How McKinley grew qualified leads 30% while cutting ad spend 30%

The challenge

McKinley operates roughly 13,000 multifamily units across Orlando and Winter Park, Florida, and Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti, Michigan. As a long-standing owner-operator, the team knows the trade-off every operator lives with: approve a marginal applicant to hit occupancy targets, or tighten criteria and leave units sitting empty. Either way, someone pays for it later, in bad debt or in lost rent.

Going into the partnership, McKinley's priorities were specific. Fraud came first, then collections and bad debt. The sharpest concern was synthetic identities, the fabricated applicants stitched together from real and fake data that slip straight past traditional screening and surface months later as unpaid rent and evictions.

But McKinley framed the problem more broadly than most. With leadership spanning both innovation and growth and digital marketing, they didn't see screening as a back-office checkpoint. They saw it as the first decision in a revenue chain that runs from ad spend all the way to net operating income, and they wanted that whole chain working together.

The approach

McKinley sat down with the Findigs team and went through their underwriting criteria element by element. Wherever they could be more conservative without sacrificing occupancy, they tightened, deliberately and with the data in front of them.

Then they did what most operators can't: they connected approvals back to marketing. Once McKinley could see which channels actually produced approved residents, not just leads, they rebuilt the marketing calendar around when approvals were needed and shifted budget toward the sources that converted. That meant putting more weight behind Google Ads for specific properties and timing spend to drive revenue that would convert inside the next two weeks, instead of paying for volume that never made it through underwriting.

• Tuned underwriting criteria conservatively, line by line, with the Findigs team
• Closed the loop between approvals and marketing spend, scoring channels by approved leases rather than raw lead count
• Reallocated budget, including Google Ads, toward the channels and properties driving qualified, approvable demand, timed to when approvals were needed

When we understood what channels were resulting in approvals, we adjusted our marketing calendar and allocated more ad spend to specific things, like Google Ads for particular properties, to drive revenue that's going to convert in the next two weeks. — Scott Daniel Lysz, Director of Digital Marketing, McKinley

The results

Twelve months in, McKinley saw a clear drop in bad debt and far stronger protection against synthetic fraud, exactly the outcomes they set out to fix. But the bigger story showed up at the top of the funnel and on the bottom line.

• +30% more qualified leads while spending less to acquire them
• -30% ad spend year over year
• Lower customer acquisition cost across the portfolio
• Higher NOI, starting with net rental income at the top of the funnel

The reason the gains compound is that approval quality touches everything downstream. Josh points to three ways it plays out in operations:

• Conversion. Better-qualified applicants convert to move-in at a higher rate, so every approved application is worth more.
• Community. They are better additions to the community and take better care of the property, which protects the asset over the life of the lease.
• Payment. They pay on time, which frees the team from spending resources reminding residents and chasing collections.

Put together, those three effects are what McKinley means by revenue quality: not just filled units, but filled units that perform. The fraud-and-bad-debt project they started with turned into a measurable lift in NOI.