Sign InSpatial Storytelling: The #1 Digital Marketing Strategy for Multi-Family Properties
Multifamily properties — also referred to as apartments, multi-unit buildings, apartment complexes, or residential communities — require unique marketing strategies to stand out in a competitive market.
Your goal is simple: maintain high occupancy and low turnover.
The solution isn't better photos or flashier brochures. It's about creating stories for your spaces that help prospects envision their life there.
You’ll learn five proven strategies to transform how you market multi-family properties, plus practical ways to use these same techniques to improve tenant retention and build stronger communities.
The different types of marketing for multi-family properties
Multifamily marketing serves two distinct purposes: attracting tenants to rent units, or finding buyers to purchase properties. Each requires different strategies and targets different audiences.
Who handles rental marketing:
Landlords who self-manage their rental units
Property managers who lease units on behalf of owners
Who handles investment sales marketing:
Agents who sell individual condo units to homebuyers
Commercial brokers who sell entire apartment buildings to investors
This guide focuses on rental marketing—helping you attract quality tenants and reduce vacancy rates. While most strategies can be adapted for investment sales, our emphasis is on filling units with residents, not selling properties to investors.
The challenges of marketing individual units in multi-family properties
Marketing multifamily properties comes down to one core challenge: scale.
When you're managing 100+ units, even small inefficiencies in your rental process snowball into major time and profit drains.
Competition creates the biggest headache for most agents, especially in crowded urban and suburban markets. In 2024 alone, 440,000 new units were delivered in the US, with 900,000 to come. The rental market is flooded with options for renters.
This oversupply leads to prospect fatigue and decision paralysis. People get overwhelmed by choices and delay their decisions. Meanwhile, you're competing against dozens of similar properties for the same pool of pre-qualified tenants.
Administrative chaos amplifies every other problem:
Different finishes, varying layouts, and constant turnover make it easy to get disorganized
Lost documentation and certification extend vacancy periods.
Poor showing coordination requires hiring more staff or delaying availability
The solution to these multifamily marketing challenges isn’t working harder, it’s working smarter. Visual storytelling will help you to attract and nurture leads more effectively at scale.
5 innovative ways to nurture leads and create spacial stories at scale
Did you know that after 3 days, people retain 65% of visual information but only 10% of text-only information? That means your pictures and videos are 6.5x more memorable than a written listing.
Using spatial storytelling helps you move beyond bland listing features and create emotional connections with prospects. When someone can mentally imagine themselves in your spaces, they become more warm leads who are ready to lease faster, and even bid higher.
The results speak for themselves. This year-long study showed properties offering both property and unit-level virtual tours reduced average vacancy by 5 days, saving $37,895 annually.
1. Produce engaging and immersive assets at scale
One of the biggest advantages of modern 3D scanning technology is how a single capture session creates multiple marketing formats.
For example, when you scan a unit with Matterport's Pro3 camera, and you're not just getting a virtual tour—you're creating an entire library of marketing assets.
A single scan automatically generates:
Self-guided interactive 3D model of the unit and property
Professional photography from every angle and perspective
Video walkthroughs with guided narration capabilities
Accurate floor plans with precise measurements
These assets are uploaded to the Matterport Marketing Cloud which adds intelligent features like AI-generated property descriptions, auto room labeling, and Instant measurement capabilities.
Instead of coordinating photographers, videographers, and floor plan creators, you capture everything at once. Your real estate marketing materials stay consistent across all platforms because they're all generated from the same source.
2. Offer 24/7 virtual open houses
Traditional open houses happen for a few hours on weekends. Virtual open houses never close. And that kind of ‘always on’ availability solves major pain points for modern renters. In fact, 54% of people won't even consider a property without a virtual tour because:
Busy professionals can browse units after work hours.
People in different time zones or locations can confidently evaluate properties.
Families with young children can browse without scheduling babysitters.
Beyond attracting interest in your property, virtual accessibility also vets your leads. When prospects take time to thoroughly explore a virtual tour, they're genuinely interested. This means fewer pointless showing requests and higher conversion rates when people do schedule in-person visits.
Check out this tour to see just how much context you can glean from a few clicks:
3. Create an emotional connection
As much as we all might claim to be logical creatures who make decisions based on facts, we often use emotion instead.
Beyond square footage and popular amenities, your single biggest asset is how you help prospects see a space as their home. They need to be able to visualize sitting in that nook in the morning sun, their colored couch in the living room, their art on the wall.
Virtual tours augmented with tags that explain features and functions of the space help differentiate your spaces by creating an emotional connection. Check out this example below to see how adding tags to a tour can help you deeply understand the space.
4. Streamline unit comparison
One of the most frustrating aspects of letting apartments is when you have interested prospects, but your contracts are delayed due to decision paralysis.
Virtual tours for all your real estate listings mean prospects can digitally walk through every unit you offer and rapidly make side-by-side comparisons to narrow down their process
The result is faster decision-making and less overwhelm. Instead of trying to remember details from five different units they looked at, your prospects can revisit their favorites virtually. And they can show options to family members or roommates who couldn't attend.
5. Build anticipation
Building anticipation is all about continuing the work of building a powerful emotional connection. Rather than just helping prospects visualize a property as their home, help them understand the lifestyle they’re saying yes to when they move in.
First, help them see themselves in the unit. Virtual tour features like Defurnish can help you remove or add furniture to a unit. This completely removes issues with current tenants not cleaning clutter or having a… let’s just say interesting… decoration style.
Here’s an example of what the Defurnish feature can do:
When you can show the unit furnished and empty, it reduces anxiety about empty rooms while avoiding negative connotations with the current tenant’s furniture.
Next, help potential tenants see their lifestyle in the building by creating visual resources of the amenities available to them. For example, check out how this German hotel builds anticipation by showing you what it looks like to visit their communal areas:
How to increase tenant retention and engagement
Keeping existing tenants costs less than finding new ones. The same spatial storytelling strategies we mentioned above can also help strengthen relationships with current residents.
Transform community updates and resident communication
The same technology that powers your virtual tours can help you drastically improve your residential communication strategy. A digital twin platform offers a full scan of your property which you can use to communicate upcoming renovations and building work to residents.
You can distribute this visual content through multiple channels:
Include videos and images in resident newsletters
Share progress updates in community social media groups
Send email campaigns with embedded virtual experiences
Support remote multi-family property management and maintenance
Retaining tenants is ultimately down to good facility maintenance. Digital twins give managers a significant advantage when it comes to remote management over their entire portfolios.
Here’s how:
Maintenance teams can plan work more effectively when they understand the exact room dimensions and layouts. Unit turn coordination becomes more precise when vendors can assess spaces remotely.
Contractors can provide accurate estimates without initial site visits. Material ordering becomes more precise when measurements are readily available. Project timelines become more realistic when everyone understands the scope of work.
Ultimately, faster issue resolution happens when maintenance teams arrive fully prepared. Proactive maintenance scheduling becomes possible when property managers can identify potential problems during virtual inspections.
It’s that kind of good management that ensures happy tenants who stick around for longer, and an always-in-demand building.
Ready to transform your multi-family marketing with spatial storytelling?
Try Matterport for free and discover how digital twins can help you lease faster, retain tenants longer, and command premium rents for your properties.
