How Berkshire Residential Investment Uses Price Drop Notifications to Convert Cold Leads to Leases

Berkshire Residential Investments is a vertically integrated multifamily owner-operator with a portfolio of more than 40,000 apartment homes across 132 communities nationwide. Its vertical integration informs their operating philosophy, with a top down mandate to prioritize decisions that stem from a consumer-first point of view.

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For Kasee Godwin, Assistant Vice President of Marketing, and the rest of the Berkshire team, "customer" includes two distinct groups. One, of course, is their prospects and residents. The second group, which is less obvious in this context, includes the Berkshire site teams. This protectiveness of their site teams shapes how Berkshire selects and adopts new tools, with marketing, training, and revenue management acting as one support network for  all new technology rollouts. 

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Building on that "team-first" approach, Berkshire screens for two other key standards when choosing tech partners. The first is prioritizing a unified communication experience, so every message a prospect or resident receives feels like it comes from one voice. The second is a focus on steady, incremental improvement. Across more than 40,000 units, a shift that increases conversion rates at one step of the leasing funnel by even 1% adds up quickly.

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The standardization of communication and focus on national programming controls are what put Berkshire and EliseAI in a unique position to tackle one of the most manual aspects of the leasing funnel: letting prospects know when prices drop to re-engage cold leads.

For any operator of Berkshire's size, pricing is always subject to fluctuation. As Operations and Revenue Management respond to the market, rents change constantly and a small drop can be exactly what a hesitant prospect needs to move forward. Ensuring that a hesitant prospect hears about the right price cut at the right time is the hard part, and for Berkshire, it historically relied almost entirely on manual work.

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The most effective approach Berkshire found was also the most personal (and subsequently the hardest to scale). Berkshire team members would take price changes into account, and personally reach out to price-sensitive prospects who they had recently toured. While their sales teams proved excellent at this kind of follow-up, it depended on the right person remembering the right detail at the right moment. That kind of personalized service is understandably difficult to guarantee across 132 communities, especially with a packed seven day leasing schedule and offices that are closed at night.

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The only way to reach prospects at scale was broad campaigns, which brought problems of its own. Marketing, operations and revenue management could build a campaign with careful segmentation, but sending it fell to site teams who were already pulled in many directions.. Thus, campaigns often went out to wide audiences instead. Even worse, there was no way to answer outstanding threads before the mass blast. So when a prospect had already asked questions about floor plan, budget, or move in timing, it looked as if they had been ignored. At scale, that could wear down trust and hurt deliverability for every message after it.

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Berkshire was already using a wide variety of EliseAI tools across its portfolio, including LeasingAI, and the team saw an opportunity to build something better together: an automated, carefully segmented way to match each price drop to the prospects it would actually convert, without adding a single task to site teams' plates.

EliseAI’s Price Drop Notifications feature in LeasingAI empowers operators to re-engage price-conscious prospects automatically. When a price changes, EliseAI identifies prospects who were recently quoted on a matching floor plan and reaches out with the new price, along with up to three available units that fit their needs.

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To execute this, Berkshire and EliseAI worked closely on the configuration before the first notification went out. Early conversations centered on a fixed-dollar threshold for when notifications should fire. When the two teams tested that approach against Berkshire's real pricing history, those thresholds matched cuts far larger than the ones typically made. Together, they rebuilt the logic around percentage changes that add up over time, so a series of small adjustments registers as the larger drop it adds up to.

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Segmentation logic got the same level of attention. Notifications only reach prospects who have been active in recent weeks and were quoted a price the new rent actually supersedes. No prospect hears from any given community more than once per day. Every notification arrives in the same EliseAI conversation the prospect already has with the community, which keeps Berkshire's communication in one consistent voice and provides context for leasing agents responsible for the leads. And LeasingAI continues to nurture leads both pre and post tour, with sub-60 second replies the rule rather than the exception.

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True to Berkshire's rollout philosophy, Price Drop Notifications started with a pilot. After the logic proved out, the feature expanded across the full portfolio in about two weeks. Berkshire's transparent pricing added one more strategic advantage as they went to generate demand. Prospects who got a notification could check the community website, confirm the new price, and see how few units were still available at that price point, creating a sense of “FOMO” that drives action.

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For site teams, nothing changed about their daily workflow. Notifications run in the background at any hour, and when a prospect replies, a warm lead comes back to the leasing team ready to tour or apply.

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Since launching in late June 2026, Price Drop Notifications have reached more than 19,700 Berkshire prospects resulting in 1,072 booked tours and 308 signed leases across 99 communities. That accounts for about 7% of all new leases Berkshire signed over that period. But, the comparison with Berkshire's earlier approach is where the impact shows through. Prospects reply to price drop notifications at roughly 3x the rate of the price-focused campaigns Berkshire sent earlier in the year, and convert to signed leases at about 1.6 times the rate. The data from the pilot also backs up the logic the two teams built together. These are the routine, everyday adjustments that the original fixed-dollar thresholds would have missed. 

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In one example, a prospect submitted a guest card on July 7 and didn't respond to initial outreach. A price drop notification went out the next day, and within two hours the prospect called the community to ask about the unit. They finished an application within four hours of the notification, and the lease was approved five days later.

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For Berkshire's leasing teams, the results show up as warm leads. Leasing professionals no longer have to track which prospects asked for which floor plans at specific prices, and can now spend that time on the relationship building Berkshire's teams do best.

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Looking ahead, Price Drop Notifications are one piece of a larger effort to create a best-in-class prospect experience at Berkshire. The marketing team is continuing to analyze the prospect journey step by step to find manual tasks which offer the greatest potential for automation. Next on the list is concession automation, which the Berkshire and EliseAI teams are now piloting together. This is just another example of what a motivated operator and an agile technology partner can build when they work side by side.