How Crescent Communities Increased Leasing Activity By 19% with Rilla

Before Rilla, Crescent Communities relied on mystery shopping to see how tours were actually going. "So we did mystery shopping. The problem with mystery shopping — the route that most multifamily operators go is you put in a request for it, it usually takes a few months to get a mystery shopper out there, and then the rubric is not catered to what you're looking for," explained Christopher Bland, who works on the asset management team. With leasing teams spread across multiple markets, hundreds of miles from corporate, that meant almost never seeing the tour that actually mattered.

Rilla solved this by letting every tour be recorded and coached against Crescent's own standards instead of a generic rubric. "A big advantage of us using Rilla is we actually were able to put in our Brand Camp programming into the platform prior. So with the AI coaching tool, we can go in and suggest responses on how to do better if you can't dig into a ride-along or an agent tour, or you can actually go in and listen to the whole conversation and put in specific feedback that you want for the leasing agents," said Bland. For Brianna Posey, assistant manager at Noble Beach Park, the effect was immediate: "It's almost like a notes app. A lot of the time we're spewing information out to our prospects and some things get lost in translation... being able to go back on some of those notes is super helpful."

The team quickly built Rilla into their daily workflow. "Everybody on our asset management team is doing ride-alongs in Rilla," said Bland, who now reviews tour summaries built around what competitors came up, how price was handled, and whether the agent explicitly asked for the close. Posey leaned on the AI coaching directly: "Rick AI is like my personal assistant" — surfacing the smaller details she might otherwise miss, like when a prospect was looking to move in or had a pet.

Over a 6-to-7 week pilot across 7 communities, leasing activity increased 19% on average, with some agents closing at 35% to 44%. "Out of the 7, 5 had pretty significant leasing improvements, and even the 2 that were a little more stable had improvements in other ways," said Bland. "That made us a lot more confident to roll it out portfolio-wide."

The team was initially wary of being recorded on tour, but that changed fast. "I think a huge surprise with using Rilla for us was the boost to morale that it was gonna give. We thought there was gonna be a little bit of pushback either from prospects or from the agents on tour... but we actually experienced the opposite effect," said Bland.

For Posey, the change has been personal: "With Rilla, coaching has made it a lot easier. Sometimes it's kind of hard to see what the agent did and hard to explain it. But with Rilla, it kind of gives you notes as well and helps give you a better answer as to what may be the issue if there is one."