FIG Property Management leases and manages more than 550 doors around Knoxville, Tennessee. Cassidy Johnson has run the entire leasing funnel on her own since February 2025.
Marketing, showings, and prospect communication used to run in one system while applications lived in another, so a prospect went through two separate processes: one to see a property, another to apply for it. FIG's team then had to manage both systems and combine data between them to keep the experience consistent, and that is where things fell through the cracks.
Since applications moved onto the same platform as the listings, median processing time has dropped by half.
A single leasing agent covering 550 doors might sound like a staffing gap but FIG treats it as a strategy. The same person handles a prospect from the first enquiry through the showing, the application, the approval, and the lease. Nobody gets handed off mid-funnel, and no context has to be re-explained to a second person who was not on the earlier calls.
For the prospect, it means one name, number and face helping them throughout the process.
"Tenants, applicants, prospects, they have one point of contact the whole way."
— Cassidy Johnson, FIG Property Management
The one-person leasing playbook works because the repetitive parts of leasing, the routine questions, the follow-ups, the status updates, get absorbed by RentEngine rather than spread across more people.
Cassidy owns leasing end-to-end since she has an overview of marketing, communication, and applications in a single tab. Nothing needs to be rechecked or re-entered into a separate system.
Cassidy uses RentEngine AI and snippets to cover routine questions and follow-ups, so she’s not drafting the same answers for every prospect. More than that, applications live in the same system as the listing, so automated follow-ups and AI can nudge prospects to apply after a showing. The prospect experience is also improved since they don’t need to create a separate account for applying.
FIG’s owner leasing reports are sent automatically every Monday so manual reporting isn’t piled on top of Cassidy’s leasing work. The reports reflect a property’s full lifecycle and answers the questions owners tend to reply back with including, how many leads, showings, and applications have this property received? Since Cassidy doesn’t need to reply to these, that’s more time saved.
Self-guided showings let a lean team cover more ground without an agent driving to every property. Prospects can tour on their own time and if they have follow-up questions or feedback, this is automatically captured and answered by AI or Cassidy.
FIG has run self-showings for four years, well before the practice became standard in property management. Cassidy joined in November 2021 and the policy was already in place.
"We haven't had the issues that you would think of, like squatting, people moving in randomly. That's very rare."
— Cassidy Johnson, FIG Property Management
A unit that is listed but not yet showable spends its most valuable weeks unable to convert anyone. When an owner insists, FIG keeps the listing on hold for visibility until the make-ready is done, then makes it live.
The reasoning is that a listing carries its own momentum in its opening fortnight, and a unit that cannot be shown during that window spends it earning nothing. RentEngine's data across scattered-site portfolios backs this up. 38% of all leads on a listing arrive in its first week on the market, and volume falls off steeply from there.
"If it's not actually live, available for showings, ready to rent within those first crucial week, maybe two weeks even, that's going to slow down how quickly it gets rented in the long run."
— Cassidy Johnson, FIG Property Management
Days on market is the main metric that FIG tracks. It comes up at the weekly level, pulled either from RentEngine's tracking or exported to a spreadsheet.
Application processing time runs on a slower cadence. Cassidy reviews it monthly, which is frequent enough to catch a trend and infrequent enough that a single slow week does not present as a problem necessarily. Splitting the two cadences means the daily metric drives daily decisions while the structural metric measures whether the process itself is improving.
Splitting rental applications into a separate system from the listing and the marketing means the two do not talk to each other, so details fall through the cracks. Moving applications onto the same platform removes the disconnect.
FIG also realized the value in having an application that’s easier to complete.
“We found that having an easier application is getting higher lead conversion."
— Cassidy Johnson, FIG Property Management
Applications now run through the same system as the listing, and the form is easier for applicants to complete on a phone. When an applicant uploads everything FIG needs, Cassidy approves in a couple of minutes.
"It's less clunky, it's more mobile friendly, it's quicker."
— Cassidy Johnson, FIG Property Management
Median processing time dropped from about 120 hours in July 2025 to 59 hours in July 2026. Cassidy's read on lead conversion is that it has roughly doubled over the same period, with more leads sticking through to a completed application.
Running marketing, communication, showings, and applications through RentEngine has let one person keep up with leasing across FIG's 550 door portfolio since February 2025, without adding a second hire.
Support has not been a bottleneck either.
"I can talk to the AI support 99% of the time and it actually answers my question. You're always accessible. The support team is always accessible. No issues ever."
— Cassidy Johnson, FIG Property Management
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Her favorite feature: messaging 50 prospects at once.
When Cassidy puts a property on hold, every prospect attached to that listing hears about it immediately. If a lockbox stops working, she tells all of them in one action and tells them again when it is fixed.
"I can automatically send that to 50 people and I don't even have to think about it."
— Cassidy Johnson, FIG Property Management