Let’s talk about dealing with communications on your available rental listings in Harmony.

Harmony provides high performing efficient tools to optimize communications on rental listings - maximizing your opportunities to fill units with qualified tenants while minimizing the time they sit vacant.

Inquiries are fed into your communications system from a number of sources:

• Inquiry forms on your HERO listings, in your website and throughout the HERO ILS.
• Inquiries from partner websites, when the partner has the HERO APIs enabled.
• Manual input when you receive an inquiry by phone, in person, or in some other way.
• Direct text inquiries from sign riders and other text marketing.

We’ll take a look at these inquiry sources, then move on to the process of efficiently responding to prospective tenants.

When you create a unit in Harmony, and make its status active, the unit listing is distributed to a ton of different websites. While this is covered in detail elsewhere, it’s worth understanding a little bit in order to understand listing communications.

In short, your listing may be included, displayed, or linked on a website where you directly receive inquiries into your Harmony account. These include your own website, the HERO ILS network of sites, and manual exports like X, Facebook, and Blogs.

Your listing may also be exported to other websites, either sites where we have a partner relationship, sites that participate in our “grab feed” option, sites that scrape your data from available sources including your website, or sites that collect and redistribute listing data.

These sites frequently have their own mechanism for collecting inquiries. This means you could have to manage inquiries from multiple sources in different ways.

However, when a site uses HERO’s free listing communication APIs, they can feed these inquiries directly into Harmony - allowing you to manage all your communications in a central location.

We strongly encourage all of our partners to use this option, but many don’t until they are pressured by the individual provider of listing data, which is you. If your listings are going somewhere, and they’re not feeding inquiries into your Harmony account, please ask them to.

There’s also an inquiry method that bypasses websites altogether - the text marketing system. When you tap into this, you’ll receive inquiries directly, always. We’ll come back to this.

Let’s go through the process of getting an inquiry from your website, to get a better picture of the system in action.

When a prospective tenant finds an available rental on your site, they can easily submit an inquiry.

You are notified of this by email and/or text, as configured in the managing/leasing agent’s contacts.

You also receive an alert in Harmony that you have an unprocessed listing inquiry. Select this alert to view the inquiry in your list.

At this stage, you’d normally determine if the inquiry is spam, or if it’s legitimate. To discard it without a reply, select the X icon.

Since this one is real, select it to open it, where you can quickly respond to the inquiry. We’ll do that in a moment.

If your package includes the Harmony management system, you can add this prospect to your tenant prospect database.

Adding the prospect to your database is optional, you’d typically do this when you have a serious prospect and you anticipate ongoing communication.

Once they’re in your tenant prospect database, you can perform functions like scheduling a showing with appointment confirmation, tracking all interactions, or adding them to a drip email campaign to automatically send follow up messages.

In this case, we’ll skip adding them to our prospect database, and just reply. When you get your second inquiry in a moment, we'll cover adding them to your database.

For now, select the Reply icon to open your reply options.

If you have internal office notes to add to this inquiry, that you do not want the prospect to see, add them to, Office Notes.

The, Reply Custom Message, is pre-written, based on your settings.

One common setting here is the option to include the application link in the reply, which you can set from Settings, Applications, Preferences, Include Application Link in Inquiry Replies.

Edit and add notes in the custom message, based on the prospect notes and any specifics on this listing. This will be merged into your message template for listing inquiries, and sent to the prospect.

Details on configuring templates are available in other resources, which are worth studying before you go too much further. We’ll take a quick detour to take a glance at this one.

From Settings, Messages & Letters, select system message & letter templates.

Select the template for, Places: Inquiry.

Your default template is pretty simple. Both the email and text version have three merge fields: the listing address, the custom message you compose in response to the inquiry, and the block providing the summary of the listing inquired on, with a built in link back to the full listing.

You can modify this template as much as you want, with any custom images, formatting, styles, or verbiage that you wish to include on each inquiry reply. Again, a quick tour through other resources covering templates will give you all the guidance you need.

Back at the inquiry, select the method of delivery for your response.

Note that you can, Mark, this message as processed without a reply. While you’ll normally mark inquiries from your list of all inquiries, you can also do it from here, in cases where you have a duplicate inquiry, or didn’t discover the spammy nature of the inquiry until after you opened it.

If you’ve already replied, but want to unmark the message as processed, you can do this as well.

In this case, you want to Send the reply, so select Send.

Confirmation displays, and the reply icon changes to a, processed, icon. Hovering over this icon shows you who replied, and when.

Back at your inquiry list, you’ll see this one has dropped off. However, you can still find it by toggling the, Show Processed Inquiries, icon, and searching for it. You can also see all inquiries from the listing inquired on.

If you added this prospect to your database, you can also see the inquiry in their message list. We’ll come back to that in the next inquiry.

The prospective tenant receives your email, and can take action as you instructed, or reply to the email.

As long as your CRM email is connected, when the prospect replies, you get another alert, and their reply is prepended to the original inquiry.

Preview their inquiry, and select it to reply further.

As communications go back and forth, the original inquiry is updated. You can always view a running log of all communications.

You’ve just handled your first listing inquiry, but there’s much more to cover.

In the next scenario, you’ve received an inquiry from a prospect that looks good, and you’re going to end up doing a virtual showing.

Select the inquiry, and go through the same process as before, replying to the prospect. In this case, you are going to offer the prospect the opportunity for a virtual showing, where you will get on Zoom and highlight the features of the unit while answering their questions.

The prospect received your message, and replied with a preferred time for a virtual showing.

You received an alert. Select it, and open the inquiry.

This came in as an inquiry, but the context of the message indicates it’s a request to see the unit. Our first step is to convert it to a showing request, based on the prospect’s desire.

Select the communication type, and convert it from an inquiry to a showing request.

You see that the showing/moving icon has changed to showing, with the time of the showing request.

Now, add the tenant to your prospect database so you can track all future interactions in their prospect profile.

You see there’s now an icon that indicates this prospect is in your database.

Select, Schedule Showing, to schedule a showing from the request.

All of the information is filled in from the request, but you have a few options that you can set.

The time here is set for 1 hour, because you set your default showing duration as 60 minutes per showing. If this will take longer or shorter, adjust it. If you want to change your default, do so from Settings, Places, Place Type, Preferences, Showing Duration.

If you want to set yourself a reminder alarm, set and select the desired options.

If you want to send the prospect an appointment confirmation in advance of your meeting, select Appointment Confirmation.

In this case, send the prospect an appointment confirmation an hour in advance, since this is a virtual meeting.

Scroll through the remaining options, adjusting as desired.

Save the showing activity.

You now have a scheduled virtual showing, and it’s on the calendar of the people on your team who you selected were involved. It’s also on your company’s activity list, and on this tenant prospect’s activities.

There’s a pending appointment confirmation, which will change to confirmed, and you’ll get an alert, when the prospect confirms the appointment.

You’ll also get your reminder by email 30 minutes in advance of the appointment, since you selected a reminder alarm.

In addition to the showings option, you see the option to add this person to a prospect campaign. Here we have no campaigns defined.

Campaigns are a powerful way to keep in touch with prospects, via email, text, phone calls, and more. Creating and managing prospect campaigns is covered in detail in other resources, we’ll skip it here.

Please review other help when you’re ready to implement campaigns to grow your business. It applies not only to tenant and guest prospects, but also owner, vendor, and source prospects who you want to attract to your business.

If you’re familiar with message templates, you noticed that when you scheduled the showing, you did not send the prospect a template email to provide them the appointment details. Typically, you would. However, for this example, we skipped it, giving you a chance to study up on help resources covering templates - so you know exactly what you’re sending.

In other words, we scheduled this, but didn’t tell the prospect. Let’s tell them now with a reply to their request.

Select Reply, then enter a quick note and send it.

If you’d sent the template message from the showing instead, you could simply mark this as processed, to show yourself and your team that this prospect is not waiting for a response.

We’re finished with this prospect for now, so let’s look at a different prospect from another source.

You may get prospects that do not automatically feed into your communication system. These might be from direct emails, partner sites that don’t use the communications API, phone calls, walk-ins, or open houses.

When you have these, you can enter them manually into your system.

In Harmony, you can do this by going to your communications list and selecting the add option, then choosing the unit, or by selecting the unit, going to communication, and selecting the add option.

For this demonstration, let’s choose the latter option.

Select the unit, then select the Communication icon, then the add icon in unit inquiries.

Select the communication type, then proceed to enter the prospect’s information.

When entering a prospect manually, you can enter the comments and office notes directly, before sending them any communications.

You can also add them to your prospect database at this point. If you do not wish to add them to the database, but you do want them in your communication list, simply uncheck this option.

Select the Add button to add them, or select Add, then Enter another if you are entering a series of prospects in bulk.

This prospect is now in your list, exactly as they would be if they’d inquired directly from one of your online listings.

Next let’s take a quick look at a time saving feature called the check phrase.

Many property managers are overwhelmed by what we call, “lazy inquiries”. This happens when someone doesn’t bother to read the listing, and just submits an inquiry.

Sometimes these are spammy, sometimes they are just people copying and pasting an inquiry into dozens or hundreds of rentals to see what comes back.

While most property managers do want to reply to lazy inquiries that appear legitimate, they are the lowest priority. Higher priority is given to people who paid attention to what you’re offering, and feel like it’s a good fit.

To help you prioritize, Harmony offers inquiry check phrase matching. When enabled, you provide instructions in your listing to include a specific phrase in their inquiry.

If the prospect includes this phrase, you’ve got a match, and you know they read the entire listing and paid attention, making them a higher priority.

For example, your listing may include a statement like, “When inquiring, you must state that you understand this unit is available in October.”

In the listing, enter, “October” as your check phrase.

A prospect who follows the instructions is a match.

Let’s do this now.

Editing unit and property listings is covered in detail in other resources, so we’ll go through it quickly here. If you’re not yet familiar with how to edit places, take a moment to explore help.

Edit the unit listing. In this case, we’ll add instructions to the prospect in our listing remarks, although we could add it anywhere that we want the prospect to read.

Scroll down to the Inquiry Check Phrase, and add, October.

Save the unit listing.

A prospect just found your listing and read the instructions. In their inquiry, they indicated this.

Since your unit listing now has a check phrase, each inquiry on the unit shows whether the inquiry matched the phrase or not.

The previous inquiry we received did not mention October in their inquiry, so they show no match.

This inquiry did mention October, so they show a match.

When using check phrase matching, you can easily prioritize the inquiries with matches as your best, most legitimate, most attentive, most serious prospects.

Let’s move on to discuss another super tool in your listing communications toolbox - text marketing.

With text marketing, a prospect texts a code to a number, and the system sends them listing details, with an application link, and registers their phone number in case you want to proactively reach out.

Text marketing is available for marketing your company and for marketing your listings. Here we’ll just cover the listings.

Text marketing is not enabled in your account by default, because it incurs an additional fee per-inquiry. For most users, the small fee is well worth the time savings and effectiveness.

To enable text marketing, go to Settings, My Account, Preferences, Enable text marketing and authorize text marketing charges. Select the help tip to see the fees for your account type.

Above that you see a company short ID. This ID is used throughout the system to identify you, but is typically only published if you use text marketing. Select the help tip for information.

If you like the short code that’s been assigned, do nothing. If you want to order an alternate short code, you can do so. For example, our fictitious demo company is called Jim’s Management, so we might want the short code, J.I.M.S.

Now that you’ve enabled text marketing, you have a few new options. We’ll cover the Rental and Showing keyword prefaces.

The Rental keyword is used when a prospect wants information about a rental. The preface is your custom text that appears before the rental listing information.

The Showing keyword is used when a prospect wants to schedule a showing. The preface is your custom text in response.

We’ll see this in action in a moment.

Let’s take a look at a unit listing. Select the unit, then select the, Media, icon from the menu.

Scroll down to the Unit Marketing Media section.

At this point, you’ll make a decision about how you’re going to use text marketing. If you plan to print signs, sign riders, or other fixed media, you’ll want recyclable codes.

These give you a code that you can print on a sign, then assign it to a unit when you stick that sign in the yard. In other words, you’re not creating one sign, or sign rider, for each listing, you’re just creating one for each code, and assigning the code to a unit as needed.

If you’re not delivering the text instructions on fixed media, you don’t need recyclable codes, but you can still use them if desired.

For this unit, let’s assign a recyclable code. Select the Edit icon from the menu, then choose the code to assign to this unit while it’s on the market. You’ll notice the code includes your custom short ID.

The display has now changed to provide text codes, the QR code, and the link, based on your recyclable code.

The permanent code specific to the unit will still work, so if you’ve published it somewhere, there’s no need to worry.

Select Save Media to save the assignment of this recyclable code.

Now, when a prospect follows the instructions you printed, texting the, rental, keyword, they’ll receive your rental preface and the listing.

When they text the, showing, keyword, they’ll receive the showing preface and the listing.

You can choose which keywords you want to publish and print, based on your business needs.

In Harmony, you now have two new communications in your prospect communication list, which you were alerted to.

The first is the rental inquiry, the second is the showing request, as indicated by the icons and the details.

For the rental inquiry, you’ve already given them all the information they need to view the rental online, and apply. If you want to send a personal touch, feel free, otherwise you can mark this one as processed without an additional reply.

For the showing request, you told the prospect you’d be in touch to schedule, so a response is expected. Respond to this the same way you handled the previous showing request.

You may find that it’s beneficial to ask the prospect to reply with essential information for additional follow up or scheduling.

Or, you may want to outline your available showing times, and ask them to reply to select one.

It’s really up to you how hands-on and interactive you want to be with these marketing messages.

The end goal of dealing with inquiries is typically to get an application from a prospect. Harmony offers the most powerful, flexible, easy-to-use rental application and screening system.

We won’t cover that here, but rest assured, it will meet all your needs in dealing with applications and screening. Please take a look at other resources to learn how to configure and use the rental application system, it will likely save you many, many hours over what you’re doing now, while helping you get the most qualified tenants.

For now, let’s look at a few other features of prospect communications.

Harmony provides detailed statistics on inquiries, both on a per-unit basis, and across the entire company.

First, select Places, then Reports for the type of place.

Select Vacancy Activity or Unit Activity to see the aggregate average statistics for all of your active unit listings.

You can download this report as CSV or Excel for additional analysis, if you wish.

Now, select Places, the place type, and select a unit listing.

Select the, Statistics, Icon from the menu bar.

This displays all of the individual statistics for this unit listing. Again, you can download them to CSV/XL.

Next, let’s imagine you have a vacancy, and the owner calls you to ask why his unit hasn’t rented yet. While this is covered elsewhere, we’ll touch on it here so you can see how to send the owner proof of your hard work in communicating with prospects.

Select the, Distribution, icon from the menu, and scroll to the Marketing Effectiveness section.

As long as this unit has a management agreement, and you have a message template for Places: Marketing, you’ll see a template message icon for the owner.

Select the icon, and enter an optional custom message for the owner.

They’ll receive a nice email based on your template. As long as you included the contacts graph in your template, this will show the owner how many inquiries you’ve handled for them. Configuring and customizing message templates is covered in detail in other resources.

Last, let’s cover the NotifyMe system.

When enabled, when a tenant views your listings and cannot find one suitable, they can add themselves to your NotifyMe database. When you add or activate a listing, or when you reduce a price to come in line with their budget, Harmony gives you the option to send them a template based email to inform them of the available listing.

While the primary purpose of NotifyMe is to fill your vacancies, it has other benefits as well. You can see market areas for targeted expansion, and prospect for new owners with a ready-made list of possible occupants for their homes.

Let’s take a look at how this works.

A prospective tenant has found your website, and you have NotifyMe enabled. They did not find a suitable rental advertised, so they opt to add themselves to receive notifications.

The prospect confirms their email, and selects the criteria they wish to be notified on. They can create multiple requests for different prices in different areas, if they wish.

You receive an email confirmation that a prospective tenant has been added to your notifyMe database.

From Harmony, select Places, then NotifyMe for the type of place.

You see this prospect with their details, and what they’re looking for.

The match count shows that nothing in your available inventory matches what they’re looking for, which is to be expected. In a perfect world, if there was a match, they would have just inquired, not asked to be notified of future options.

You don’t need to do anything with this. However, you can. If you have a unit that’s coming soon, or you have a unit that’s really close to what they need, you may proactively reach out to them.

Or, if you have a desperate unit that’s a little out of their budget, you may want to contact the owner to ask if he’s ready to reduce the rent and match his unit with this prospect.

If you’ve been talking to an owner prospect who has the perfect unit, you might reach out and let them know you just received a potential tenant for their property.

Normally, though, you just let these sit.

Let’s imagine you’re just humming along, and an owner calls you up to let you know he’s anxious about his vacancy and wants to lower the rent.

Edit his unit, and reduce the rent as he requested.

As a side note, you might want to send him the template unit change notification message to show that you made the change. Template messages, as you know by now, are covered in other resources.

Save the unit, and NotifyMe matching kicks in. It turns out there is 1 prospect who is looking for a unit that exactly matches this one, with its new price.

Select Notify, and the unit view for communications opens to the notifyme matches.

In this case, you see that there’s an upcoming showing for this unit. You might want to hold off contacting additional prospects, or you may want to include this in your message to the prospect to incentivize them to apply quickly.

For this demonstration, continue to notify the prospect.

Manage this just like an inquiry. Add a custom message, if applicable, and send the template message to the prospect.

The prospect now has an email, based on your notifyme email template. They can view the unit, inquire, or apply immediately, when you have applications enabled.

We’ve now covered the fundamentals of listing inquiries in Harmony.

You probably noticed that all of these communications occurred in the unit’s communication view. In addition to managing your inquiries from notifications, alerts, and lists, you can visit any unit’s communication view to see a complete list of all communications you’ve had regarding that unit.

Harmony gives you multiple ways to accomplish the same task, it’s up to you to find a groove that works for you, which is different for everyone.

Once you’re in the groove, we’re confident that you’ll find managing listing inquiries and filling vacancies to be fast, simple, and effective.

When you’re ready to watch your next video, it’s worth studying up on managing listings in places, setting up rental applications, and customizing your message templates.

For now, it’s time to relax. Kick up your feet, grab a big bag of Doritos, and watch that next TV episode that’s been patiently waiting.