Does a 48-Unit Community Need Its Own Website? Running the Numbers

There is a rule floating around this industry that small communities do not need their own website. It is worth naming, because it is probably the reason some owners have never seriously considered one.

RentVision, a multifamily website vendor, published a piece on December 1, 2022 titled which apartment communities need to have a website. It says that "communities with at least 100 units have enough supply to warrant establishing online demand," that "smaller communities with less than 50 units typically have less turnover," and that for a C-class community a website "may not be feasible or necessary."

That is the only unit-count threshold content in the category, which means it quietly anchors the answer whenever anyone asks this question. It also arrives with no arithmetic attached. So here is the arithmetic.

What a vacant day actually costs

Start with the only number that matters, and use your own rather than an industry average. Take your average monthly rent and divide it by thirty. That is what one vacant unit costs you per day.

At $1,700 a month, a vacant day costs about $57. At $2,300, it is about $77. At $1,200, it is $40. Whatever your number is, a website is not really an expense against your marketing budget. It is an expense against vacant days, and it only has to remove a few of them.

The break-even table

Take a $2,500 website and a $1,700 average rent, which puts break-even at roughly 44 vacant days recovered across the life of the site. Assume you turn 45 percent of your units a year, and substitute your own turnover if you know it.

Read the 50-unit row, because that is the one the rule says should not buy. A 48 or 50 unit community needs its website to shave about two vacant days off each turn in the first year to pay for itself. Over the three years a decent site will actually last, it needs to shave about two thirds of one day per turn.

Two days per turn is not an ambitious target. That is one prospect who found the community by name instead of losing it in a listing feed, or one renter who could see a floor plan and a real price at eleven at night instead of waiting for the office to open.

The part the rule gets backwards

The argument that smaller communities have less turnover is true and points the other way. If you only get twenty-two chances a year to lease a unit, each one is worth more, not less. A 300-unit community can absorb a bad week of leasing because it has another hundred and thirty chances that year. A 50-unit community cannot.

There is also the demand side, which the rule does not address at all. In the 2024 NMHC and Grace Hill Renter Preferences Survey, 79 percent of renters said they visited a property's own website during their search, compared with 75 percent who used an internet listing site. Renters go looking for the property's own site. If a community does not have one, that search either ends on a listing site, where the community sits next to its competitors, or it ends on a management company page that never mentions the property by name.

When the rule is right

There are real cases where a small community should not buy a website, and it is worth being straight about them.

• You lease entirely by word of mouth and have a waitlist. If you have not had a vacancy in two years, none of the arithmetic above applies to you.
• Nobody will keep it current. A site with last year's rents and a dead phone number is worse than no site. If there is no plan for who updates it, fix that first.
• You are selling within the year. Let the buyer make the call.
• The building is fully subsidized with a waiting list managed off-line. Different problem entirely.

Outside of those, the unit count is the wrong variable. The right question is what a vacant day costs you and how many chances a year you get to fill one. Run your own numbers with your own rent. The math is simple enough to do on the back of an envelope, which is more than the rule it replaces ever offered.

Sources

• RentVision, "Which Apartment Communities Need to Have a Website," published December 1, 2022, by Michael Zimmerman. rentvision.com (quoted text checked August 2026)
• 2024 NMHC and Grace Hill Renter Preferences Survey Report. nmhc.org