Hybrid Leasing Works When AI Handles the Volume. Newbury’s Conversion Rate Proves It.

Company: Newbury Living
Portfolio: 6000+ units across 80+ properties
Markets: Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri, Colorado
AppFolio Since: 2017
Contact: Rich Overholt, Technology Implementation Coordinator

CUSTOMER SPOTLIGHT / LEASING PERFORMER

Newbury Living took over and shifted a centralized portfolio of 21 properties to a hybrid model, and needed AI to make it work. Six months in, Leasing Performer handles 67% of all leads and conversion has climbed every month since go-live.

The Challenge: A New Operating Model With No Playbook for Lead Volume

LivLavender had built a fully centralized property management operation: no onsite staff, no distributed leasing presence. When Newbury Living took over management of their 21 communities, that model came with the portfolio.

But Newbury Living's own approach was different. Post-acquisition, they made a deliberate choice: shift LivLavender's properties to a hybrid model, with onsite PMs handling day-to-day operations and a centralized leasing team taking responsibility for lead routing and tour scheduling across the combined portfolio.

A hybrid model serving a larger, more distributed portfolio means more inbound leads, from more sources, at all hours. And unlike a purely centralized operation with a contained, predictable funnel, hybrid creates a structural response gap: leads arriving across distributed properties routing to a central team that can't be everywhere at once. The lag between inquiry and first contact grows — and that's where prospects go cold. They will set tours elsewhere before our team even has a chance to respond.

Rich Overholt, who oversees technology implementation at Newbury Living, brings a background in process improvement and efficiency from a career spanning large scale operations and production environments. With that background, he saw AI as a way to close the response gap.

The Turning Point: Native Integration Was the Difference

Newbury had already put other AI platforms to the test. Rich documented more than 20 integration issues across the tools he evaluated: settings conflicts, AI behavior inconsistencies, and cross-platform integration issues that made configuration overhead alone unsustainable. What he needed was something that could work natively inside AppFolio.

The native advantage matters even more in a hybrid model. When leasing is distributed across properties but coordinated through a central team, every handoff is a potential failure point. A third-party AI tool adds another layer: it has to receive the lead, interpret it, pass it to AppFolio, and route it correctly — across sources, property types, and availability windows. In a hybrid operation, that chain breaks more often and in more places. Leasing Performer reduces the issues. Because it lives inside AppFolio, it sees availability in real time, routes leads without translation, and schedules tours directly — no middleware, no lag, reduced scheduling or calendar issues, no configuration debt accumulating every time something upstream changes.

When a prospect reaches out, Leasing Performer responds instantly, qualifies the lead, and schedules tours directly — the kind of seamless handoff a centralized or hybrid team needs to function at scale across a distributed portfolio.

Rich's assessment was direct: the native advantage is real, and it's what makes the workflow actually hold together.

"Every other tool we tested required too much configuration to work reliably. Leasing Performer worked because it's native to AppFolio — and that changes everything about how the workflow holds together."

Rich Overholt

Director of Technology Implementation, Newbury Living

Outcomes: Coverage, Conversion, and a Reclaimed Morning

Six months after go-live, across 9 properties, the results are consistent and directional.

Lead coverage held at scale. Leasing Performer now handles 67% of all unique post-go-live leads, engaging prospects instantly without manual staff intervention. The primary gap is Zillow routing, which sits outside LP's native reach.

Conversion has climbed every month. Lead-to-tour conversion reached 38.5% in July and has increased for six consecutive months since LP went live. In July alone, 45% of all tours were booked directly by LP.

The morning queue disappeared. One of the most immediate changes Rich called out wasn't a dashboard metric. His centralized leasing team had been starting every day by working through the overnight lead backlog. Roughly one-third of prospects contact properties outside traditional office hours. With the Leasing Performer handling after-hours inquiries in real time, that work is done before the team arrives. They start the day on higher-value work instead.

Labor savings are real and measurable. Across 9 properties over 180 days, LP reclaimed approximately 1,126.5 staff hours, equivalent to $28,100 in payroll value at $25/hour.

What Full-Portfolio Rollout Could Look Like

Newbury currently has Leasing Performer live across 9 properties. Rich's portfolio spans 80+. Using the labor savings rate from the trailing 180-day Cupola data and applying it across the full portfolio, the projection is significant.

PROJECTED IMPACT AT 80 PROPERTIES

Across 9 properties over 180 days, LP reclaimed approximately 1,126.5 staff hours, equivalent to $28,163 in payroll value at $25/hour. Applied across Rich's full 80+ property portfolio, that rate projects to roughly 20,000 hours per year — or approximately 10 FTE of capacity freed annually. Rich's methodology; AppFolio Cupola data.

The Bigger Picture: AI as Infrastructure for a Hybrid Model

Newbury's acquisition didn't just add units. It forced a deliberate model change: taking a fully centralized operation and making it hybrid. That shift created a need that didn't exist before: a scalable mechanism for a centralized leasing team to absorb higher lead volume across a more distributed portfolio, without proportional headcount growth.

Leasing Performer is filling that role. It handles first contact, qualification, and scheduling. It covers after-hours volume without staffing for it. And because it's native to AppFolio, it works within the operational system Newbury already runs, not alongside it.

For operators navigating portfolio growth through acquisition, the Newbury story is a data point worth reading closely: the structural change came first, and the AI is what made it work.

Advice You Can Steal

Rich's advice for operators thinking about adopting AI into a hybrid leasing model: