Tour-to-Sign Rate
Definition
Tour-to-sign rate is the share of property tours (physical or video) that end in a signed agreement. It isolates the quality of the tour experience and follow-up from the quality of your marketing — a low rate with strong traffic points to a product or process problem, not an advertising one.
The formula
Tour-to-sign rate = Leases signed ÷ Tours actually conducted
- Tours actually conducted
- viewings that happened, in person or live video — not viewings booked, which is a different metric
- Leases signed
- attributed to the resident who took that tour, within a defined window such as fourteen days
Worked example
Our worked example: 62 viewings booked in a month, 41 attended, 14 signed.
- 01Show-rate = 41 ÷ 62 = 66.1%.
- 02Tour-to-sign rate = 14 ÷ 41 = 34.1%.
- 03Booking-to-sign, the figure most often reported, = 14 ÷ 62 = 22.6%.
- 04Lifting show-rate to 80% at the same tour-to-sign would produce 50 tours and 17 signings — three more rooms, no extra marketing spend.
Two different problems hide inside the 22.6%. One is people not turning up, which reminder sequences and self-scheduling fix. The other is people turning up and declining, which is a property, price or viewing-quality problem. Reporting only the combined number tells you neither.
A viewing is the most expensive step in the funnel. It consumes staff time at a fixed slot, it usually cannot be batched, and it is the only step where the building has to be presentable on demand. That makes tour-to-sign the highest-leverage conversion number in coliving operations, and it is routinely the least tracked.
A persistently low rate is usually one of three things, and they are distinguishable by asking. The listing oversold the room, so reality disappoints — this shows up as decisions made within minutes of arrival. The price is wrong for what is being shown, which shows up as hesitation about the total rather than the room. Or the viewing itself is an unstructured walkthrough rather than a conversation that surfaces and answers the objection, which shows up as polite non-answers afterwards.
Track it by room as well as by building. One room that everybody views and nobody takes is a pricing or condition problem with a specific address, and it is invisible in a building-level average. That single room is frequently also the one sitting empty in the ramp-up tail.
The common mistake
Dividing by tours booked rather than tours held
Booked-but-not-attended viewings belong in show-rate, not in tour-to-sign. Mixing them produces a single depressed number that cannot be acted on, because the two underlying causes have completely different remedies — one is a reminder problem and the other is a product or pitch problem. Keep them as two metrics and the diagnosis takes minutes.
Frequently asked
What is a good tour-to-sign rate?+
The useful comparison is your own trend and your own room-by-room spread, not a sector figure. A number that is stable month to month and collapses for one particular room is telling you something precise; a number compared against someone else's portfolio average is telling you nothing, because their minimum stay, price point and audience are not yours.
Do virtual viewings convert worse than in-person?+
Not necessarily, and for relocating residents a live video tour is often the only viewing that will ever happen — refusing to offer one removes the booking rather than improving it. Track them as separate cohorts, because blending an international video cohort with a local in-person cohort produces an average that describes neither.
Should the follow-up window be fixed?+
Yes, and state it. A signing attributed six weeks after a viewing is usually crediting the tour for a decision made elsewhere. Fourteen days is a defensible window for flexible-stay products; whatever you choose, keep it constant so the series stays comparable.
Run a coliving viewing
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