Every property website in multifamily had a popup. It came up when you landed, it told you the special, and it went away. That was the whole thing.
I thought that was dumb. Not the popup. What it asked for, which was nothing.
What the popup didn’t do
It didn’t give anyone a reason to act now. It didn’t tell you what to do to get the deal. And there was no way to know if it had done anything at all, because nothing about it could be measured. We were running specials every month across the portfolio and could not have told you which one had ever produced a lease.
So the fix was obvious to me and apparently to nobody else: put a form on it. Make the special something you claim, not something you read. Then you can count.
Our websites at the time couldn’t do a popup with a form in it, so I bought a script online and figured out how to route the leads into our CRM. The first one said, more or less: lease your new home by this date and get this much off. Complete the form below to redeem the offer. On a property with no special, it said: complete the form and you’ll be the first to know about offers, discounts and availability. Same idea. Ask for the name.
One property, then all of them
I put it on one site. About a month later that property was getting roughly twice the web leads of any other property I ran.
So I put it on a couple more. Then I got feedback that some of the leads weren’t great, so I added friction, a few more fields, so the people who filled it out meant it. Then I turned that into a standard and rolled it out across every property I had. By the end, the other regions were running at about half my lead volume, and in a few of my markets it was three or four times.
I did not ask permission for any of this. I did it first and asked for forgiveness after the numbers came in, which is how I did most things back then. When my boss asked what I was doing differently, I had an answer with a number in it, and that is a very different conversation from a proposal.
I did it first and asked for forgiveness after the numbers came in.
The pushback
Then came the part that always comes.
The operations side said the popups were annoying. On-site teams said residents complained. Fair, so I gave the thing settings: delay it a few seconds, show it once per visitor, collapse it into a small hover tab after the first visit. Then the technology team found out I had external code running on the property sites, outside the platform we’d bought from our website vendor, and that was a bigger conversation.
Cortland was growing fast, and fast-growing companies grow process. Every one of those conversations was a hoop, and every hoop took longer than the thing I was asking to do. That was one of the reasons I left. Not the only one. But when you have run something yourself and watched it work and then spent more time defending it than building it, you start to think about running it somewhere with fewer hoops.
Repli’s first dollar
When I left, the popups came with me. They were the first thing anyone ever paid Repli for, before the websites, before the search, before any of the things we’re known for now. By the time I walked out the door they were paying me more than the job had. That is the part of the story I tell founders who ask how I knew it was time: I didn’t know. The numbers did.
Still annoying, still effective
I still believe in it, and I still get the same argument. Popups are tacky. Popups are annoying. Popups hurt the experience.
Here is what I’ve found: they are annoying right up until the moment they work, and then they are annoyingly effective. The difference is never whether you have one. It is whether it asks for something, whether it respects the visitor enough to get out of the way, and whether you can count what it did.
Most of the industry still has the first version. The one that says the special and asks for nothing.
Founder + CEO