Case Study · Social Media + Leasing
From Feed
to Full.402 units. The worst apartment-supply wave Miami had ever seen. One team ran the content, the feed, and the leasing funnel — and the building leased faster than the market around it.
The Film
The content that
did the leasing.
Grove Central — the property film. Shot, cut, and delivered by the same team that ran the feed and the funnel.
The Setup
Opened into the
worst market in
Miami history.
Miami delivered more than 18,600 new apartment units in 2024 alone — roughly 20% more than the market could absorb. Vacancy was climbing. A competing tower the same quarter was offering two months free plus a $1,000 credit just to move units.
Most Class A lease-ups that year took 11 to 15 months to stabilize, and most leaned on concessions to get there. The conventional playbook was simple: buy your way to visibility, pour money into listing sites, and accept a long timeline as the cost of doing business.
We built something people actually cared about, and let the content do the work the media budget was supposed to do.
Social media and leasing were never treated as two vendors handing off a lead sheet. One team shot the property, ran the feed, and watched the leasing data every week — because the group that makes the content is the same group that has to answer for whether it filled the building.
That's the whole thesis: social fills buildings when the content is right, and it stays cheap because you stop renting an audience and start building one.
The Playbook
One system.
Feed to funnel.
A visual point of view built for the neighborhood, not a template — the feeling of living somewhere, not "luxury apartments." Every photo, video, and post ran off the same thread.
Drone aerials, golden-hour interiors, lifestyle at the pool and in the neighborhood, twilight exteriors — every angle built to stop the scroll where renters actually spend time.
The owned feed carried the load. No paid listing syndication. When the creative earns its own distribution, the algorithm works for you instead of against you.
The content pipeline fed a tight leasing system — fast response, tracked to signed leases. Follow-up time cut from 72 hours to 4. The photos did the tour before the tour.
The Numbers
11x the national
pace. Month one.
The average U.S. lease-up community leased roughly 10 to 11 units a month in 2024. This building's opening month: roughly 120 units.
How to read this: this building's figure is its actual reported first-month leasing. Peer figures are implied average monthly absorption — units to stabilization divided by months to stabilization — from public trade and transaction records. A building's opening month is typically its strongest; this one still outran several months of peer absorption.
Miami Class A Cohort — 2023–2024 Deliveries
| Property / Submarket | Units | Delivered | Lease-up performance | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| This BuildingCoconut Grove | 402 | Jan 2024 | 30%+ leased in first month — on <$7K total paid search | First-party |
| Society WynwoodWynwood | 318 | Mar 2024 | Stabilization targeted ~spring 2025 (~12 mo); 2 months free + $1,000 credit | Dev / trade |
| 2000 BiscayneEdgewater | 420 | ~Oct 2024 | 75% leased shortly after opening; perm loan ~11 mo from launch | Trade-reported |
| Remi on the RiverMiami River | 342 | Jul 2024 | 93% leased at Oct 2025 sale (~15 mo) | Sale-verified |
| Forma MiamiEdgewater | 588 | 2024 | 97% leased at Oct 2025 refi; Freddie Mac lease-up program | Dev-reported |
Peer lease-up speed is measured to near-stabilization. This building's headline is front-of-curve velocity: 30%+ in month one, where peers needed roughly a year — or concessions — to fill.
The Portfolio Effect
Same playbook.
Different buildings.
Metro Edgewater · Edgewater, Miami
Top 2 in the portfolio.
A different submarket, a different renter profile, the same content-led sequence. No paid listing "Diamond Plus" spend. Site delivered in two days. Metro Edgewater ranked among the top two lease-ups in the entire Greystar South Florida portfolio.
Biscayne Shores · North Miami, FL
The waterfront reposition.
A Class A waterfront community competing against properties still running generic listing photography. Content built around the asset's strongest feature — water — carried the lease-up on a social-first strategy, feed first, funnel behind it.
"Our two highest-performing lease-ups are Metro Edgewater & Grove Central… The only thing those two properties have in common is they use THOMAS."
Regional Marketing Lead · Greystar South Florida PortfolioWhy It Works
Content-led.
Not spend-led.
The people who shoot the property are the same people running the feed and watching the leasing data. No brief lost between a photographer, a social agency, and an ILS rep.
When the creative earns its own distribution, impressions and reach come from the feed — not from a media budget. That's how a lease-up runs on under $7,000 of paid search.
Impressions and followers are not the scoreboard. The content pipeline runs straight into a leasing system built for speed — because attention without conversion is just a vanity metric.
This is the same system behind The Occupancy Engine™ — paid ads, the funnel, and the lead-to-lease system, run by the team that also shoots and posts the content. One roof. One outcome: the building, filled.
Your Property Next
Want this for
your property?
Fifteen minutes with James. We'll look at your current content, social, and ad spend — what's working, what's wasting money, and exactly what we'd do to fill it faster.
Or call 561.386.0962