For CA Student Living, a Chicago-based provider of student housing for nearly 20 years, data is at the heart of every decision they make. As a result, it is imperative that they have access to all available data in one spot to speed up the decision making process. To accomplish this, they built a home grown platform called Unite that consolidates a number of data sources, including from Entrata, to provide them with transparency across the organization and actionable data that can be distributed at the property, regional, and organizational level.

Before rolling out Unite, it was difficult for CA Student Living to dig down into specific properties or a holistic view of their entire portfolio because their data was stored in hard to navigate spreadsheets. This meant manually running reports which was an inefficient use of time and often resulted in using stale data to make decisions.

Since rolling out Renewal Tracker on the Unite platform, CA Student living can view renewal data in real time. This helps their site teams focus time on who residents need to be contacted about renewals, which results in no wasted cycles reaching out to people who have already renewed.

After the initial rollout they looked at other areas where they could pull data to be more efficient. One of those was to pull in comments from Renewal Tracker into the Entrata activity log. From a reporting standpoint, they were able to build a robust snapshot of the performance of the portfolio as a whole and at the individual property level, which helped identify top reasons why people aren’t renewing to give them action items on what needs to be fixed and what they can do to fix it. Since implementation, CA Student Living has seen a 34% increase in portfolio renewal percentage, and it looks like that number will only improve in the future.

Using custom integrations to solve problems quicker

One of the biggest benefits CA Student Living has realized since leveling up its reporting is in forecasting for the coming year. The organization starts running forecast reports in October and does monthly re-forecasting to show what has been leased to date and where they are projecting on a future occupancy, revenue etc. It does all of this automatically, which is a big win because previously this was all done manually and took a lot of time and effort.

The latest update to Unite enables site teams to pull reports on maintenance requests in real time to help them streamline the process and ensure residents' issues are fixed quickly and without incident.

Beyond that, CA Student Living is taking advantage of AI chatbots to respond to prospect inquiries and enables them to complete the leasing process without the need to interact with a human. It is also utilizing Contact Points from Entrata to help prioritize which messages need to speak with someone on the staff or if the issue can be handled by AI.

Finally, with Resident Portal, prospects move seamlessly between your leasing site to your properties’ Resident Portals, while maintaining brand consistency and driving trust. When residents and prospects trust you, they’ll be more likely to use the portal for maintenance requests, payments, which ultimately saves staff time and helps maximize rent revenue.