The Renter Journey: Where Apartment Communities Actually Lose the Lease
The Renter Journey: Where Apartment Communities Actually Lose the Lease
Search, listing, inquiry, tour, application, lease. Most operating teams treat the tour as the qualifying gate. The national survey data suggests the elimination happens two stages earlier, and again where total cost becomes visible.
At the population level the typical recent renter took one in-person tour and submitted two applications. Those are two separate medians from two separate distributions, so they do not show that any individual applied somewhere that person never toured. What they do show is that the funnel is not shaped the way the industry models it. The tour is not the gate preceding the application; for a large share of renters the listing is the gate, and the tour is one confirmation step inside a multi-application process already running in parallel. That relocates the loss: onto the listing page, where 79% call at least one digital feature essential, and onto the moment total cost becomes visible.
The funnel is not shaped the way operators assume
The Zillow Consumer Housing Trends Report 2025 is the largest recurring read on this behaviour: six nationally representative surveys fielded by Zillow Group Population Science between March and July 2025, each sampling at least 6,500 renters, for 24,400-plus unique respondents — more than 5,700 recent renters who moved in the past twelve months, and more than 18,600 tenured renters. Two of its medians sit uncomfortably next to each other. The typical recent renter took one in-person tour, and submitted two applications.
State the caveat plainly, since it is the difference between an observation and a claim the data cannot support. Those are medians of two different distributions, not a paired measurement of the same person. Nothing in the report establishes that any individual renter applied to a community that person never walked. Zillow tested no causation here and did not measure application abandonment. The gap is a structural observation about how renters run a search, not evidence that tours have stopped mattering.
The structure it describes is still consequential. 22% of recent renters took no in-person tour at all; 45% took at least two. A pipeline metric built on a single average tour count describes almost nobody in that spread. And if applications outnumber tours at the population level, the screening that eliminates most communities is happening before anyone books anything — which is where the listing sits.
How many in-person tours a renter actually takes, share of recent renters. Zillow Consumer Housing Trends Report 2025. The 22% and 45% figures are published by Zillow; the 33% "exactly one tour" slice is derived by subtraction and is not a Zillow-published number.
Six stages, and what is measurable inside each
Walking the stages in order clarifies which ones a community can actually instrument and which ones it is guessing at.
81% of recent renters searched on a mobile website and 73% used a mobile app. The share using no sites or apps at all fell from 16% in 2019 to 5% in 2025. Measurable: syndication reach and device mix.
79% said one or more digital features was essential to deciding which home to rent: photos 50%, floor plan 40%. Measurable: asset completeness per unit type. This is the screening gate.
77% of recent renters had at least one co-shopper — spouse, partner, roommate, friend, relative or children. Measurable: inquiries per listing view. Not measurable: the second decision-maker who never contacts you.
Median of one in-person tour; 22% took none, 45% took two or more. Measurable: tour-to-application within your own pipeline — but not the applications a prospect files elsewhere the same week.
Median of two applications. In buildings of 50 or more units, 93% of renters submitted at least one, against 76% of other rental home types and 66% of single-family detached renters. Measurable: application volume and fee take.
The stage where the economics of everything above are settled or repeated. RealPage lease-transaction data reported for the first half of 2026 puts renewals at 56% of expiring market-rate leases.
The pattern is worth naming: the stages a community measures best are the late ones, and the stage carrying the heaviest elimination load — the listing — is audited least. Note too how strongly building type drives application volume. At 93%, renters in large properties apply at a higher rate than any other housing type in the survey, which puts operators of 50-plus-unit assets inside the most application-dense segment of the market. Their listings are compared side by side more often, not less.
Where the money actually leaks
The second elimination point is cost visibility. In the SatisFacts 2025 Biennial Online Renter Study, as reported in 2026, information on mandatory fees beyond advertised rent ranked as the single most wanted piece of content on a community website, scoring 4.64 out of 5, and 56.4% of renters said unclear or unexpected fees would prompt them to leave a negative review — the highest-scoring trigger tested. Treat those figures as indicative rather than definitive: the sample size is not disclosed in the source.
Regulators have converged on the same behaviour. The FTC ordered Greystar to pay $24 million in December 2025 over advertised rents that excluded mandatory fees, and earlier in 2025 ordered Invitation Homes to refund $47.2 million to 444,131 renters on the same pattern, as covered in the rental housing trade press. The National Apartment Association tracked 26 state bills and 4 local proposals across 21 states in 2025.
Then there is the cost the renter carries through the funnel. Zillow puts the median application fee for recent renters overall at $50, unchanged from prior years, and at $75 among renters who reported paying any fee. Since applications stack, total spend across all rentals applied for is the more honest figure, and Zillow reports it differing by race and ethnicity: $50 for white renters, $70 for Black renters, $95 for Asian renters and $100 for Latinx renters. Application counts differ in the same direction. Black recent renters (19%) and Hispanic recent renters (16%) were about twice as likely as non-Hispanic white recent renters (8%) to report submitting five or more applications. These are self-reported survey measures and the report does not test why the differences exist, but the operational point stands on its own: the stacked cost of applying is real, and it is borne unevenly.
One quieter movement in the same data deserves a line. The share of recent renters who reported paying an application fee at all has fallen three years running — 84% in 2023, 79% in 2024, 73% in 2025 — while the median fee held at $50. The sources do not explain the decline. Competitive pressure in a market carrying a 7.1% national Multifamily vacancy index and a $1,390 national median rent, per the Apartment List National Rent Report for August 2026, is a plausible reading, but Zillow did not test it.
The search moved to the phone: share of recent renters using each channel. Zillow Consumer Housing Trends Report 2025.
What a renewal is worth against all of it
Every stage above is a cost a community pays to fill one unit once. RealPage lease-transaction data reported for the first half of 2026 puts renewals at 56% of expiring market-rate apartment leases; the specific post was not located, so treat it as a directional read rather than a published benchmark. Figures cited by the National Apartment Association place the cost of losing a resident at nearly $4,000 per unit, a 2023 vintage number that has not been restated here for inflation.
For context on what a property-level benchmark of that kind rests on, the 2024 edition of NAA Income/Expense IQ draws on more than 1,000,000 Multifamily units across more than 4,600 properties in 109 metro markets. Set the two against each other and the priority ordering falls out without much argument. A renewal avoids the entire six-stage sequence: the syndication spend, the listing audit, the tour, the application processing, the turn. Where a new lease is unavoidable, the cheapest place to fix the funnel is the stage that eliminates the most prospects for the least money to correct — the photos, the floor plan, and a price the renter can see in full before deciding whether to spend $50 finding out.
Frequently asked questions
Where in the renter journey do communities actually lose the prospect?
Earlier than the tour, for a large share of renters. In the Zillow Consumer Housing Trends Report 2025, 79% of recent renters said at least one digital feature was essential to deciding which home to rent, with photos at 50% and floor plans at 40%. That makes the listing page a screening gate in its own right rather than a step on the way to one.
Does one median tour against two median applications mean renters apply to homes they never saw?
No, and it is important to be precise here. Those are two medians drawn from two separate distributions in the same survey. Nothing in them establishes that any individual renter applied to a community that person never toured. What they establish is a population-level mismatch between how many tours happen and how many applications happen.
How many recent renters skip the in-person tour entirely?
Zillow reports that 22% of recent renters took no in-person tour at all, while 45% took at least two. The typical recent renter took one. The distribution is wide at both ends, which is why a single average tour-to-lease ratio tends to describe very few of the people in a leasing pipeline.
What does the survey say about application fees and how they stack up?
The median application fee for recent renters overall was $50 in 2025, unchanged from prior years, and $75 among those who reported paying any fee at all. Since renters apply more than once, total fee spend across all rentals applied for is the number that matters, and Zillow reports it varying by race and ethnicity.
What is a renewal worth against the cost of running the funnel again?
RealPage lease-transaction data reported for the first half of 2026 puts the renewal rate for market-rate apartment residents at 56%. Figures cited by the National Apartment Association place the cost of losing a resident at nearly $4,000 per unit, a 2023 vintage number that should be treated as directional.
Sources: Zillow Consumer Housing Trends Report 2025 — Renters (published November 2025; six nationally representative surveys fielded March to July 2025); SatisFacts 2025 Biennial Online Renter Study as reported in 2026 (sample size not disclosed in the source); Multi-Housing News on rental housing fee transparency; RealPage analytics (lease-transaction data reported for the first half of 2026; the specific post was not located); NAA Income/Expense IQ, 2024 edition and NAA industry trends (turnover cost figure is 2023 vintage); Apartment List National Rent Report, August 2026. Survey measures are self-reported and none of the sources cited here tested causation.
