The Funnel Broke. Renters Didn’t.

Over the past few years, renter demand has stayed solid even as new supply and softening rent growth have reshaped leasing markets heading into 2026. What changed is not whether people rent, but how they discover, evaluate, and choose communities.​

The old linear path—ILS → website → tour → lease—has been replaced by a nonlinear, media-rich discovery journey that looks more like an e‑commerce funnel than a traditional apartment search. For marketers, that means awareness, intent, and trust are now built across multiple platforms before a renter ever clicks your search ad or visits your site.​

Stage 1: Ambient Awareness on Social & Video

For Gen Z and younger millennials, TikTok and Instagram are not just entertainment apps; they function as discovery engines and, increasingly, as search tools. The New York Times captured this shift years ago when it reported that “for Gen Z, TikTok is the new search engine,” and that behavior has only intensified as social algorithms surface hyper-relevant local content.​

For multifamily, that means:

• Short-form video tours dominate early discovery
  
  • TikTok alone hosts nearly 200 million apartment tour videos, giving prospects a way to explore communities, finishes, and amenities without ever hitting an ILS.​
  • Platforms like Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts extend this same behavior, where renters save, share, and revisit tours long before they’re “in market” in the traditional sense.​
• Authentic, unscripted content beats polished brochures
  
  • Renters increasingly expect real, relatable video—resident perspectives, “day in the life” clips, amenity walkthroughs, and neighborhood highlights—rather than only staged model photos.​
  • This push toward authenticity is closely tied to declining trust in traditional media and advertising, and a growing reliance on peer-like creators and user-generated content.​

In the new discovery funnel, social video is where the renter first sees your community, not the last place you retarget them.

Stage 2: Exploration via Social Search and AI

Once a renter has lightly engaged with apartment content, exploration becomes increasingly search-like—but that search is often still happening inside social platforms. Instead of typing “apartments in Dallas with pool” into Google, many renters search those exact phrases as hashtags or keywords in TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube.​

Key dynamics in this exploration phase:

• Social is a vertical search engine for lifestyle
  
  • Renters use in-app search to filter by neighborhood, budget cues (“budget apartments”), and lifestyle tags (“pet friendly,” “student housing,” “luxury loft”).​
  • Content that is optimized with clear on‑screen text, captions, and geo-tags has a greater chance of surfacing during this discovery search, even before a renter considers a “serious” search on Google or an ILS.​
• AI-enhanced discovery raises the bar on relevance
  
  • Social and video platforms increasingly rely on behavior-based signals and AI recommendations to predict who is likely to be in a moving “lifecycle moment,” even before that person self-identifies as a renter.​
  • Outside of social, generative AI search experiences are beginning to aggregate information on neighborhoods, amenities, and reviews into conversational summaries, making consistency across your web presence more important than ever.​

This exploration stage is where renters begin mentally shortlisting communities—often without ever visiting a single property website.

Stage 3: Active Search on Google, ILS, and Maps

Only after enough exposure and exploration do most renters move into what looks like the “traditional” discovery stage: active apartment hunting on search engines, listing sites, and map products. By this point, awareness and preference are already shaped by prior touchpoints, even if they are difficult to measure with last-click attribution.​

Key behaviors in active search:

• High-intent queries concentrate on search and ILS
  
  • Platforms like Google Search and Performance Max campaigns still capture renters once they are ready to compare pricing, availability, and floor plans.​
  • ILS sites such as Apartments.com, Zillow Rentals, and RentCafe remain core decision tools, especially in supply-heavy markets where renters can filter across dozens of similar options.​
• Local context and competition remain intense
  
  • In fast-growing metros like Dallas–Fort Worth, where median rents have recently dipped amid heavy new supply, renters have more modern, amenity-rich options than ever, and rely heavily on saved searches and favorites to track communities.​
  • This abundance of choice makes brand memory—built in earlier social and video stages—a critical advantage when a renter scrolls through a long list of nearly identical listings.​

In the new funnel, Search is still where the form fill happens, but it is rarely where discovery begins.

Stage 4: Social Proof, Trust, and Validation

Before scheduling a tour or applying, renters look for signals that confirm a community will deliver on the promise they’ve seen in ads and videos. This includes reviews, resident content, and social proof across multiple channels, not just star ratings on a single platform.​

Critical elements of this validation phase:

• Reviews and UGC are make‑or‑break
  
  • Renters weigh resident reviews, testimonials, and user-generated posts to understand the “real” experience behind polished marketing.​
  • Communities that encourage, curate, and respond to resident feedback—while amplifying positive stories across their website and social channels—build trust that directly influences conversion rates.​
• Consistency across channels builds credibility
  
  • When pricing, photos, amenities, and policies differ across your website, ILS, social accounts, and AI summaries, renters perceive risk and may abandon the lead altogether.​
  • Consistent messaging and accurate data feeds across channels ensure that the story a renter saw in a TikTok tour matches what they see on Google, Maps, and the online application.​

Trust has become its own stage of the funnel, and it is primarily powered by social proof rather than brand claims.

What This Means for Multifamily Marketers

By 2026, the communities winning are not just “turning up” search budgets; they are orchestrating a full-funnel, multi-channel presence that matches how renters actually discover housing. Practically, that implies a shift in strategy, creative, and measurement.​

Key implications and moves:

• Rebalance media toward true top‑of‑funnel
  
  • Allocating 10–20% of media spend to awareness campaigns on Meta, TikTok, YouTube, and Google Display helps build recognition before renters enter active search.​
  • Communities that invest in social storytelling see higher engagement and cheaper traffic when renters eventually search for them by name.​
• Align measurement with the new funnel
  
  • Relying solely on last-click conversion metrics undervalues the impact of awareness and exploration channels that created brand preference earlier.​
  • Marketers need to incorporate view-through metrics, assisted conversions, and cross-channel attribution models to understand the real contribution of social, video, and display to signed leases.​

The new discovery funnel favors communities that show up early, authentically, and consistently across the channels where renters actually live their digital lives. In 2026, that is the difference between being just another listing in a crowded search result and being the community a renter is already hoping to find.​