lease | Renew |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Each ILS | Sees it | Does not see it | Does not see it | Does not see it | Does not see it |
| CRM | Sees it | Sees it | Does not see it | Does not see it | Does not see it |
| PMS | Does not see it | Does not see it | Sees it | Sees it | Sees it |
| One renter, matched by Data Map | Sees it | Sees it | Sees it | Sees it | Sees it |
That is why this data is fragmented by default, and why a better report from any single system does not fix it. To attribute a lease to the ILSs that sent the lead, something has to recognise the same person in every system. That matching is called entity resolution, and it is what Data Map does.
One renter
Two leads. One renter.
Each ILS reports the renter as a separate lead, and none of your systems can tell it is the same person. Once the records are in your warehouse, Data Map links them into one renter, and the lease shows every ILS that sent them.
- ILS Lead reported to you as a lead
- Second ILS Lead the same renter, reported again
- CRM and PMS Tour and signed lease one source recorded, or none
Your warehouse · your account Connect keeps the pipes running
Data Map · one renter One renter, one lease every ILS that sent the renter, from first enquiry to signed lease SourceILSsCRMPMS
- Cost per lease by ILS reads the warehouse DefinitionSource
- Owner and client reports reads the warehouse DefinitionSource
- Answer in Claude or Copilot through Propexo MCP DefinitionSource
The payoff
Where should you cut ILS spend, and where should you add to it?
The reason to do attribution is to change where the money goes. Once every lease shows the ILSs that sent the renter, you can compare what each ILS costs with the leases it produces, property by property.
Some ILSs take a large share of the budget and produce a small share of the leases. That is where you reduce spend or drop the contract. Others produce more leases than their share of the budget, and that is where extra spend returns the most. You can keep the total budget the same and move it toward the ILSs that convert.
- ILS A Reduce A larger share of spend than of leases.
- ILS B Hold Spend and leases in line.
- ILS C Increase A larger share of leases than of spend.
- ILS D Hold Spend and leases in line.
What you can see
What can you see once ILS leads are matched to leases?
Your own numbers, to set beside each ILS's lead report. Every figure shows which system it came from, so you can back it up when an ILS rep, an owner or a client questions it.
One renter, counted once
A renter who enquired through two ILSs and toured two of your properties is one person. Lead counts and conversion rates are calculated from that single record, so the marketing report and the leasing report match.
Which ILSs to keep at each property
An ILS can produce leases at one property and almost none at another. With each lease tied to the ILSs that sent the renter, you can see where a contract pays for itself and where it mostly sends renters you already had from another ILS.
Lifetime value, by ILS
Renewals and evictions are in the lease record too. You can see which ILSs send renters who stay and pay, and which send renters who leave after one term.
The next step
Which ILSs send renters who stay?
Matching leads to leases is the first step. The lease record keeps going after move-in, with rent payments, renewals, notices and evictions. Once each lease is tied to the ILS that sent the renter, you can follow that ILS's renters for as long as they live with you.
| Leases per ILS | Months since move-in | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ILS | Leases | 0 | 6 | 12 | 18 | 24 | 30 | 36 |
| ILS A | 420 | 100% | 96% | 81% | 78% | 62% | 59% | 46% |
| ILS B | 610 | 100% | 95% | 72% | 68% | 49% | 46% | 33% |
| ILS C | 380 | 100% | 92% | 58% | 53% | 31% | 28% | 17% |
| ILS D | 250 | 100% | 89% | 44% | 39% | 18% | 15% | 8% |
| ILS E | 190 | 100% | 97% | 85% | 83% | 70% | 67% | 55% |
That gives you renter lifetime value by ILS. An ILS whose renters renew twice is worth more than one whose renters leave after a year or end in eviction, even if its cost per lease is higher. You can set next year's ILS budget by the revenue each one's renters bring in, instead of by how many leads it sent.
Act
What does an agent do with it?
An agent can take over the source report your marketing lead builds by hand. It produces the report for each property and each client on the schedule you set, and flags any ILS whose cost per lease goes above the limit you set. Your team gets back the hours that report takes today.
The agent works from the same matched records as your dashboard, so the two always agree. You decide which actions it takes on its own and which need your approval first. See Agents for how an agent runs, or the Agent Lookbook for more examples.
How it gets done
How to optimize ILS spend with the Propexo Platform
Five steps. Data Map does the matching that used to mean a spreadsheet and guesswork.
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List every ILS you pay and every system a lead passes through
Write down each ILS and ad channel in the budget, the CRM or AI leasing tool that receives its leads, and the PMS where the lease is signed. In most portfolios this list is different from property to property.
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Land each system with Connect
Connect has pre-built connectors for leasing systems such as Knock, Funnel, Anyone Home and EliseAI, for the major PMS platforms, and for 127+ proptech systems in all. Each system's data lands unchanged in a warehouse you own, so a lead's source is read from the system that first recorded it.
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Load ILS spend and lead reports
Load what you pay each ILS from your invoices and exports, using file import, by property and by month. Load the lead reports each ILS sends you the same way. Spend and leads are then in the same warehouse.
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Match the same renter with Data Map
Data Map recognises the same person across every ILS, the CRM, the AI leasing tool and the PMS, and links the records, with a confidence score on each link. It also holds one definition of a lead and one of a conversion, approved by your business, so two reports cannot count the same renter differently.
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Compare each ILS, then move the budget
Your BI tool reads one dataset in which every lease shows the ILSs that sent the renter, what you paid them, and what happened to the lease afterwards. Reduce spend on the ILSs with a high cost per lease and increase it on the ones with a better return. Through Propexo MCP, the questions you approve can also be asked in Claude or Copilot, and each answer comes with its definition and its source.
To optimize ILS spend you need to know which ILS leads convert into leases, and an ILS cannot tell you. Propexo lands your ILS leads, your CRM and your PMS in a warehouse you own, and Data Map matches the same renter across all of them. You then see cost per lease for each ILS, so you can reduce spend where it underperforms and increase it where the return is higher.
Frequently asked questions
How do you optimize ILS spend in multifamily?
Match every ILS lead to the lease it became, then compare what each ILS costs with the leases it produces. Reduce spend on the ILSs with a high cost per lease, and increase it on the ones that produce leases for less. The matching is the hard part, because ILSs report leads and your PMS holds the leases.
How do you calculate cost per lease by ILS?
Divide what you paid an ILS by the number of its leads that signed a lease in the same period. The spend is easy to find. The hard part is the count: an ILS reports leads, not leases, so each lead has to be matched to a lease in your PMS before you can divide.
Do ILSs report which of their leads signed a lease?
Most do not. An ILS knows it sent you a lead. It does not see the tour, the application or the lease, which happen in your CRM and your PMS. Connecting ILS leads to signed leases is left to the operator.
Why do our ILSs report more leads than we have prospects?
Renters enquire through more than one ILS, and each one reports that renter as a lead. No ILS can see the others, so each report is accurate and the total double-counts. You have to count each renter once across every ILS to remove the overlap.
Can we measure renter lifetime value by ILS?
Yes, once leads are matched to leases. The lease history in your PMS includes renewals, move-outs and evictions, so each ILS's renters can be followed past move-in. You can compare ILSs on how long their renters stay and what they pay, as well as on cost per lease.
Why does the lead source in our PMS not match the CRM?
The source is recorded at first contact, in the CRM or AI leasing tool, and is passed to the PMS by a sync between the two systems. If that sync drops or overwrites the source, PMS reports are wrong from then on. A guest card that is re-entered at application can lose its source too. Propexo reads the source from the system that recorded it and matches it to the lease afterwards, so the result does not depend on the sync.
Can we check the attribution our AI leasing tool reports?
Yes. Its conversation data lands in your warehouse next to the leases from your PMS, and Data Map matches the two by renter. You can then see which signed leases the tool handled on its own and which a person on your team also worked. The connection to each system is read-only.
Does Propexo connect to ILSs and ad platforms?
Connect has connectors for the leasing systems that receive ILS leads, and for Google Analytics. All of them are in the catalog. Spend and lead reports from ILSs and ad accounts are loaded with file import, from the invoices and exports you already have, by property and by month.
Can an owner see this for properties a third-party manager runs?
It depends on the access your management agreement gives you. Connect needs credentials for each system, and at a managed property the manager holds them. Where you have that access, the data lands in a warehouse account in your name, and it stays there if you change managers.
What do we need in place to start?
Credentials for the systems you want landed, and a warehouse account or the managed Snowflake option inside Connect. No data team, and no custom build on your side.