Turning Vacancy into Action: Tenant Leasing Dashboard

• • • Client: Regional property management firm with $10 million in revenue and around 100 employees.
    • Challenge: Leasing and occupancy data were fragmented across spreadsheets and ad hoc reports. Leadership lacked a single, reliable view of vacancies, unit types that drive downtime, or the operational reasons behind empty units. This made prioritization and targeted remediation slow and inconsistent.
    • Tools used: Power BI, SQL, and Excel data.
    • Solution: A Tenant Leasing Dashboard that consolidates unit-level occupancy, vacancy counts, property drill downs, and manager annotations into a single interactive decision surface. The dashboard surfaces portfolio-level vacancy trends, as well as the specific units and reasons that require action.
  • Impact:
  • • Converted dispersed vacancy signals into a clear and prioritized action list for operations and leasing teams.
      
    • Surfaced that almost one quarter of leasing units were vacant in the sample dataset, creating a clear headline for executive focus.
      
    • Identified property-level hotspots as well as unit type concentration, enabling focused marketing, maintenance, and manager engagement.
      
    • Brought manager-level notes into the same view so actions can be assigned directly from the dashboard.
  
  

Introduction and Business Context

Vacancies are a direct and visible drag on rental income and operational efficiency. For this regional manager, many of the inputs required to understand vacancy patterns were scattered across various systems and spreadsheets. That fragmentation meant leaders reacted to symptoms rather than addressing root causes. During the sample period covered by the dashboard, nearly one-quarter of the portfolio’s leasing units were vacant. That single headline demanded a clear and fast response.

The Tenant Leasing Dashboard was built to change the operating model. Instead of running periodic manual reconciliations, leaders and field teams can now see which properties, which unit types, and which managers require attention in one place. The dashboard converts volume-level observations into actionable tasks by combining vacancy counts, unit metadata, and manager notes.

Business Objectives

The project focused on outcomes that matter to executives responsible for revenue and portfolio health:

• Provide a single source of truth for occupancy and vacancy across all leasing units.
  
• Prioritize remediation efforts by surfacing the properties and unit types that drive most downtime.
  
• Expose operational root causes at the unit level through manager annotations.
  
• Reduce time to act by enabling teams to convert discovery into assigned actions from the same dashboard.
  
• Enhance rent flow and tenant experience by closing vacancies more efficiently and effectively.
  
  

Outcomes and measurable impact

The Tenant Leasing Dashboard enables the organization to transition from fragmented monitoring to prioritized action. The dashboard visuals demonstrate clear operational signals and the concrete steps that follow from them.

• Portfolio-level Clarity: The dashboard provides a single, actionable headline to the C-suite. For our client, almost one quarter of all leasing units are vacant. This immediate visibility focuses executive energy and creates consensus on where to direct resources and campaigns.

• Property hotspot identification: By highlighting the hotspots with a high number of vacant units, the dashboard enables operations and leasing to prioritize targeted interventions, such as promotional offers, maintenance prioritization, and manager coaching. For instance, Maple Ridge Estates is identified as the area with the highest number of vacant units.

• Unit type prioritization: The dashboard displays the number of current vacancies at the unit level, providing marketers and leasing staff with a precise target for promotions and pricing tests. For instance, for our client, Two-bedroom units are the largest contributor to vacancy in the sample.

• Property-Level Root Cause Visibility: Manager annotations in the dashboard indicate that poor property management is the primary reason for several vacancies. Bringing these notes directly into the data view reduces the time teams spend in meetings trying to reconcile anecdotal explanations and enables immediate assignment of corrective actions.

• Assignable actions and closure paths: Each flagged unit or property includes an action item prompt, such as connect with the on-site manager to resolve issues. Embedding the next step in the same interface removes ambiguity and accelerates follow-up.

Collectively, these outcomes reduce the organizational effort of discovery and channel attention to the highest-impact activities that reduce downtime and protect revenue.

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Our approach

We applied a decision-making methodology first. The goal was not to build every possible chart but to create the smallest set of views that change what people do.

Discovery and KPI definition

Workshops with leasing managers, operations, and regional leadership identified the minimal KPI set that would change behavior:

• Vacancy counts and vacancy rate.
  
• Vacancy by property.
  
• Vacancy by unit type.
• Unit level status, days vacant, and manager notes.

These choices were deliberate and aimed to produce a single operational playbook for weekly stand-ups.

Data Integration and Validation

Data was ingested from the property management system and Excel exports. Key validation steps included standardizing unit type labels (for example, single bedroom vs. two-bedroom), reconciling property identifiers, and ensuring that manager assignments were current so that every flagged unit had a responsible owner.

Dashboard Design and User Flow

Design centered on two complementary user journeys: Executive scanning for portfolio-level headlines and Operational drill for unit-level closure.

Main views of the dashboard include:

• Portfolio summary showing vacancy rate and counts.
  
• Property ranking to prioritize interventions.
  
• Unit type breakdowns to inform pricing and marketing.
  
• Unit detail table with manager notes and action prompts.

Iteration and Adoption

The dashboard was deployed iteratively. Early feedback from site managers clarified the taxonomy for vacancy reasons, which made manager annotations more useful. A short adoption phase included training for regional leads and a commitment to review the dashboard weekly as part of the management rhythm.

Key learnings and recommendations

• Make the headline visible and unambiguous: Displaying portfolio vacancy as a single headline statistic creates focus and helps leadership prioritize discussion time.
  
• Prioritize by unit type when a single category dominates vacancy:  If two-bedroom units represent the bulk of downtime, it is faster to design targeted promotions than to pursue portfolio-wide changes.
  
• Integrate manager notes as mandatory fields for long vacancies: Requiring a short reason and next step when a unit crosses a vacancy threshold (for example, 14 days) reduces meeting friction and improves accountability.
  
• Embed action prompts to make discovery an assignable task: A dashboard that produces a prioritized list but does not offer the next step leaves teams to re-interpret data. Action prompts remove that friction.
  
• Align the refresh cadence with the meeting cadence: Ensure the dashboard is updated shortly before weekly stand-ups, so decisions are made based on current data, not stale spreadsheets.
  
  

The Tenant Leasing Dashboard turns a diffuse, manual vacancy process into an operational workflow that leadership can act upon. By surfacing that almost one quarter of units were vacant, highlighting that two-bedroom units account for a significant proportion of vacant units, and exposing property-specific hotspots, the dashboard converts doubt into direction. With manager notes and action prompts embedded, the dashboard facilitates a seamless transition from inquiry to assignment and from assignment to closure. That sequence is how downtime shrinks and rent flow steadies.

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