All right. Good morning. I'm Greg Van Winkle, our Vice President of Investor Relations. First, thank you all for being here. We're super excited today to be hosting our first Investor Day, so it's awesome to see a room full of people. It's great to have your interest and your support. We're going to have a great day today. You'll have a chance to hear from and to meet a lot of our senior leaders you may not have had a chance to meet before. We'll walk you through what it is that makes Invitation Homes unique, and we'll talk about some of the specific initiatives we have that we think are going to drive our growth over the next several years. You may also have noticed that we're all wearing these extremely tasteful bright green running shoes today.
I promise in about one minute, Dallas will tell you all why. First, I've got to read a quick legal disclaimer here. Certain statements made during this presentation may include forward-looking statements relating to the future performance of our business, financial results, liquidity and capital resources, and other non-historical statements, which are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual outcomes or results to differ materially from those indicated in any such statements. We describe some of these risks and uncertainties in our 2018 annual report on Form 10-K and other filings we make with the SEC from time to time. Invitation Homes does not update forward-looking statements and expressly disclaims any obligation to do so. During this presentation, we may also discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures.
You can find reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measures with the most comparable GAAP measures in the accompanying slide presentation, which is available on the investor relations section of our website. With that, I'd like to turn it over to our Chief Executive Officer, Dallas Tanner.
There's supposed to be a rousing applause.
Yeah. All right. I thought I might get the rousing applause.
Oh, thanks, Greg. I want to thank Greg and Bensing, who did an excellent job putting this all together. We appreciate it. To get all of you for half a day to listen more about our business and the things we're focused on, quite frankly, is really exciting for us. Our business is built on three really key pillars, which are our residents, our associates, and our shareholders. Many of you in the room are shareholders, and we appreciate that. Thank you. Thank you for your support. I also want to make sure that, and I'll spend some time here in a second talking about a little bit of this, but we have an excellent team here today with a lot of our senior management team in the room.
Whether we're on break or during lunch, please feel free to grab any of them to ask any questions or anything that you've got top of mind or may want to know a little bit more about. We also, I believe, have Bryce Blair, our Chairman of the Board, here in the room. I want to thank Bryce. One of the things that makes IH so unique is the excellent board that we have behind the company. Amazing amount of support. As Greg mentioned, we're up here in these pretty bright green sneakers today, and I'll get more to that here in a second. Just by a show of hands, any runners in the room? Anyone, or at least thinks they're a runner?
Yeah.
Yeah. Okay. Well, I used to be a runner prior to starting IH. Training regimen went downhill from there. As you know from your own personal experience, if you've run a half marathon, you ever run a 5K, or you've done a marathon, my best races were ones where practice, dedication, persistence came together. Didn't overeat, for the record. It coupled with maybe a great race day, an environment or a landscape that was in front of you that you thought, okay, it's not too hot today. The weather's perfect. It's all downhill, right? For Invitation Homes, we're at a unique moment in time. We're at a point in our history and in our structure where we feel like we're ready to run.
We've put in the proper time, the training, the discipline, the focus, the optimization, the efficiencies, the things you're going to hear some of the team talk about today, but we really feel like this business is set up to be successful. Not just from what we've done to date, but the things that we're going to do going forward to not only change the single-family rental experience, but to create a best-in-class asset and business that can be reliable for our shareholders. We're excited to talk a little bit more in depth about that with you guys all today. By the way, Greg, just a heads up, this screen's not on, just front and center. The four things we want you to walk away with today. First, fundamentals are off the charts.
I'm going to spend a little bit of time talking to you about not only what we're seeing from a macro perspective, but specifically how that relates to our portfolio. Which will be a second point, is that we've built a deliberate business with very deliberately picked assets, in specific locations and sub-markets that have almost created a moat. I always think of it in the word of a protective moat, but a moat that helps insulate some of that outperformance that we think is going to lend to better risk-adjusted return over the long haul. Third, that we have a team here in place today. A lot of them, the senior management, is here with me, but also in the field.
You're going to learn a little bit more about that later as Alicia and Jiggs talk a bit about how our teams in the field operate, and the way that we think about that team and the types of best practices and efficiencies they're driving. Lastly, having gone through all the tremendous growth that we've built in our business, we have a portfolio and systems that are refined and fully integrated that are ready to create additional value going forward. We're going to talk about what that means, both from an external and an organic perspective today. Don't want to spend too much time on history, but I do think it's important to remember with Invitation Homes, always been first. First to market in terms of scale. First to market in terms of securitization, structured finance opportunities.
First of its kind to do a GSA-backed Fannie Mae securitization. ProCare, Resident First Look program, all very innovative opportunities that we built as a company to create value, both from a process standpoint internally, but also for our shareholders in terms of ease of efficiency for us to be able to execute best-in-class return profiles across our assets. We'll talk more about what that means. When we talk about being ready to run, covers a lot. It has a lot to do with how we think we're going to grow externally. We want to talk and spend some time about that and some of the opportunities we're seeing in markets. I want to talk to you about the way that we're continually enhancing leasing, the leasing experience. Our customers are staying with us right now for about three years.
We're pretty good at leasing up assets, but we've got room to go. Our pre-leasing can get better. The way that we're identifying value-add opportunities through our lead generation funnels and the types of customers we're trying to attract and acquire into our business. We're going to spend some time talking about that. Tim's going to talk to you a little bit about ProCare. You hear us talk about it, and I know many of you, and we've spent some time in some one-on-one investor meetings before, and we mention this word ProCare a lot in terms of our approach to the asset and the overall resident experience. It's more than a word. I think you'll walk away today understanding this is a core part of how we run our business, and it's a differentiator in terms of our approach to the asset and also the resident.
We're going to spend a little bit of time talking about ancillary opportunities. Specifically, what are those key areas we're focused on in the foreseeable future, and how do we think that can impact our business over the long term? We're also going to spend some time letting you get under the hood and understand how we think about the real estate. What's the kind of asset management approach we have as a business? What are those core principles that we're going to stand by, location, scale, and density? What that means to us internally and how we operate that. John and Tim are both going to spend some time talking to you there. Lastly, what does this all mean? How much upside is left in this business going forward?
How do we see the future generally for Invitation Homes? I think you're going to walk out of here today as bullish about the opportunity as perhaps we are, and it'll reinforce that we're not done. We're just getting started. We are in the first innings of what we think single-family leasing or the single-family leasing business can be. Let me talk a little bit about the team. These three guys up here, myself included, you know the three of us. You get to spend a lot of time with Ernie, Charles, and I at different conferences.
I think what I'm most excited about is we've got a lot of the team here today, a few of which are going to spend a lot of time getting under the hood with you, talking about what makes the engine run at Invitation Homes, and what are our processes and best practices that we use to approach the business. John Gibson, our Executive Vice President of Portfolio Management, is going to talk to you a little bit about the revenue management curve. He's going to get into how we invest, how we sell, what are the types of triggers for us in terms of risk-adjusted returns, and how do we think about that going forward.
Tim Lauthner, who's going to really get into the weeds on ProCare and the expense side of the house and walk you through what are some of the best practices that we're putting into our business today that are lending itself to some of that outperformance that you'll continue to hopefully see in the future. Jiggs Foster, our Senior Vice President of really all things marketing, but hyper-focused on the customer experience side of the business. He's going to walk you through what our customer looks and feels like today and how we're attracting that customer. How are we refining the approach to what types of customers we ultimately want to attract to our business and why that matters. Alicia MacPhee. Alicia is a really unique leader in our business. Alicia's been with us from the beginning and now runs our entire East Coast operations.
There is nobody as well-versed as how the field operates in our business as Alicia MacPhee today. We're excited to have them with us to also speak. There's a myriad of other folks here that are with us today to talk to you about what it means to be Invitation Homes and how we see the business going forward. Let's talk a little bit about the schedule. I'm going to lead us through this first section called Surveying the Track. I'm going to hand it off to Charles, who's going to get a little deeper into the green shoes and what that means. It must be the shoes. What is the IH way? How do we think about acquisitions? How do we think about our rebuy analysis?
Is our revenue management curve set up in a way that we're winning now, or is there room for improvement? Ultimately, as I mentioned earlier on ProCare and the resident cycle, is that just a word or what is it? It is more than a word, and we're going to show you. We're going to walk you through that process and lifecycle of a resident and where the different touch points of ours are so that we can influence not only the customer experience but probably put ourselves in a better position for renewal. Talk a little bit more in-depth about how that works. After that, we'll take a small break, and we'll have plenty of time. There will be a lot of us in green shoes walking around. If you want to ask any questions during the break, feel free. We'll come back.
Ernie will jump into how we're going to grow our lead, the external growth, how we think about the asset management approach, and the ways that we want to continue to invest in the business. We will leave plenty of time towards the end of the day for Q&A. If you've got a question while any of us are presenting, please write it down, and at the end of the day, we'll be more than happy to have the entire management team up here to take questions. Sound good? All right. Let's jump into it. I want to spend one second just talking about some of the macros. Some of this you guys already know, and you cover across a lot of your different businesses. I want to talk about two of things that really are pushing some of the most extreme tailwinds towards single-family rental.
First of all, there's about 125 million households in the U.S. Simple math is two-thirds of the country owns, one-third of the country leases something in one way, shape, or form. Of the 45 million households that are leasing today, roughly 16 million of those are leasing a single-family home in one way, shape, or form. Now, in that cohort of 16 million, 2%, let's call it maybe 300,000 units are institutionally managed. It's a really small number at the end of the day. Many of you in this room probably own a rental property, or your brother, your sister, your parents. It's a mom-and-pop industry. 98% of what we would say is a single-family detached home for lease is owned by a one-off person or run by a small third-party management company. Doesn't give you some of the best-in-class approaches that institutional management can.
Furthermore, there's a rising demand on our way in terms of the demographic profiles and the likely net household formations that are going to occur over the next decade. There's going to be somewhere around 12.5 million households formed in the next 10 years. As you start to think about what are the kind of the psyche shifts that are going on, and then you start to kind of parlay that with what's Invitation Homes' core customer, let's talk about that for just a second. Our average customer today is about 39 years old and makes about $100,000 of combined income in that household. Okay. They're staying with us for about three years. Rent-income ratio, close to 5 to 1. That's also a unique differentiator for our business.
Charles will spend more time talking about that later. Behind that customer, say our average age is 39, there's 65-plus million people between the ages of 20 and 35 coming our way right now. That is an extremely large customer set that are delaying certain things like homeownership, and you see some of the statistics on the right. Just in the last 40 to 50 years, we've seen a real shift in, call it, the way the psychology of the average renter, the average owner, is changing. Fannie Mae recently just did a study where they talked about what are some of the decisions that are impacting your decision on owning versus renting? Just look at the last three years.
In the last three years, 42% of renters in 2016, this is all post-crisis, mind you, thought, "I'd likely want to own a home at some point in the future." That number is down to 18% of current renters. Choice, quality of choice, the opportunity to lease, flexibility, being down payment light, all of these things are impacting decisions. Another kind of interesting statistic is you just think over the last decade, the average age of somebody getting married has gone from 24 to 28. It's the biggest jump we've seen in over five decades in terms of that type of decision-making. People are delaying choices, and people are also in a little bit of a different economic footprint in your late 20s. For us, we see this as a massive opportunity for our business.
We're going to have somebody who's likely got a little bit bigger wallet, probably need a better located proximity to the things that are going on in their life. May or may not have kids at that point. As we think about our own customer profile, it's typically cohabitating kind of partnership or marriage with two kids. That's our average customer today. All the demographic data is suggesting that we're going to see more and more of that natural demand coming our way. Let's talk about supply for a second. Again, I don't think this is a lot of new news for many of you in this room, but we need somewhere on an annual basis of between 1.6 and 1.7 million units between single-family and multi-family to come into the supply side of U.S. housing every year.
If you just look at the last 8-10 years, we've been delivering somewhere between 1.2 million-1.3 million units on an annual basis. It's really safe to say that we've probably underserved our total portfolio, call it need as a country, by 2 million-3 million units over the last decade. Now, couple that with what I said earlier, we're going to have net household accretion of, say, 12.5 million units over the next decade. We're still only delivering 1.4 million-1.5 million units a year right now. We are going to have a massive amount of demand for higher barrier to entry, infill-located product that's at a reasonable price point. All of this kind of fundamental shift is heading, quite frankly, to our portfolio's way, and we've already started to feel and experience some of that along the way up to this point.
The type of supply that's being built, it's a lot different than it was even a decade ago or 20 years ago. It's almost, in terms of size and proximity and location, it's largely different for a first-time buyer today than it was even a decade ago. If you just look at from where the average builder was building 1,800 sq ft and lower to what percentage of deliveries today are at 1,800 sq ft or lower, it's almost in half. It's gone from 37% to 23%. You start to think about, well, what kind of price points are we talking about here? You can see on the graph on the left that most of the median-type price points across IH markets are at a much higher price point, $350,000, $450,000, which you would never consider entry-level, right?
You start to couple high costs, limited amount of supply that are coming into the space, need for affordable product at relatively predictable price points, and the opportunity to be down payment light or have flexibility of choice, the options for a leasing lifestyle become pretty compelling. You start to think about, well, what about the cycles? Are we in an upcycle? What happens if we get into a slow cycle? I'd say, look, it's safe to say that today we're in a pretty healthy environment, generally speaking. The economics of our country obviously are far better than other places in the world today, but we're still seeing growth. I'd put us in that kind of higher growth cycle right now. When we're in one of those cycles, we have great rent growth in our markets.
We have a massive amount of demand for product. We're even in an environment today with pretty low interest rates, and we're not seeing the needle move all that much in terms of jump to homeownership. Even in our own portfolio, that number's been pretty consistent in the last three years. About 8%, more or less, of our entire portfolio cycles into homeownership on a year-over-year basis. Okay. That number hasn't really changed. About 22%-25% of our move-outs depending on the quarter, cyclical. As you start to think about, well, what happens if things slow down or we see less growth? Well, I can speak from personal experience. 2009 and 2010, we had 1,000 single-family rentals in Phoenix prior to forming Invitation Homes. Our occupancy was stellar.
You had to be a little bit sensitive to rate and what was going on in your market, but the cost to move and those barriers for people in a slowing environment are even more difficult than I would argue in a rising environment. Furthermore, we see an opportunity to invest. In a moment where we start to see a market that we're particularly bullish on start to slow down, we actually see more of a buying opportunity. A good example of this for us real-time right now is Seattle. Seattle's a market where for basically the last 3 years, we've had about 3 weeks of supply in that market. Today, it's somewhere between 2-3 months. We're seeing meaningful opportunities right now to invest in a market like Seattle, where we can still see really, really interesting risk-adjusted returns for our business.
High single to low double digits on an unlevered basis. That's compelling. As the market starts to slow down, SFR, particularly Invitation Homes, actually have the ability to be maybe more of a net buyer in some of those times, in some of those cycles. Now, put aside cycles, don't forget what we talked about before. There's a massive wave of folks coming our way. The demographic profile is so unique of what's about to come into our business over the next decade. Mature, stable residents that want flexibility of choice. This is why we would argue that not only SFR, but truly Invitation Homes deserves a premium valuation. We have a unique asset class in today's environment for a number of different reasons. One, you guys understand it, and we talked a little bit about it.
The long-term supply and demand fundamentals are off the charts across really the single-family housing space generally. Talked a little bit about this, but we have a sticky customer, one that stays almost 2 times the average length of multifamily today. Guys, we're good, but we're not great yet. We've got a lot of runway for improvement to make that experience even better. We're going to talk about that even further. If our customer gets to 4 years on average stay with us, this could very well be a 97%+ occupancy business with all the same type of rate growth that you've seen historically in our book of business.
The diversity of our assets and our ability, John Gibson's going to go into this a little bit later, to look at not just markets and not just sub-markets, but school districts, streets, charter school areas, gentrification zones, all these little meticulous things that in any other sector, you've got to make a pretty big trade to have exposure there, we can do on a one-off basis. We've done that deliberately by design in terms of how we built the portfolio. Share a couple of examples here momentarily. Lastly, I think this may be one of the most underserved parts of our business that people don't fully appreciate, is how liquid single-family housing is in the U.S. There's $5.5 million transactions in the U.S. today. On an annualized basis, we represent the smallest fraction of those $5.5 million on a run rate basis.
For us to be able to go in and out of markets, whether we're buying, selling back to an end user, or ultimately looking for an opportunity to asset manage maybe in a little bit different way, the fact that we can do that on a unit-by-unit basis is truly unique to SFR. Our value doesn't just lie to those of you in the room. Quite frankly, there's a value on every one of our assets or retail value, I would say, to the average homebuyer. You've seen that from us, where we have had assets appreciate and get beyond what we think is a warranted risk-adjusted return for investors, we've sold that asset. Great example of this would be in markets like North Hollywood, where we bought homes for $300,000 and $400,000, $500,000 five, six years ago. They're trading between $1 million and $1.2 million.
That, call it a three cap or a two and three-quarter cap type property, can be sold back to the end user, and then we can take that capital and reinvest in parts of the country where we see meaningful risk-adjusted returns at a five and a half or whatever you want to think about it. That is really unique to our business. There are not a lot of businesses that have that optionality to stay long on an asset in your portfolio or to incrementally cull. Very unique to SFR. I've talked a little bit about some of the macros, but I want to make sure that I also spend a little bit of time talking about how we built this business. I have the unique opportunity because I've been here from day one.
Me and some partners started Invitation Homes in 2012. We had really some core principles that we were not going to deviate from, and we still don't to this day, that center really around three things in our business. First is location, location. It's the age-old principle in real estate. You cannot compromise great locations. They, in the tougher times, will see you through the day, and in the really good times, will be some of your out-performers. The other part of the business that we knew immediately from past experience was you got to have scale. Our definition of scale, quite frankly, has changed over time as we've gotten better and more efficient at running our business. Lastly, we knew we wanted to be a self-sustained operator. We were not going to outsource that experience for a number of reasons.
We wanted to optimize and continue to build more efficiencies into the business. Two, it's a lot easier to get things right if your eye is on assets. There's a motto in our company, one look's worth a thousand words. We talked about it with our investors on our weekly calls that happen every Monday, our directors of investment that happen every Monday. That call has happened every Monday for seven years, and we say one look's worth a thousand words. When you look at homes and you look at how you want to service that home or how you want to service that resident, it's one thing to say that home's in 75225 ZIP Code.
It's another thing to say that home's in 75225, and by the way, has two of the best charter schools in the state, and it doesn't back up to power lines. You want to be on Robin Street versus Montgomery for those very reasons. That is called being local, eyes on assets, and that's what that means to us. In terms of how we design the footprint and the shape of the business, we largely covered what we would call coastal markets, but really the smile part of our country. Dominant positions in the West Coast and parts of Florida. I'd be safe to say that this portfolio that you see today is next to irreplaceable in today's environment. You cannot get 80,000 high-quality homes today with this kind of exposure to some of the highest growth markets in the country. It would take years, if not decades, in today's environment.
I'd also argue that there are some really strategic moats in our business that we think are going to serve us over the long haul. 12,500 homes in California is a great example of that. That type of footprint is almost irreplaceable today. Very hard to go into those markets and aggregate any type of scale. We'll talk more about what that scale means. I think just as highlighted on this page, you guys understand what's happened over the last five, six, seven years and where the housing demand is going to continue to go. This is where you want to be at the end of the day. It was by design to be coastal. As you start to think about, well, what are the ramifications of being in those markets? I think the headline here is really two times.
We're seeing two times the average household formation, where people want to live in our markets. North of 60% differential in terms of the types of jobs and job growth, wage growth, things that are happening in our markets. That's meaningful. It just means it's where the action is. It's where people want to live. It's where the better schools are starting to pop up. Different communities are establishing themselves. I think there's a lot of warm weather, generally speaking, in some of the markets we're in. Country is continually moving south. John Burns says, and I'm a little bit of a Burns disciple. I don't mean to quote him as often as I do, but country basically, if you look at it on a map, is moving a foot a day south in terms of where demographics are going.
You want to be in the sunbelt, ultimately speaking. Let's talk about what it means to be eyes on assets, to be local. There's a couple of examples here on the board. I talked about Southern California. We have a little over 8,000 homes in Southern California. It's unique to our footprint. As we were building that portfolio, there were some very deliberate reasons as to why we built it the way we did. You'll see this pocket kind of to the northwest, which is kind of the San Fernando Valley. That is like your cookie-cutter 1,800 to 2,000 square foot home built in 1950 or 1960 with a 40 to 60-minute kind of commute time into West Wilshire in Downtown L.A. It is a commuter neighborhood for folks that basically work in L.A.
On the flip side of that, because we are local, I'd add the average tenure of our directors today is over six-plus years with us, our directors of investment. Another great example would be the stadium in Carson. The new football stadium that's going up near LAX. As they started to kind of identify two, three sites, we started to go in and really buy real estate in some of those markets. Funny enough, the current site where they're building the new football stadium today, we have over a dozen homes in what was a newly built neighborhood in the early 2000s that literally butt up to the stadium, or they share a common wall. We've seen the values of those properties go from anywhere from $400,000, $450,000 to $800,000, $850,000.
Being local, understanding where the action's going to be, where the value's going to continue to create, is something that's part of our core ethos. That's a higher barrier to entry market. Seattle would be a similar high barrier to entry market, but you can play it a couple of different ways. King County specifically is a market where you're going to see limited opportunities in today's environment. We were lucky enough that we went in early. We have a significant amount of scale in King, but that is your true blue downtown infill type of product. North Snohomish and South Spanaway are great examples of called commuter communities. Kent, Auburn, some of those kind of suburb or kind of collar communities that are around downtown, where you can find great values, but you can find really good access to transportation corridors and major job centers.
Spanaway, specifically to the south, is also kind of a tweener. Someone can live in Spanaway and work in Seattle. They can live in Spanaway and go to Tacoma. It's a unique approach. Michael Lapointe, our director of investment for Seattle, has been there from the day we started. Our high-touch approach to investing is continually influencing not only the way we want to buy and sell, but future asset management decisions along the way. Phoenix is a good example of a little bit of a lower barrier to entry market, I would say. There's a lot of operators that have scale in Phoenix, but what kind of scale? We were pretty deliberate. We invested only inside the 101 and 202 beltways. There were a couple of reasons for that. In the Southeast Valley, for example, we wanted to make sure that we were surrounding Gateway Airport.
North of 1.2 million customers are going through that airport now on an annual basis. There's so much growth happening in the Southeast Valley. On the west side, we wanted to make sure that we didn't get west of the 202, and that we were inside the Loop 101 in the north part of Peoria. We've also had a ton of success buying gentrifying product in and around Tempe, that 101 corridor, because that's where all the action and the jobs are happening. We're actually having a lot of success buying 30 and 40-year-old homes, putting our Invitation Homes standard on them that are right up in and around ASU and seeing a massive premium to our underwritten values. That's what I mean when I talk about being local and understanding the business. We are centrally supported, for sure.
You cannot compromise that high-touch approach that happens in the field. We're going to talk a little bit more about a lot of these things that I've touched on here early, but there's really just kind of 4 key principles to being eyes on markets. 1 is local, as I mentioned earlier. 2 is proactive, and you're going to walk away after listening to Tim understanding that we don't just say being proactive or having a ProCare approach to our business, but we do it. It's in everything we do. It's systematic. I think we've had limited time to engage with you guys in one-on-ones. I think today's going to be pretty fulfilling as you start to see our approach, how detailed that approach is to the business.
I hope you come away with an appreciation of understanding how much collaboration happens between ops, the investment team, financial group, and then that go-between between the field organization of 800-plus personnel and the 200-plus people across our two corporate offices that help putting the tools, systems, and resources in place for our business to be operated in the field. Lastly, where we think that efficiency has an opportunity to go. There is so much upside. We do some things really well, but there's a lot we can do better, and we're really excited about where the company's going in terms of some of these new initiatives. You can take my word for it, but numbers don't lie.
When you look at the way we've had best-in-class revenue growth across any residential sector, really, for the last 3 years, it's evident that not only have we built a great portfolio and that we're capturing really good tailwinds, but we're running a great business. We're executing on that demand as a company. As you start to think about the NOI in our business, and the way that we can continue to optimize those efficiencies, we've also had best-in-class NOI. Some of that is tailwinds, but a lot of it is execution. You have to be full, you have to run a good business, and you got to know what you're buying, where and when and how, and how to do it.
I'm excited for you guys to get under the hood today with us and see not only our philosophy, but how we actually execute on this plan. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Charles Young, our Chief Operating Officer.
Thank you, Dallas. Good morning, everyone. I'm Charles Young, our COO. I've been with the company for over seven years. Been in the industry for seven-plus years, one of the early adopters in the space. I'd like to transition our conversation to discuss our platform and introduce you to the Invitation Homes way. Let's start with our purpose. Why are we here? What do we do? As I think about it, what we do is we make sure that we're always considering the resident. We think about the thousands, the tens of thousands of families that live in our homes and create memories. We know that if we provide the right service, if they're happy, we're going to win. We succeed when they are pleased.
If we deliver the right house in the right neighborhood with the right service, we're going to post great results. That spirit shows up in our mission. Together with you, we make a house a home. When you take this mission, vision, value, you look at it all together holistically, what I see is collaboration and continuous improvement. We've been doing that over the last seven years. You can see how we just have this steady march to improve. I'd like to illustrate that. That spirit is captured in a video we created tha`t has our actual residents and a few of our employees in it. Let's start there, and then we'll jump into the platform.
What does it mean to lease friendlier? Simply put, it means to lease from Invitation Homes.
It's really refreshing to have a company that cares about the home I live in and whether or not I'm happy in it.
My children and I love our home. We love our neighborhood, we love the school.
It has just meant the world to us to have our first home together and to have a space where we can have everybody over.
Having a backyard barbecue. I actually like lawn care. I like cutting the grass.
I have a little beagle named Rosie, and she really enjoys having space to run around.
This is the first time that I've ever leased a home. I didn't expect it to be as easy as it was.
Invitation Homes has this amazing Smart Home technology. They know what we want.
Leasing from Invitation Homes gives us so much confidence because they are a professional leasing company.
You can honestly tell that they care about the homes that they lease and the people that's within them.
They stand by what they say, and they're there for you.
No wonder we're the nation's premier home leasing company. Invitation Homes. Lease friendlier.
We hope you see from that video, it represents that collaborative culture, where we collaborate not only with our employees and vendors, but with our residents. How do we do that? Let's transition the conversation and talk about our operating model, which we're all very proud of, and it's built for the long haul. We see this as it's designed to maximize our effectiveness and think about our future growth. We've been at this for a while, so this model is based on our seven-plus years of experience through multiple mergers, taking the best of all the talent you see in the back of the room, but also throughout our whole company, to come up with the best model that we've evolved over time. It optimizes performance by taking advantage of our national scale, but also utilizing our local density to maximize operational efficiency. Okay.
I'll start over here. When you look at the centralized services that we're able to provide, with 80,000 homes, what you have is the ability to really have the power of that scale. When you think about that, you should think about a centralized national call center. Think about the marketing power that Jiggs is going to talk to you about in a little bit. Think about procurement and our ability to buy and have power of purchasing across all of our 17 markets and 80,000 homes. You can think about resident screening and lease administration. You put all that together, it has real power. As Dallas mentioned, it's really about having a local presence. It's about having a connection with our residents, that we're there in the market with them.
It's also about having the ability to get to that home and put the eyes on our assets, as Dallas talked about. That's the key. As you look at that's here in the dark green boxes. This starts right here with our vice president of operations. These VPOs, all of our field teams report up to them. Ultimately we have our east and west, the VPOs report to them. We have one of our leaders of the east region, Alicia, here. She will walk you through some of what we do on the ground. We have 10 VPOs that run our 17 markets. We further subdivide underneath them into what we call pod groups. We have 34 pod groups that are led by our portfolio directors.
Those portfolio directors have their teams under them, their property management team, their leasing team. That's the connection with the resident. The residents know who to call when they need to be serviced. Again, you look at that number, 34 pods and 80,000 homes, we're averaging around 2,300 homes per pod. The other thing I want to point out, I'm not going to go into a lot of detail here, is underneath the VPOs is our RTM directors, rehab, turn, and maintenance, critical roles who are the ones that keep their eyes on the assets. They're out in the field servicing our homes. Tim Lauthner, our EVP of RTM, is going to walk you through that structure in detail. Bottom line, when you take all of this, that's the efficient local structure that we have. Okay?
Before I jump into an example, I want to highlight one more thing. We have our investment management team that's tied in very nicely with the operations team. You're going to hear from John Gibson, who's going to talk about how do we run that? What are the details in terms of analyzing our markets, looking at pricing, what markets do we want to expand in, move out of? What specific homes do we want to dispose of? They not only have a national look at it, but they have investment professionals, as Dallas talked about, sitting next to our ops teams, so we can make sure we make the right decisions on our assets. That's a great example of our collaboration and having the eyes on assets. Let's bring the model to life a little bit. This is Atlanta.
Atlanta is our largest market, over 12,000 homes in Atlanta of our 80,000. You'll see we have it broken down into different colors here. We have four pod teams in Atlanta. You do the math real quick, that's 3,100. That's more efficient than the national average that we talked about. Well, how do we do that? We do that because of that local density. Each one of those dots is a home or a cluster of homes. It's pretty powerful when you look at it. That's where we get that local presence. That's where we minimize the drive time between homes, what we call minimizing windshield time. Our ability to service those homes gets that much better, that much more efficient. That operational efficiency that we strive for is there. What's funny about this is I think back to where we started over the seven years.
We started, when we put the pod concept together, we started with the idea, let's start with 300 homes. We said, "This makes sense." We quickly got into it and said, "Oh, we can do better." We doubled, more than doubled. We got to 700 homes. We thought we were doing well. We continued to grow through some mergers. Prior to the most recent merger between Sway and IH, we were at 1,400 homes. Feeling good about it. Today, we are at 2,300. What you see here is foreshadowing to where we can go. Atlanta is running at over 3,000. Again, Atlanta is our biggest market. We have other markets that are smaller, but what it tells you is we have the ability to grow into some of these other markets and get even more efficient than we are today.
As you look at that, the other metric I'd bring up is we also look at what number of homes per employee do we have in the field? Going a few years back, we were around 50 homes per employee. Pre-merger, around 70, 75. Today, we're running north of 90-95 homes per employee, with again, a market like Atlanta running north of 100. We have a couple of markets that are running north of 100 because of the size, local density that we have and the efficiency that we can create. Powerful image of what we're doing currently, but we'll continue to get better with this continuous improvement and collaboration that we talked about. I'm just kicking off this section of the day. What are we going to do?
We want to walk you through what we call a curated resident experience, curated asset experience. How do we buy a house, get it ready, price it, lease it, service it? We're going to walk you through that experience. I just scratched the surface. I came in high level. What's our structure? I'm going to turn it over here shortly to John Gibson. He's going to start with the acquisition side of our business. John's purview also includes the revenue management side. He's going to spend a minute talking about the revenue management side of the business as well. John's going to turn it over to Tim Lauthner, and Tim's going to walk you through that resident service and ProCare experience and get into the details of that side of the business. Thank you for allowing me to have time to set this up.
With that, I'm going to turn it over to John Gibson. Thank you.
Hand off the thing. Thank you. Thank you, Charles. Thank you everybody for being here. I know what you're thinking. Finally, somebody that looks like a runner. I've got my shoes on. I'm really excited to be here today. I've been at Invitation Homes for the last three years, my tenure is actually quite a bit shorter than some of my colleagues on the senior management team. I say I got here as fast as I could. I am responsible, along with my partners, Peter DeLillo and Dan Scanlon, for our investment and asset management group. We're going to talk today about how we think about acquiring and managing the revenue of these homes, and later on, we'll talk a little more about asset management.
Before I get started, I want to talk about some common attributes of the company that we think helps us to continuously improve our business. You've heard these things with other people today, but I want to talk about them again. First of all, it's our shareholders, some of whom are in this room. They provide us the capital to acquire homes, the capital to invest in our homes. That key attribute is very meaningful. Next is our residents. Our residents that live in our homes, they tell us the types of homes they want to live in, the locations they want to live in, the value they see for those homes. That feedback is critical. We have our purpose-built portfolio with scale and density in our markets. That portfolio, with our rich operating history, provides us so much insight into the business. Finally, it's the people.
Our first-in-class operating teams on the ground running the business every single day, and people like me in the central office, in the corporate office, I like to say, the back office, there to support those teams as they run the business. Shout out to a lot of our folks in the field that are listening today. If you're listening live, hopefully, you're multitasking. Let's start talking about our acquisition process and listen to those themes. Our acquisition process combines local expertise with central support. It's a locally driven proposition for us because SFR is local. Let's start on the right side of the page. We have built a proprietary system, Acquisition IQ, to help us efficiently manage acquisition, the process from soup to nuts, from multiple channels. That's really critical for our business given the scale of the opportunity and the scale of our portfolio.
Next, we go through a rigorous capital allocation planning process once a year and continue to refine that throughout the year, trying to make sure that we're thoughtful about which locations we want to invest in going forward. Keep in mind, at the beginning of the year, we don't know the particular homes that may be available, but we know where we want those homes to be and the types of homes we want to buy. That's critical. We do real-time mining of the MLS to quickly make sure we can cull through those opportunities and get the right opportunities sent to our directors. Finally, we've, of course, built proprietary underwriting tools to support our business. There's a reason the end-market investment directors and our local teams are on the left side of the page, because I believe that's where we differentiate ourselves.
We have our on-the-ground investors in-market. They've been with IH for over five years. They've got much longer experience in their marketplace, buying and selling homes, seeing the market evolve. They put eyes on every single asset before we buy it. That's a hard and fast rule from Dallas. We have to have eyes on our assets. They have spent many years building local relationships in the marketplace with the brokers that transact the buyers and the sellers. That makes us see every opportunity we possibly can in our market. Finally, that best-in-class operating team, our colleagues in the RTM space that Tim will talk to you about, our property management and leasing colleagues, it's a collaborative effort. Without them, we can't enhance and improve our underwriting.
At the end of the day, they have to agree that these are the right opportunities because they have to operate them over the long term. That's really critical. Next, I want to talk to you about something that you've heard Dallas say many times. We are channel agnostic but location specific. What does that mean for those of you that haven't heard it? We want to make sure we're seeing all of the opportunities in our marketplace, regardless of where they're coming from. Of course, we from the very beginning, and continue today, to utilize some very traditional channels for buying homes. The broker MLS network. We still participate in the auction process. For example, in Seattle and Atlanta, we continue to participate there. We also continue to look at bulk transactions.
We have the larger bulk transaction we talked about earlier in the year, but we also did, for example, an 18-unit transaction in Seattle. Those types of bulk transactions are out there for us to do as well. As the business has evolved and as certain new channels have evolved in the business, we've also made sure to look at that inventory also. For example, with iBuyers, we continue to buy homes with our iBuyer partners in the market. We want to be one of their first choices to go to when they have inventory to trade that makes sense for IH. We're also building relationships with builders. In fact, we recently closed in the Dallas market, a handful of, I think about 12 homes with a new builder in a market where we wanted to be.
We remain very focused on being in the right locations. We do not care where the home is coming from, which channel. Finally, we're working on innovating a new process, a sale leaseback program, where we can go to end user owners and help them monetize equity to stay in the home, then begin experiencing the leasing lifestyle because they love their homes. We think that's going to be an exciting opportunity in the future. The point is, we look across all the channels. Let's talk a little bit about our centralized team and how we go down the funnel to our local markets. We built this proprietary technology. We have all of the channels feeding into that technology to help us look at these opportunities. That's coming into the top of the funnel.
If you go to number two, you see that the technology helps us focus the list based on the buy box that we've put together, the specific locations we want to be in. In the past 12 months, that helped us narrow down the opportunities to 20,000 homes. Still a big basket of homes, but we narrowed it down to 20,000 homes. Our investment directors in the markets underwrite these opportunities along with centralized analytical support. From that, we ended up deciding to move forward making offers on 5,000 of their homes. The point is, the technology helps narrow the list. Those directors with their local expertise are critical to make sure we're moving forward on the right opportunities. Of course, not every offer we make is accepted.
In the past 12 months, of the 5,000 offers, over 2,000 of them have been accepted and put under contract. The process continues. We want to keep that rigor going down the funnel. After we put those under contract, our local directors stay involved in doing the underwriting. Our RTM colleagues in the field help us doing inspections and writing the rehab budgets. Our leasing and property management teams, through our investment committees in the region, talk about the rental levels and make sure they affirm the underwriting. This rigor continues down the funnel and results in some cases where we decide not to move forward. Of the 2,300 homes we put under contract, we closed almost 1,700 of those, 1,650.
We ended up canceling over 300 of them, and we still have another 300-400 that are still under contract and in process. The funnel's always moving. The point here is the technology is working. We're seeing better opportunities to take the time of our directors and our local teams to look at, along with the support of the central team. We remain rigorous down that funnel to make sure we're getting the right opportunities for Invitation Homes. Let's talk a little bit about our approach to market analysis. You know we have 17 markets. If that's one thing you've learned today or probably knew coming in the room, that's true for Invitation Homes. We obviously look at external market data when we're thinking about our marketplace.
All of the typical economic data that you'd want us to look at as we think about how these markets are going forward. We also look at our own internal market performance indicators. We have a lot of visibility into the marketplace. We have 80,000 homes that are rental. We have scale and density in our markets. This gives us tremendous insight into the on-the-ground operating environment, and that goes into the equation as well. We take it a step further. When I got involved with the business, we talked about how do we think about asset managing, and they were so far ahead of me coming into this because they think about it at a more micro level. I almost liken it to thinking about large assets in the multifamily space. We've taken our 17 markets, and we've further drilled down to 235 total sub-markets.
These sub-markets were built around common geography, but also common home attributes and common operating attributes. This helps us to think about the markets in more bite-sized pieces. Those sub-markets are then aggregated into the operating portfolios you heard Charles speak about earlier. That analysis at the sub-market level helps us to be more specific. We do remain very bullish on Seattle, for example, but there may be particular sub-markets where we think we'll get the best long-term risk-adjusted returns. We go through the capital allocation plan. That analysis also tells us places where we may want to take risk out of the portfolio, where we think we're going to be less successful going forward. Again, that rigorous capital allocation planning. It gets down to the neighborhoods.
We want our infill locations with good schools, low crime, close to job centers, the places our residents want to live. That's clear to us. We've been in this business. They continue that feedback to us of where they want to live. We look at the housing demographics, municipal factors, HOA, location scores. All of this comes together in our analysis of where we want to be. Then we, of course, look at the property characteristics. What type of physical characteristics of the property make us most successful? All of this goes into the analysis in setting our buy box. Here's the one thing I want you to remember if you remember nothing else about our acquisition process. It is a locally driven business. Those experienced directors, the ones we want to always be making the buy/sell decisions, are still making those decisions today.
We've built centralized support, scale, and technology to help enable them to be able to increase that volume as we see fit and to support them in this environment where we have more channels, but they're still making those decisions. That's what I think will make us long-term successful in this business. Now let's talk about revenue management. Revenue management is about a consistent feedback loop for us. We have a centralized revenue management team and system that helps start the process each time. We have field teams with on-the-ground operating experience. Common theme, right? We have this giant portfolio with a lot of operating history. These things are constantly fed into the conversation about how to set rents on homes because our revenue management is about discovering the right price for the home.
Our revenue management team reviews macro statistics to identify opportunities while the local teams are busy running the business, and the feedback from both of them is constantly fed back into the model. I'll get back to this at the end, but the point is, with time and experience, this revenue management model continues to get smarter about our business. Let's talk about the tool itself. We call it Potenza, is the name of our revenue management tool. It takes in quite a bit of different data points. Obviously, it takes in marketplace data, resolve data. It takes in economic trends that we want to see. We also are constantly looking at the competitive situation on the ground as well, more broadly than just the actual comparable homes. See that middle channel there, the internal data.
Again, think about the rich visibility to information we have as it relates to our revenue management process. We have scale and density in our markets. We have perfect visibility to how we on the ground are operating and what rental values are available for our portfolio. We take all of this into the mix. We've gone through building algorithms to build similarity scoring between our own homes and external comparable homes to make sure that we're thinking about how to adjudicate those comps in the system the right way. That all goes through the algorithm, ultimately resulting in a pricing recommendation for all new and renewal leases. We'll talk about this in a minute, but we do this 2,000 to 3,000 times a week. We do pricing runs on 2,000 to 3,000 homes, just given our scale. We're doing over 100,000 pricing recommendations a year to start the process.
We had to build the scale for speed. Let me take you through the journey. You actually are getting a screenshot of the Potenza system here. What happens is, we'll get a move-out notice. Let's talk about new leasing. Our homes are placed into the revenue management tools queue, if you like. We run the pricing with the algorithms behind the scene, completely objective, and it comes out with initial pricing recommendations. Our revenue management analysts that are assigned specific market coverage, they then review those pricing recommendations and make adjustments as they see fit. Maybe particular outliers that they want to take a closer look at, potentially. As hard as we work on it, the system is obviously not always got it 100% right, we need those analysts with their experience reviewing the results.
We also may say, based on where we see the ball going in certain markets or sub-markets, it may affect how we think about the opportunity in the field. That starts with the centralized team. Next, it's our field teams. They review the pricing recommendations, and they'll make adjustments based on what they see happening in the field. I always tell people, no matter how hard we spin the propellers on our hats back in the central office, we can't know about the new school opening up across the street or the new job center that's coming in or maybe leaving the market, or the neighborhood, particular attributes of the neighborhood that make people want to live in this particular micro location. That's very difficult for the model to see in the data. That's where our local teams come in.
They've got this rich operating history, and they're able to provide that feedback. Once we have the pricing set, homes are listed for pre-marketing on our IH website in the exclusivity process. You'll hear Jiggs talk about that a little bit later. Later down in the pre-marketing journey, we will syndicate it to external websites like Zillow and Realtor.com, for example. The homes are assigned to sub-market specific leasing agents. They have coverage responsibility for a certain set of sub-markets, and they again are in that feedback loop, right? As they see the home and encounter it, they look at the marketplace. They're also giving us feedback, working with the market teams and the revenue management team. Here you see a particular screenshot. Next. There we go. Now the home's on the market. What do we do? Well, we monitor activity.
We monitor activity at the market and the individual home level. It's monitored by both our central revenue management team and our field team. The central team I really think about as really watching things from a 10,000-foot level, paying attention to how things are moving in the marketplace or in the sub-marketplace. The field teams, of course, are doing that, but they have to execute the business day-to-day, right? They have to execute new and renewal leasing. That's where their focus should be and remains, and their revenue management partners are paying attention to how it's all developing. The important thing here is that our scale and our density helps us drive greater confidence in the pricing. What we're doing through that process is monitoring demand. You know the key factors of demand for us.
We look at leads that turn into showings, that turn into applications, that then get approved. Going down the demand funnel, that's how we're looking at our process, and you've got a screenshot of that here for one of our markets. Finally, once we land on a price with an applicant, applicants can be offered multi-term leases, with multi-year rent bumps, and we also may offer specific lease terms if we're trying to manage the lease expiration curve. Our business, our demand, market by market, does change over the course of the year. We've given you an example here of an undisclosed market, but you can see what you might expect. We believe the demand for the housing is going to be strongest in the second quarter here, and we're trying to manage the curve to that.
Obviously knowing we want to also balance that by making sure our field teams have the right resourcing in place to handle it. You can see in this particular example, we've got it managed pretty well, some exposure in October we've got to deal through, but all manageable. We pay attention to this because we want to make sure the revenue curve over the horizon is shaped correctly. The important point here is that we're not managing. We talk a lot in our results about the revenue results quarter-over-quarter, but we're trying to manage long-term revenue growth for the business. That's our focus. We want to make sure the portfolio is in a position to be successful no matter where we are in the year. I hope you've learned a bit about acquisition and revenue management.
It starts with those local teams on the ground and our central support. Now I am really excited to hand this off to Tim Lauthner, my colleague.
Thanks, John. Appreciate it. Good morning, everybody. My name is Tim Lauthner, and I've been with Invitation Homes for seven years now, and I head up our rehab, turn, maintenance, and procurement operations. I get it. You didn't wake up this morning saying, "Yeah, I want to listen to 30 minutes about maintaining a home." It's not sexy. Anybody have a plumber at their house in the recent past? Nobody? Okay. All right. Not sexy, right? Not sexy. I hope to take this time this morning with you guys to tell you about why we take this part of our business so incredibly seriously. I can tell you firsthand, our residents take it very seriously, too. What we're going to talk about today, three things. I'm going to give you an introduction to how we think about maintaining homes. I'm going to get into details about maintenance specifically.
I'm going to tell you a little about our turn process. We often get asked, "What do you do for a living?" I often say, "Well, I'm in real estate." They say, "Well, what do you do in real estate?" I say, "Well, we own and operate single-family homes." They say, "Well, how many homes do you have?" I say, "80,000 homes." They say, "Oh, 1,000 homes." I say, "Well, no, 80,000 homes." "8,000 homes?" "No, 80,000 homes." The very first thing after they have this look of shock, they ask, "How do you maintain 80,000 homes?" Because like you, they've had a plumber at their house recently, and they say, "Wow, this is a pain in the tail." Well, let me explain to you how I respond to that question, how do you maintain 80,000 homes?
What you see here is the map of all of our homes across the U.S., spread out across the 17 markets where we own homes. You go a step further, you look at a market like Southern California, there's about 8,100 homes there. You go one step further, a little more granular, you look at L.A. County and a little bit of Ventura County. You go a little closer to the area around the South Bay, a little bit to the east of the South Bay. You go to Carson, the part of Southern California that Dallas mentioned earlier. You go all the way down to a single house. That is how we look at maintenance, through the lens of a single resident who lives in a single house. You have to look at it that way.
It sounds a bit reverse, but remember, the resident only cares about their experience. I can tell you firsthand that the resident in Atlanta who welcomes home their baby from the hospital, and their HVAC system isn't working in the dead of summer, they don't care that we have 80,000 houses. They care about their house. They care about their baby. I can tell you, the resident in Phoenix whose oven isn't working, and they have family coming over for a holiday, they don't care that we own 80,000 houses either. They care about our house or their house. Same holds true for the family in Seattle that's renting a three-bedroom, two-bathroom home from us, and they've got family in from out of town. What happens when that second shower's not working? Pretty uncomfortable. They don't care that we own 80,000 homes either. They care about their house.
That is how we look at maintenance, one house at a time, one resident at a time. As we look at the programs that we design, the platforms we build, how we communicate, the call centers that they speak with, we think about it through the lens of a single resident, and that is how you have to do it. It takes some creativity because you can't avoid the fact that we have 80,000 houses. Resource efficiency is incredibly important. We have to maximize every single touch point. We have to leverage technology to collapse both time and distance in order to efficiently serve our residents while still applying that same genuine care that they expect when their HVAC system's not working or their oven's not working or that second shower's not working. Part of the secret sauce is stakeholder awareness.
Everybody plays a role in maintaining a home. It's not just Invitation Homes, it's our vendors, and it's even the residents. Making sure that everybody understands their role and that they're accountable for their role and responsibilities, it's really important. What I would tell you is this has shaped our philosophy in terms of how we manage single-family homes. If there's ever a point where we've given people a peek behind the curtain or a taste of the special sauce, this is it. I'm going to tell you about how we think about expense management. You're going to think that it's pretty philosophical, and it is, and I'm going to get to actually how we apply it. I like to watch TV sometimes, and every once in a while, one of those Farmers Insurance commercials comes on, and J.K.
Simmons at the end of it says, "We know a thing or two because we've seen a thing or two." Who's seen that? Okay, good. I'm not the only guy that watches TV. I'd like to think that we know a thing or two because we've seen a thing or two. We've rehabbed 80,000 houses over the last seven years. We turn 25,000 houses a year, and we complete over half a million work orders every single year. We've been doing that for a couple of years now. I'd like to think that we have more experience than anybody in the industry at maintaining homes. Again, 80,000 houses rehabbed, 25,000 turns a year, 500,000 service requests completed. We know a thing or two because we've seen a thing or two. Let me tell you what we've learned along the way. This triangle symbolizes our expense management philosophy.
What I'm telling you, we've told every single associate in our company. We've gone to every single market, we've explained this to every single person, even the maintenance technicians and superintendents. Managing expenses has three parts to it. The first is price. Price is the easy one. Price is really simple. It has a low impact, what it is, you may say, "What do you mean by price?" Price is what you pay for a material, a product, or a service. For example, let's say you need to replace a garbage disposal. A three-quarter horsepower garbage disposal needs to be replaced. What do you pay for the unit? What do you pay for the labor? Together at the national level, our corporate procurement team and our regional teams, we've really dialed in on that price. We are price makers. We are not price takers, folks.
If you think about a single turn, just to kind of dial it down and give you some context, if you think about a single turn, price is one of those things where you get maybe tens of dollars of savings when you do it right. That's what we've found over the last couple of years. When you look at scope, which is the next area of expense management in our philosophy triangle here, its impact is moderate. It's a little harder to implement. You might say, "What do you mean by scope?" Remember, we do 25,000 turns a year. We have 155 superintendents in the field, and every time a superintendent walks into a home, they've got a lot of decisions to make. The question becomes, well, what should we scope on the budget? Should you repair something? Should you replace something?
Should you remove something from the house altogether? Should you clean something? Hundreds and hundreds of decisions for every single house that we turn. We've gone about this very methodically. We've trained in person with our technicians, and we continue to train in person with our superintendents to make good decisions. How much should you paint? Should you repaint the entire house, or does the entire house need to be repainted? At the end of the day, we've got to provide a great service and a great experience for our residents. You have to balance out what you do with the overall experience. We've got to remain committed to delivering a clean, safe, and functional house. Again, it's a pretty broad spectrum in terms of what might be right in the eyes of an individual superintendent.
If price can impact turns at tens of dollars, I would tell you that our experience has shown that scope, the right scope, can impact turns in the hundreds of dollars. You're wondering, okay, we've talked about price and scope, which are the easy ones. What's next? Condition. This is the most important thing, and it's taken us the longest to learn, and it's the condition of the house. It has a massive impact. Let me explain what massive means. If it's tens of dollars for price, hundreds of dollars for scope, if we get the condition right, it can be thousands of dollars on a turn. We know that because we've seen a lot of it. You wonder, well, what is condition? Condition is the condition of the house that we get back from residents.
Remember, residents stay with us one, two, three, four, five years. Everybody plays a role, specifically the residents, in terms of asset preservation and making them aware of what their job is in terms of their responsibilities as part of that asset preservation life cycle. It's really important. They need to know that they're responsible for the air filter changes. They need to know that they're responsible for perhaps touching the GFCI and resetting it so that we're not going to roll a truck. They need to understand what maintaining the landscaping means, mowing their yard, and the importance of it. There's a quote that I like to share with our team. It's this one right here.
If I had one hour to save the world, I would spend 55 minutes defining the problem and only five minutes finding the solution." I think it's Albert Einstein that said that, there's a couple of people on the internet that think that other people have said that. I love the philosophy there. We've spent the 55 minutes out of the hour thinking about this condition. I know that a lot of you are probably saying, "Well, gee, Tim, it's pretty philosophical. Sounds like it might be a business school lecture." It's not. Let me tell you why. Let me go to the next slide here. The ProCare Life Cycle.
The ProCare Life Cycle is taking the ideas that we just discussed, specifically the impact of the condition of the house, and putting it to work as we look at the intersection of our residents and our homes. The ProCare Life Cycle, you've heard this term a lot, ProCare. Charles has talked about it on earnings call. Dallas and Ernie, we've talked about it a lot. Let me tell you exactly what it is. It sounds good, but I want to tell you how real it is. The ProCare Life Cycle, believe it or not, actually starts before the maintenance of the house even starts or before even a resident moves in. It's during the leasing process. When one of our leasing agents explains to residents our ProCare Life Cycle and says, "Hey, Mr. Smith, we're so excited that you're going to be moving into the house.
Let us tell you that we're very active landlords. We want to make sure that the house works for you. We want to make sure that the HVAC system doesn't fail catastrophically. We're in this together. Together with you, we make a house a home. The initial showing, we tell them we're going to be back in 45 days. We've built this great program built on the home building space where we warranty the house. If there's something small that comes up, we'll be back. The message is there that we'll be back. That's really important. Because somebody who doesn't want us coming back to the house twice a year on a proactive basis, they're probably not a good resident for us. They're probably going to do stuff in that house that we don't want them to do. Again, condition. We're setting the expectations early.
What I would tell you as I walk through the rest of this ProCare Life Cycle, there are three things that we are trying to do and at least get two of them on every single touch point. Educate residents. Again, what is your responsibility? What's your role in this relationship? Make repairs while we're there. The last is check the home condition. Folks. We don't have the luxury of every other asset class that many of you look at. We don't have on-site property management. That'd be nice, but it'd be a little awkward, right, if you had a property manager in the living room? Right? "Hey, Bill." "Hey, there." We don't have that luxury. We have to maximize each touch point to make sure that we understand what's going on in the house and that the resident is taking care of it. It's really important.
As I walk through the life cycle, you're going to understand, oh, wow, educating residents, it's pretty darn important. The ProCare resident orientation, this is something that we came across a couple of years ago. Michael, if you were a resident with us, you're saying, "Wait, wait, wait. I'm not a resident." Yeah. If you were a resident with us and you were moving in, one of our superintendents would meet you at the house before you moved in and walk you through the house, show you, this is how the thermostat works. This is how you change an air filter. This is where your air filter is located. This is how you reset a GFCI.
What?
A GFCI. GFCI is that button that you push on the outlet, right? The one that sometimes nothing in your kitchen works. It's usually near a wet area. We teach people how to reset that to make sure that we don't have to roll a technician out to the house. We're going to tell you how the irrigation system works to make sure that you know how to keep your lawn watered. We're going to explain what your responsibility is in terms of lawn care and trimming hedges one foot off the house. It's a very personal experience for every single resident. We walk them through so that in the first couple of days after they've moved in, they're not calling us for something that we could have taught them at the house. Again, being present, being there on-site. Again, we talked a lot about being local.
Being there is critical. You can't teach somebody about their house that they've never lived in by showing them some random video, some generic video of a house that isn't their house. You can't send them a checklist. They're not going to read a manual. That personal touch of that resident orientation is critical. Again, educating folks. By the way, it's three days before they move in, if something's identified that's slightly off, we can make a minor repair because we're sending somebody that knows how to make that repair. The ProCare 45-day maintenance visit, that's the secret sauce right there. We're back at the house.
One of the things that we do that's pretty cool is if a resident has a minor maintenance issue that comes up after they move in, we say, "Hey, would it be all right if we take care of that on your ProCare visit?" Remember, we want to make it convenient for them. The minor stuff we can push off, and they say, okay. We actually have this great technology platform where they can go online and put it on their fridge list. We call it a fridge list. Obviously, if something's really wrong and there's water coming into the house, there's a leak, or maybe if an appliance doesn't work, we're going to roll a truck. It's an emergency. We're not going to wait for the 45 days.
Residents really like this, and we're getting great feedback, and we've been doing this for a while now, and it's a very successful program. Next thing I'll talk about is the work order general property condition assessment program. It's pretty simple, folks. When we go to a house, every time we send a maintenance technician to a house, we're looking at four things, and these four things get entered into a proprietary mobile app that sends that information back to our property managers in the office. What do we look at? You're saying, what are those things? What are the four things? One is, how is the resident taking care of the interior of the home? Second is, how is the resident taking care of the exterior, the landscaping of the home? The third is, do they have any pets?
You might say, "Well, why do we care if they have any pets?" We want to make sure they're on the lease. It's an opportunity to collect an upfront fee, and also the monthly rent for the pets. Again, we don't enjoy the luxury of being on-site, and so every set of eyes that visits that house has to capture that information. The last of the four things is if there's some sort of safety issue, something that our property management team needs to know about that might expose our brand to risk. All four of those things go back through our proprietary platform. Our property management team, they then take action. They'll either call the resident. Maybe they send a letter to the resident. Maybe they say, "Hey, you know what?
I need to come out to the house to take a look at this to make sure that you've addressed this issue." We take that very seriously. Again, all these touch points are part of the ProCare lifecycle. We come back at the six-month maintenance visit, and we take a deep look at how the HVAC system's working, how the appliances are working, how the irrigation system's working, all designed around one thing, putting eyes on asset and making sure that there isn't a catastrophic failure that would really ruin the experience of a resident. The last area is this pre-move-out visit. I'm going to get more into that when we talk about turns, that's also on-site, and it's conducted by our superintendent.
The last part of it is our move-out inspection, and it's something that we do invite our residents to participate in as we look at the house and we assess resident chargebacks at move-out. I share that with you. That's the life cycle. That's ProCare. When you hear Dallas, Charles, or Ernie talk about it, this is what we do, and this is part of our brand promise to residents. This slide, the right local staffing drives the right service experience. You hear us talk about local. Local, local. It is so important to our business. Let me tell you've got to be local in order to run a proactive maintenance program like the ProCare lifecycle. You can't outsource that. All of the ProCare lifecycle experiences are our W2 employees that work on our team, and they understand it.
They understand our philosophy about genuine care and caring for the asset. You might say, "Well, why else is it important to be local?" Well, I'll tell you that the contracting community is a community that you need to put eyes on all the time in order to make sure you're getting great quality of work. A great contracting network doesn't just come about by itself. It requires people to source and vet and onboard and manage and make sure that the quality of the work is up to our expectations. Again, you have to be local. We don't always get everything right. We're not perfect. Our vendors aren't perfect. Our houses aren't perfect.
Having a local presence, having a team where there's boots on the ground, allows us to deploy resources to houses to help residents to calm their nerves and make sure that stuff gets addressed the right way. The last thing I'll tell you is the unfortunate part of any business when you own a hard asset, there are natural disasters. When you have something like an earthquake or a hurricane, having people on the ground that can go and assess and address the condition of the homes, whether they're vacant or occupied, is absolutely critical. You have to deploy people that are on your team that can give you an honest answer and lay out a very thoughtful plan to get assets back into their great conditions so that people can go on enjoying the leasing lifestyle.
Let me tell you a little bit about our staffing structure at the local level. We talked a little bit about the vice president of operations. Charles told you that local structure. We have a director of rehab, turns, and maintenance in almost all of our markets. They cover one to two markets. What we found over time is that it's very easy in our world to have this happen when it comes to rehabs and turns. What do I mean by that? Well, you could go cheap on the rehab or the turn, and then the maintenance side has to deal with it. You could go cheap on the maintenance side, and then the turn folks have to deal with it. When you have a single point of accountability in the market at the director level, you don't get this.
You get a thoughtful approach that makes sure that we deliver a clean, safe, and functional house at the turn, and that we provide great care to residents and make the right decisions for them while they're in the home. This director has three areas, three verticals, that he or she runs. You have the regional rehab and turn side, you have the maintenance side, and then we have the customer service side. Our average director, by the way, has been with us almost six years. They've been with us for a long time, and they understand our offense really well. Our regional rehab and turn team, they manage and execute 100% of our turns. We scope, we budget, we manage, we check the quality control. Nobody else. We will never outsource that. The regional maintenance team, they manage 100% of our work, and we self-perform 50% of it.
W2 employees on our maintenance staff perform 50% of the over half a million service requests that we complete each year. The last area that I'll point out is that customer service rep. As I mentioned earlier, we don't get everything right. Having somebody on the front lines to address those customer service issues is really important. We have that function at the local level. I mentioned that we do 50% of our work in-house. That's the part where we've got to get right. We've got to be efficient. What you see here is a screenshot of our proprietary platform that optimally schedules and routes our maintenance technicians. We have about 250 maintenance technicians on the workforce at Invitation Homes across the 17 markets. What's pretty cool is when you look at this and you see that that's one maintenance technician's day.
Our scheduling and routing algorithm ensures in coordination with our density of homes, it allows us to really reduce our windshield time, allows us to get to more residents. We like to do work in-house. We love to do work in-house, and so do our residents, and they tell us that. What we really like about doing work ourselves is this idea of plus one. If you send a vendor to a house who's a plumber, they can do plumbing work. When we send a handyman from our team, we can do the plumbing work, and we can also say, "Is there anything else that we can do while we're here?" By aggregating that, we're not rolling an additional truck, we're saving money, and quite frankly, we're providing a better experience for our residents.
Our proprietary platform, I'd like to point out over the last 18 months, we've increased our productivity in terms of locations visited per technician per day, which is one of the metrics we look at. We've increased that by 23%. Work orders handled per technician a day, we've increased by 33%. You might say, "Well, wait a second. Why are they different? Why have you improved in one area more than the other?" The answer is simple. One of the things we've been able to do is start using our technology to aggregate work, especially around the ProCare visit, aggregate work so that we can do more each time that we're out there. We haven't even perfected this. What I can tell you is it's really working.
One of the things that you can probably imagine is that we generate a lot of data, and we believe that the truth is in the data. There's that business adage that you can't manage that which you can't measure. We measure just about everything. We don't just measure it at the national level. We look at the regional level. We look at it all the way down to the individual maintenance technician level when it comes to maintenance. We're looking at things like on-time arrival. We're looking at things like how often are they complying with our mobile app rules, checking in, checking out, taking pictures. Again, all the way down to the individual technician. Michael, I'm going to use you again as an example. I hope you don't mind.
If you were a maintenance technician at Invitation Homes, I could tell you exactly what % of work, appliances or cabinetry or irrigation. I could tell you how often you get the job done on your first visit.
100%.
Yeah, 100%. I knew it. That's why I'm using you. You're great. We could also tell you how long it takes you to get jobs done. Every single trade, I could tell you exactly how long, and I could also tell you how the maintenance was scored by our resident, again, at every single trade. I'm going to tell you how this information gets used. Again, we're taking macro data, driving micro decisions. We have a maintenance supervisor in Chicago. His name is Chuck Galletta. I love Chuck. I get a call from Chuck probably about six months ago, and he says, "Hey, Tim, let me tell you something. I've been looking at the data, and I've found that we're really bad at appliances in Chicago." He goes in specifically, and he listed off three maintenance technicians.
He goes, "These folks are really bad at appliances." What did Chuck do? He went out on his own time, set up a camera, videotaped himself. He's actually really good at appliances. Videotaped himself going in and working each of the different types of jobs that these individuals were having a hard time, and posted these videos on YouTube. Now his team can use that information when they're doing work orders, and they don't fully understand how to. I like that song, by the way. They're able to use that information to get more jobs done. We saw their work order completion rate. Again, it's kind of like a batting average for how often you get the job done on your visit. We saw that go up in appliances. Again, taking macro data, driving micro decisions. We use this information for training.
We use it down here. This is something that we do, this Top Tech program. I like to cook. I like to watch Top Chef, as well as a lot of other cooking programs. We've developed Top Tech. We have Top Super. We gamify everything. We give out scorecards. This right here is just a summary, for August 2019 results. We're looking at handled work orders per day, locations per day, completion %, RTV %. What's that? It's return to vendor. How often when they're there, do they not get it done and have to outsource? We look at that on the individual tech level, individual trade level. We roll all this up, we have games, we also give out awards for our top performers in every single market. We are driving micro-level behavior starting with macro-level data. Vendor management.
Vendor management is a tough one. Remember, we do about half of our work in-house out of the 500,000-plus work orders. The other half, we've got vendors doing that work. It's really important that we understand what they're doing and how they're doing it, when they're doing it, because they're a representation of our brand. We've helped them. We have the do's and don'ts of a successful affiliate. We have getting started. We have mobile app training. We've gone so far as to look at HVAC data. We've worked with every single HVAC vendor. We know exactly how many techs they have. We know exactly which regions they want to work within our regions. We know how many work orders they get to a day, and we've done capacity analytics around here.
What you can see here is these are each of our vendors in one of our markets, and we know how much work they did last week. We know how much is scheduled for the next seven days. We know how much they have in terms of capacity. The goal here is we do not want to overload our vendors, because ultimately it leads to a bad experience for our residents. We're looking at temperature, not just past temperature and work orders created. We're also looking at the next 14 days of temperatures so that we understand the demand on our vendors, so that we can deploy them in an intelligent way. We're also giving our vendors feedback. We don't just gamify it for us. We're gamifying it for them, too.
Every single vendor gets a scorecard every single month, and we have meetings with them, and we're judging them based upon how often they're on time, how often they complete the job. We also judge them based upon the resident survey scores. Oh, yeah, we survey every single visit. We receive more than 40,000 survey feedback every single year. We look at our relationship with vendors as a partnership, and this is really important. We're just one of many customers that they have. There is this German phrase or German term called gestalt. Gestalt means that the whole is worth more than the sum of its parts. You might say, "Well, okay, that makes sense." It's based on what's called the law of simplicity.
What we found is we need to give something back to vendors and help them do their job more efficiently and help them be more profitable. What you see here is part of our technology platform. We've done this thing called tiering. In each market, we've tiered and broken out each region into sub-markets. We know where their office is based. We know where our portfolio is based, all of our homes. We know where their technicians are. In this case, I won't say which vendor it is, but this is a vendor in South Florida. Ahead of the season, we knew mathematically we were going to give them about 28% of our work. We knew that they were going to be covering a specific area, a specific set of zip codes.
We knew that they were our tier 1 vendor in two of those markets, a tier 2 in another part of the market, and tier 3. This is just absolute gold for our vendors. They want to be profitable. They don't want to send their technicians driving all over the market. Again, we're helping them make more money, be more profitable, be more efficient through our technology. Again, our goal is to make them so loyal to us that they don't want to work for anybody else. It's really proving to be successful. We've got a lot of great vendors. At the end of the day, all the technology, all of our vendor relationships, they really don't matter unless our residents are having a great experience. I'd like to share with you our resident satisfaction scores since January of 2018.
We were back in the 4.3-4.2 range back in early 2018. Now we're consistently running north of 4.4. We'll break 4.5. I'm very confident. What I'll tell you is one thing I know we're doing better. When you look at the peak season, which is where you really can get in trouble in the maintenance business, right? It gets hot. It gets really hot. HVAC calls go through the roof. When you look at June, July, August of 2018, we were hovering in that 4.2 range. You look at June, July, and August of this year, all the work that we've done to educate our vendors to roll out that tiering system, to give them feedback, and to make sure that we don't overload them, it's paying off, and our residents are telling us.
This is what's really exciting, and we've got a lot of more work to do. This is really important. I don't expect you to take my word for it. I'd like to show you a quick video of our residents talking about the maintenance experience and the ProCare experience.
Before you sign a lease with just anyone, check out what the nation's premier home leasing company, Invitation Homes, has to offer. At Invitation Homes, every resident gets our VIP treatment called ProCare. It's world-class support throughout the life of your lease.
ProCare service is what sets Invitation Homes apart. The quality of the service for Invitation Homes, on a scale of one to 10, I give a 10.
It always kind of seems like it's always about you, and I love that. They really pay attention to your needs.
You make a phone call or plug it into the internet portal and tell them there's a problem, and it gets fixed.
Why wait for issues to pop up? We work to avoid them by proactively scheduling regular maintenance visits.
The ProCare services really is proactive about maintaining the house rather than just reacting to any issues I might have.
It's so easy to schedule routine maintenance with Invitation Homes. They just take the worry out of having a house.
You know that you're going to get somebody that's professional. You're going to get a professional plumber. You're going to get a professional tree service.
They sent out an air conditioner tech the next day and fixed it. I'm so happy I didn't have to climb into that attic.
We make sure your home's appliances and systems are always working like they should.
Using the ProCare service certainly makes our lives easier.
There's never been a, they came to fix it and it wasn't fixed. It was always the job was done, and I never had to worry about it again.
ProCare service is resident-friendly service. Invitation Homes. Lease friendlier.
It's great to hear our residents tell us that we're doing a great job. As I mentioned earlier, we don't get it right 100% of the time. One of the things that we challenge our team constantly is to not just think about how we respond to a problem or react to a work order that goes the wrong way, but how do we avoid it? I'd like to tell you a little bit about what we're doing in that area. As I mentioned earlier, we do about half a million service requests a year, and from that information, we are able to generate a lot of information. With that information, one big initiative of ours is to leverage machine learning to identify where certain keywords that are typed into our work orders or taken out of phone calls, out of the transcripts of phone calls.
When you look at that and you look at key metrics that are potentially driving a bad experience, and you look for correlation between that data and the growing amount of data that we have on the work order side, we're able to correlate that and say, "All right, we know when a resident's probably having a bad experience." From that information, we are now proactively reaching out to residents to the tune of about 1,000, a little north of 1,000 calls a month, proactively to say, "Hey, we get it. Your experience isn't going great. Just want to confirm that we're going to be there on Tuesday or Thursday." That's gone a long way to reducing the number of escalations and upset residents that we have by simply reaching out and saying, "Hey, work order number 5732 isn't lost.
We're going to be there, and we understand that it's not going perfectly." Just communicating with residents, using data to understand where the problems exist before they become a real big problem is so important to our business. This is an area that's only growing right now. We've talked a lot about maintenance. Let me tell you a little bit about turns. Turns are so important to our business. It's very different than multi-family. Our properties are two to three times bigger. Our tenants stay longer. It's really important that we get it right, that we're fast, and we deliver a great product. We don't have the luxury of being on-site. Having a very choreographed process is really important to getting the job done quickly and getting the house re-residented. Our pre-move-out visit, that's the secret sauce.
What we found over the years is if you get to the house 21 days, at least 21 days prior to somebody moving out, you have a chance that they'll listen to you as you walk through the house and tell them what they might do to get more of their security deposit back. Michael, I'm going to use you again as an example. You moved in with us a while ago. Now you're moving out. 21 days in advance, we're going to walk through room by room and tell you, "You know what? The crayons on the wall here, you can paint this. We're going to go and walk outside, and we're going to talk about landscaping that you might be able to perform because maybe you had neglected it." Not likely because Well, maybe. Well, we turned the house over to you in a certain condition.
Our expectation is that we get it back in that same condition. Yes. What we found amazingly is that if we get there 21 days in advance, not seven days in advance, not 14 days in advance, that doesn't give a family enough time to actually do something based on the advice that we give them. When we give them 21 days, they may do something. They're not worried about the truck that's going to be moving them. They're not worried about who's going to be taking care of the dog for the day, but they can actually listen and process the feedback that we're giving them. Again, it's on-site, and this is performed by the same superintendent that's going to be performing the move-out inspection with them. There's a continuity of information. It's consistent.
The other thing that's great about the 21 days in advance is that we're able to capture a bunch of information that we send to John Gibson's team. We have a proprietary mobile app that captures about 20 different items. It allows us to identify how big the job is going to be. It allows us to begin to line up contractors for work. Most importantly, it captures really specific information that allows us to determine whether or not we want to make a larger capital investment in that house. Do we want to replace the kitchen? Do we want to put in a new master bathroom? Do we want to put hard surface flooring in high traffic areas? Again, we have enough time when we go out through that process to allow our asset management team to make that decision and give that information back.
Because if we don't do that, we go back on the day that somebody moves out, and the superintendent, he or she might scope the house, budget the house, only to find out that they've got to go back because we're going to invest more capital in the house. Again, it's all about efficiency. One of the things I'll tell you about the pre-move out visit, you might say, "Is it worth sending somebody out? Couldn't you just send them a flyer? Couldn't you just send them a video?" The answer is no. That specific one-on-one information, walking through their house has yielded results to the tune of $600-$700 per turn of work that we've been able to avoid. That's right, $600-$700 difference in the gross turn cost based upon us giving very specific feedback.
Again, we're very clear on the resident orientation when they move in that the expectation, beyond normal wear and tear, is that the house comes back in the same condition that we gave it to them. It makes sense. We find that it's a good return on invested time when we send that superintendent out. Our move-out inspection is done at the house within one day of move-out. That's followed by the turn itself. The turn takes one to 15 days. On average, it takes about two weeks to get that done. I'm pretty confident that we're going to be improving upon that time based upon this new technology that we have in place, capturing this information for John Gibson's team to assess those capital improvement decisions in a faster way so that we can get that turn started. The last area is the resident orientation.
You heard about that, but that is our overall turn cycle. If there's one thing that I think you should take away, first, it's the same superintendent that walks through this entire process, starting with the outgoing resident's pre-move out visit and the new resident's resident orientation. I talked earlier about stakeholder accountability. This is where it really comes into play. Remember, we gamify everything. We measure the amount of maintenance work that's done in the 60 days following somebody's move-in. We attribute that to each superintendent. Depending on how much money was spent and how many work orders, that's how we define quality control. Obviously, the lower dollar spend and the lower number of work orders, and we hold people accountable. The other point, the second point that I'd hope that you take away is that everything we do is at the home.
There's no substitute for it. Trying to do a pre-move out visit or a resident orientation when you're not there on-site, hands-on teaching people. I'll give you an example. Let's say there's something wrong with the electrical panel. Not something wrong, but let's just say a breaker opens while a resident's in the house. One of the things we do on that pre-move out visit is that we actually walk through and say, "Again, flip the breaker, open the breaker." Most people are afraid to touch an electrical panel. It's okay. It's not going to hurt you. Sometimes that's all that it takes, and we can solve people's problems by the phone and not have to ask them to take time off of work. Again, in person at the house. The last thing I'll tell you is how we run our turn model. It's a hybrid approach.
We have local people. We also have a central team. Our local people help us operate with speed. As I mentioned earlier, we have dashboards that are exception-based reporting and allow us to make sure we're not losing any turns. Everything is watched, and everything is managed. We have superintendent scorecards, that second one, again, gamifying everything. Having that local presence ensures a quality product. We have a central team also that's based in Scottsdale. The Scottsdale team helps us ensure that we are allocating work across vendors, helps us ensure that we're complying with our own procurement program. We're installing the right products. We have programs for HVAC, we have programs for our flooring, we have programs for our appliances and where we're getting front-end or back-end discounts.
Having that central control allows us to ensure that we're complying with our own programs and putting the right products in houses. It also allows us to ensure that our contractors are paid in a timely way. We like to say that construction moves at the speed of money, so it's really important that we get that right. Before I turn it over to Greg, I hope that over the last couple of minutes, I've been able to tell you why the turns and maintenance side of our business in the SFR space is so incredibly important. I can tell you firsthand, our residents think it's important. When you think about the resident life cycle, someone could move in. They may use our Smart Home technology, and if that's the case, the first person they need is the superintendent.
For the following year, or two years, or three years, the only voice they hear or face they see is somebody in our maintenance call center or a maintenance technician. We have to get that right. We have to be good. We have to protect the back door. Because if you think about it, our success as a business is keeping residents in place. Again, we take this incredibly seriously because our residents do. That's all I've got. Thank you. I'll turn it over to you, Greg.
All right. Thank you, Tim. I just want to give a quick agenda update here. We're going to take a break till 10:45. We'll have another set of presentations on the other side of the break. I'm sure a lot of you have questions already. I just want to let you know we are going to have the question and answer session at the end of the presentation, where we'll have everybody presenting today back up on stage to take your questions. I'd also encourage you guys, during the break here, grab people and ask questions one-on-one. We're intentionally having a long break so that you guys have the opportunity to meet some people you may not have met before, get to know our team a lot better. With that, we've got drinks and food outside. Let's take a break and be back here at 10:45. Thanks.
It's not as good as the pizza.
Huh?
It's not as good as the pizza. That's the healthy stuff. All right. If folks could please take their seats, we'll get started here in a moment. Just let folks get settled in. All right. Welcome back. My name is Ernie Freedman, Chief Financial Officer at Invitation Homes. I want to take a moment to recap what we discussed earlier today, and then what we plan on covering here in our second session. Going to need some help from folks here in the audience, a little audience participation. As we started out the day, we talked about kind of four key things we wanted to focus on. I need some help. Go back, take a look. What are those? Raise your hand. Answer one of the four things that we're going to focus on. Again, it's an open book test.
You can go back to page four if you need to. I don't want to call on Invitation Homes folks, so what's one of the items that we wanted to focus on? Anyone?
Tony.
Tony.
Where's the slide player?
We'll get there, Dallas. Don't worry. Tony?
Business is great.
Business is great, and his fundamentals are fantastic. Tony. All right. What else do we have? Yep.
Consistently first to market and innovative.
Nice. I like it. Fundamentals are great. Consistently first to market and innovative. Greg, you're keeping track of who's getting these, right? All right. Who we got?
Great team.
Where I had that. Great team. Thanks, Scott. This is a little too far to throw. I'm not the peanut Scott. I don't want to hurt anyone here. All right. Last one. Yeah.
Early stage with long-term growth story.
All right. Early stage with long-term growth story. For those folks who got some headbands or some gift cards, make sure you stop by and visit with Greg afterwards. We need to get shoe sizes from you guys, too. You got some green sneakers coming. All right? Excellent. We're really focused on the first part of the day was we laid out those four themes, industry fundamentals, really strong, enabling growth for the industry, but specifically for us around where our locations are, our scale, great opportunity for growth. Innovative team. It's kind of hard following John and Tim. They're pretty good at what they do. Listening to how they walk through in the detail, how we're built up, how we're doing the things with team.
It sets us up for the opportunity for growth, for growing our lead, and that's where we're going to focus for the second half of the day. Dallas dove into some details around the fundamentals, how things are strong, and he talked about our three pillars, location, scale, excuse me, scale, and eyes on market. Charles talked about it's all about the resident. That's where it all starts. Together with you, we make a house a home. You heard John walk through the first part of our home and resident life cycle around acquiring, rebuying a home, make ready the home, and then also revenue management. Tim talked about where we're focused with regards to the resident in our ProCare service. We really covered those first three items in the first part of the day in terms of building our core.
When you think about building your core, that gives you the opportunity to do better. When you think about that long-distance runner who builds that core to get ready for that race. We spent the morning talking about the first part, and we're talking about the core. This part, we're going to talk about how we're going to grow our lead, how looking at that same home and resident life cycle with the opportunity to create value for our residents, and importantly, value for our shareholders. Again, going through that cycle, and you can see the strategic initiatives that we're going to cover in the second half of the day around each of those pieces. My colleagues are going to come up.
We're going to have Alicia, and Jiggs, and John, and Charles talk about these different initiatives for us, and then we'll wrap up the day with an opportunity to answer any questions that you may have. With that, I'm going to turn it over first to John to walk through the first parts of that resident cycle.
Thank you, Brody. Thank you again, everyone, for having me. At the break, I was a little bit offended by how many of you thought my opening comment about finally there's someone that looks like a runner up here was a joke, but that's okay. I'm here today to talk to you about our external and organic growth opportunities in the portfolio. Let me grab the clicker over here. First of all, let's talk about our external growth. Earlier, we spoke about our acquisition team, eyes on the ground, looking at all the opportunities, finding the best opportunities for us to buy. Let's remind ourselves how small we really are compared to the overall opportunity set today. You know the stat, 16 million single-family rentals in the marketplace. Invitation Homes represents 0.5% of that today. Take it another way.
If you look at our 17 markets, there's 21 million detached single-family homes in those markets. We own 40 basis points of that inventory. Put that in context. When we're buying a home, one of our criteria in the buy box is not whether or not the home is already rented. We're looking at opportunities across the single-family space. I think you really have to keep that in mind when you think about the opportunity. The important point is we've just begun. Invitation Homes is the largest owner of single-family rental product in the U.S., but we have just begun, and there's a huge opportunity that lies in front of us within our current market footprint. Let's talk a little bit about this year. As you see, we had in the first half of the year, we acquired about 81 homes per month.
Measured pace going through the first half of the year. In July, we continued to see great opportunities in the marketplace. We knew there may be some shift in the cyclical demand of the year. We decided to increase our deployment target. You can see that we were able to put that increase in place right away, leveraging our central technology and support, also utilizing our in-market directors, working with their local operating teams to find the best opportunities for Invitation Homes. In the last three months, we've ended up acquiring really at a volume well above the first half of the year. It just speaks to our ability to amplify the volume as we see fit. Look at the markets. Of our 17 markets, we are actively looking to buy right now in 11 of those.
These are the particular 11 where we see great opportunities right now, our Western markets and some of our other sub-scale markets, along with our bellwether Southeastern markets. There continue to be great opportunities there. Doesn't mean there may not be great opportunities for us in the future in some of the other markets. These are the 11 where we're focused today. A broad representation of our current footprint and consistent with our strategy in this business. We continue to see opportunities to buy homes below replacement costs, and we're typically doing that on average in the mid five cap rate range. We continue to be disciplined. You saw the funnel. You saw how homes come through the funnel, how we think about that opportunity set.
We continue to be very disciplined, making sure that we're making the right long-term risk-adjusted return decisions for our shareholders, one home at a time. Next, I want to talk to you a little bit about asset management and value-enhancing CapEx. You got to think about the asset review process. People ask us, "How do you asset manage 80,000 homes?" Similar to Tim's message, as he spoke about earlier, it really has to be done one home at a time. We leverage our data to try and figure out the best way to identify the homes where we should be spending our time on the asset management desk. We have this flowchart showing the asset management process. Really, when you think about the existing portfolio, we go through an asset decision-making process when we review homes that gives us really three options.
The one that happens obviously the most is to simply turn the home and re-lease it in its current, do a clean, safe, and functional turn, and keep going in the marketplace. There will be times when we believe that if we amplify the investment, increase investment in upgraded fit and finish, we have the ability to harden the asset, potentially move the revenue, and that value-enhancing CapEx investment, we make that decision one home at a time. Finally, there are going to be times when we decide, this particular home and the forward opportunity doesn't make as much sense. Recall the capital allocation planning discussion we had. We talked about identifying the sub-markets where we felt like we could be less successful.
As those homes come up for review, one home at a time, we're going through a rigorous rebuy process to make sure we're thinking about the opportunity to continue owning that home versus selling it. Doesn't happen a lot, but when it does happen, we recycle that capital and put it into other acquisitions. Those three things going through the asset decision-making process help us to constantly refine and optimize the portfolio. Let's talk a little more about value-enhancing CapEx. We've been doing this for quite some time, just not at the scale we're doing it today. When you think about value-enhancing CapEx, you think about the opportunity to make an investment in a home that, as I said earlier, will help us harden the asset, minimize long-term costs, and move the revenue on the home as well.
The most important thing for us is really that top box. It allows us to increase resident loyalty. We listen to our residents about what they want in their homes and the value proposition there. We want to make sure we're delivering a product that makes them want to stay with Invitation Homes and continue choosing that leasing lifestyle. Now, as we think about the process, there's multiple channels we utilize to identify opportunities to look at here. First is the pre-move-out visit. Everybody raise your hand if you remember the pre-move-out visit from Tim's talk, where we talked about how we go into the home and we do a pre-move-out visit with the resident, typically wanting to be at least 21 days beforehand. That's the perfect time for our superintendents to do a property assessment survey to identify opportunities in the home. Can't emphasize this enough.
Our superintendents are just as experienced operating in this space as any of us. Their eyes on the asset at that visit are going to begin identifying opportunities where we may want to take a look at potential value-enhancing CapEx or other investment alternatives. Next, we have the pre-marketing process. During pre-marketing, if we haven't identified it through the pre-move-out process, we may determine that based on the demand feedback we're seeing in the market and for this particular home, there may be an opportunity to put upgrades in the home and capture additional revenue. Finally, turn scope from the RTM teams. If we haven't captured it early in the process when they're actually in the home doing the turn, there's an additional opportunity to bring the asset management desk in to think about an alternative for the asset.
All of these are really important that we try to leverage them in the cycle, and we've tried to continue to build and improve technology and processes around this to be able to look at it at scale. Because what's important is that as they come through these different channels, we're able to run data and algorithms over that data to determine the ones we want to review based on the feedback we're getting. Finally, ad hoc rebuy analysis. I like to give the example of most of the management team lives in Dallas. We have an operating portfolio and a market team in Dallas as well. Unfortunately for them, there are homes between my office and my house that we own, and I've been known to drive by and share some opinions on the way home or on the way back to the office.
I always say, no matter how much they try to hide the lockbox, I still manage to see a few of our homes. All of the people within the organization are constantly inside our homes, looking at them as they have opportunities, providing that feedback. From my visits on the way home or on the weekend or whenever I might see them, I may identify other opportunities for us to review. That's a John Gibson example of an ad hoc process, but ad hoc processes and opportunities happen all the time. Let's walk through an example. This is a home in Mint Hill, North Carolina. Nobody knows the greater Charlotte area, but Mint Hill is a suburb, I believe in the southeast. This home was a home we ended up doing a value-enhancing investment on.
When the superintendent goes to the home, as I said, during the pre-move-out visit, they can have a property assessment survey, and there's a number of the different factors on the right with a lot of prompts and questions they can walk through to better understand if there's an opportunity. We purpose-built this in partnership between the asset management and Tim's team. Next, when the property assessment survey is received, an algorithm searches for value-enhancing investment opportunities in the portfolio. In this particular example, this home in Mint Hill, North Carolina, was identified and triggered what we call an asset review on the asset management desk. You can see the asset review includes an evaluation of the overall historical performance and the generation of a pro forma performance for the potential investment that we're looking at making. One house at a time.
They looked at the initial evaluation of the home, and initially had thought that a larger scope of investment was wanted, but after working in partnership with Asset Management and the RTM team, they refined that scope down to approximately $10,000, focused on LVP flooring in the common areas of the home, the high traffic areas, and upgrading the kitchen, both the cabinets, countertops, and appliances. They agreed on a rental value for making those upgrades and communicated it thusly through our system. You can see a screenshot. The Asset Management team will alert through our system the local leasing manager and the revenue management analyst to add the rental premium to the listed rate to make sure in the pre-marketing channel, as we're making the investment at the same time we're putting the home on the market, how we see the new value proposition.
You can see again examples there in some of the chatter we use in the system. Finally, let's look at the result here. The actual spend for the upgrades on the Mint Hill house were approximately $9,000, so it actually came in below budget. After completion of the investment, this home leased in 12 days for $1,845, which was $180 above what we viewed as as-is market rate for the home prior to the increased investment, and $50 above our conservative underwriting for this investment. This one was very successful, ending up in a 24% gross yield on incremental investment. The point is not that we expect to make a 24% yield every time we spend value-enhancing dollars, because we think about it holistically.
Total shareholder return, minimizing costs, increasing revenue, those types of opportunities to harden our assets and increase our resident loyalty and the time they live with us in the homes. It has to be done one home at a time. No matter how hard we try to build a system, an algorithm, we can be pretty smart about guessing the types of homes and the locations where we'll see more of these opportunities. That operating team on the field, starting with the day that superintendent walks in the door for the pre-move-out visit, is when our clock starts and our ability to potentially put that home through our asset review desk. The final thing I'd say, which I forgot to mention in my earlier presentation, is when you think about all of these things we're doing and constantly improving, remember Charles talked about always refining, always improving.
We're still in very early innings of our business, whether it be the acquisition process, revenue management, or this asset management process, which I've spoken about today. We're very early in these phases. Every single month, every quarter, every year, we add to that. Our data becomes richer. We become smarter about the business. I'm really excited to see where this goes. With that, I have one more slide. I apologize, Alicia. I was so excited talking about the asset management business. We also have our disposition process. This is something we don't talk a lot about all the time, but it's so important to our business because we do want to utilize dispositions to help us manage the portfolio and to take less than optimal performing assets or locations out of the portfolio and replace those and refine the portfolio.
We utilize a process we call disposition pathways. Obviously, we're trying to minimize time on market, maximize our net outcomes. We have a number of different channels we can do that through, whether it be through bulk sales, whether it be through our Resident First Look program. As you know, we've sold over $30 million of homes to our own residents, our direct-to-market channels or the MLS broker channels. No matter which one we use, this, again, is about a central management team running the process, working with the local investment directors and the people on the ground executing the business. Constant feedback loop, constantly trying to get smarter about how when we do need to dispose of homes, we can do it quickly with the best results, because at the end of the day, SFR is local.
With that, I'm very excited to hand the baton over to one of the great operators in this space, my colleague, Alicia MacPhee.
Thank you. Thank you, John. My name is Alicia MacPhee, and I'm very excited to be here with you today. As Dallas mentioned in his opening, I oversee the field operations for the East Region. That consists of the Midwest, the Southeast, and all of the Florida markets. Today, I'm going to share the leasing journey. I'm going to take you through how these running shoes actually impact the leasing track. As I get started, I will tell you that we wake up in the morning and we go to bed at night asking ourselves, "How can we get better to reduce our days in vacancy?" It's a very important thing that we concentrate on. We strategize our leasing process.
We know that whatever we can do every day to monetize the fact that each one-day reduction in average days to re-resident adds approximately $1.6 million to the bottom line. $1.6 million to the bottom line. You can imagine how important this is to us. As a leader of the field, I have that opportunity to work with that team. We've got an A team out in the field directly working with our resident, providing that service, but also helping us to improve our business every day in reducing days to re-resident. As we run harder over the next several years, we believe that by reducing days to re-resident to the mid-thirties, we can actually make this business a 97% structural occupancy using today's average turnover rate of 30%.
Realizing the impact each day of reducing days to re-resident, we have several initiatives in place that are helping us work towards that reduction. It starts with our team becoming more efficient in the prospect journey. If we can provide an efficient prospect journey search, we know that we're going to be able to reduce our days to re-resident. Usually, when someone goes out, typical, they want to lease a home, they'll go out and, of course, search for properties online. They're going to send information, request information. In one day, they may sit down and send out to various different sites, waiting for someone to provide more information and access to the home. They may take the route of driving neighborhoods where they want to be for the schools for their children, or perhaps close for their commuting for work.
We know that we want to differentiate ourselves and provide a more efficient process. We start out with our Invitation Homes website. On our Invitation Homes website, this proprietary website, we have exclusive listings prior to anything syndicating out to the rest of the world. Once we have a lead that comes into our proprietary website, that lead, we have a follow-up process where that lead is contacted immediately. There's follow-up emails that are done, there's also an agent, a leasing agent on the ground, an expert in the area, assigned to that lead as it comes into the process. With that, we're able to provide flexibility of choice. As a prospect is looking to get into a home, they can easily request a self-tour. They'll get a code. We, of course, get their information.
They'll get a code, they'll be able to go in at their convenience, their appointment time, view the home on their own, and basically have some follow-up if they're interested. However, there's a large cohort of consumers out there that still want to be able to have a self-guided tour. They want to be able to meet with a leasing agent, have certain questions about the area, we have that availability with this flexibility of choice. Either way, even if they have a self-guided tour, our agents are contacted not only of the showing that is set up so that they can follow up, but also that the showing has taken place. They're available. That certainly, really, what we pride ourselves on is being able to provide that high-touch local service. That moves on to the application process. We have a quick, easy online application process.
They can submit everything online. They do not have to meet with anyone in person, with a quick turnaround approval in the process. From there, we have our move-in process, and as you heard Tim take us through the ProCare, we have a ProCare move-in orientation, and that takes place just a couple of days, hopefully three days prior to them ever moving in to orient them to the home, get them ready for knowing if they have to shut the valves off for water. They're oriented, like Tim said. They're going to understand how the circuit breakers work. With that, knowing how important our pre-leasing is for us, we have initiatives that we're working on, that we're focusing, and they include our insight and our analytics. We leverage our current customer information, and we do that through focus groups and meeting with them.
We also have certain analytics that provide us more information, okay, that can definitely help us attract and generate high-quality leads. We also have the digital experience. Jiggs is going to take you through a little bit more of what we're able to do to really help us understand who we're trying to market our homes to and how do we market to them better and faster. Thirdly, we have our pre-leasing process. Our pre-leasing process, I'm going to do a deeper dive once Jiggs takes you through the technology and that background. We have our pre-leasing process, and I'm going to take you through that. This is an opportunity for a prospect to actually secure a home maybe even before the resident's actually moved out of the house. We'll take you through that process and dive in a little bit more.
I'm going to go ahead and hand this over to Jiggs.
All right. Thank you, Alicia, and good morning. I'm Jiggs Foster. I'm the Head of Marketing and Customer Experience at Invitation Homes. I've been here about four years, and I'm excited to be here this morning to share a little bit about how we use research and insight to understand our consumer, and how we are using a leading-edge digital experience to attract and convert our prospects. Thinking about the target audience, understanding them deeply is how we are able to identify their motivations for choosing this leasing lifestyle, which you heard from Dallas is really where demand is shifting. We want to understand what are the motivations, what do they want, and what's underneath this. How do we get to know our audience?
On a going basis, we are conducting proprietary research, both quantitative as in large base usage and attitude studies, then qualitative, like focus groups. We do this research among both category users as well as residents. The chart at the bottom illustrates the type of data we might uncover in some of the research we're doing. In this example, we are asking how important are various items in your experience as a single-family home renter. Interestingly, you will see ease of doing business right up top with other well-known category drivers like safe neighborhoods and price. You will see that following closely is 24/7 maintenance, updated kitchens, baths, garages, and good schools. All things that our residents give us high marks on. We utilize this research to craft our messaging.
You might see some of the advertising that is surrounding us, nicer homes, easier process, friendlier service, that builds from the research and understanding that we've got. Then we're able to test new ad copy on a going basis to understand what appeals most to our prospects. We're also tracking metrics like this on a going basis for both us and our competitors to make sure we continue to deliver on the promise. We've utilized this research to create three persona groups, the expecting, the transitional, and the transplant. Let's take a closer look at the expecting, which is the largest segment. Who in here moved when you had your first child? How about the second child?
Yeah.
You can actually see a shift in the data in renters moving from an apartment to a home when families had a child, a significant shift with the second child. The first child's approaching school age, the second one means they need more space, a yard, safe neighborhood, good schools, and easy online payments for their busy life. With the quantitative studies, we get the key drivers, and then in the qualitative, like focus groups, we hear it in their own words. "I've been here for six years, and I'm leasing because of the school district," is one that we will often hear. The totality of the feedback, and insight that we're gaining on a going basis is a valuable resource in understanding our consumers and what they're looking for.
Now that we know who they are, let's take a look at how we find these consumers. Let's take a look at our expectant prospect, and we might call her Pam, and we'll follow her on her journey. The goal is to know her before she ever visits our website. From the time she types in homes for rent in the Google search bar, or from the time that she is searching for schools in the area, we want to bring her into our fold early and often. We know she's qualified and ready to move. What do we know about how Pam searches? Focus groups over the years have added insight to what they're looking for and how they search. The typical prospect like Pam might search for 12 or more homes, possibly over lunch, in a really compressed timeframe.
She's got 30 to 60 days to move. This is really a different cycle than buying. She has got some urgency. Things are moving quickly. She's also driving homes, as Alicia mentioned, but also coming back to websites, back and forth. We call this sense of urgency rent-head, and our job is to help solve that for Pam. We also know she's heavily digital. On average, she spends almost six hours with digital media, most of that on mobile, and importantly, about two hours in just one app, on Facebook. Who here has searched for a pair of bright green running shoes? I see a lot of hands in the back from the Invitation Homes team. As she's searching, she's leaving us clues, and we're using that same technology that anything that you're searching for, following you around until you purchase.
We're using that same sophisticated technology to convert our prospects. Like many top consumer businesses today, we're getting smarter about how we use this digital technology to find her. Based on her behaviors, she's leaving us her preferences and sharing what she's looking for. With every visit to Zillow or Realtor.com that she might be searching on one minute and then shopping for kindergarten or baby items the next, it's this intersection of lifestyle data and demographics and renter search behavior that is helping to shape this picture, and help us find Pam. We know that our preferred residents are dual income families. They choose the flexibility of leasing, driven by their desire for this comfortable leasing lifestyle. We've got media partners who are using a prospecting engine to crawl billions of web pages in search of Pam.
The more they convert, the more we create a lookalike audience for what that prospect that's attracted to our promise and our proposition has clicked on an ad, what that looks like, and we're able to refine the algorithm and attract more and more. We also know what time of day and week our prospects are engaging with us. They're searching, and they're converting. I mentioned they might search during the day. They might come back later in the evening, maybe at the end of work or after they've put the kids in bed, and actually fill out the application and complete their journey. We know how to find Pam. How do we get her to our website and keep her there? Say we find Pam. She was searching on a listing site.
She sees one of our ads, like you see here, and she likes the promise. Updated homes, easier process, worry-free leasing. She finds this appealing. She clicks on the ad, and she is now rerouted to our website from the listing aggregator that she may have been on. We've tagged our ads, so we know where she's come from, and we can see the analytics in the journey every time she continues to engage with a click on our website with a search of a home. We can see this in real-time and constantly optimize against this. She lands on a webpage specific to her geography, and it's got many homes in the sub-market that she is looking in. In fact, she sees exclusive inventory that she can't find anywhere else.
As Alicia mentioned, these are our newest homes that we syndicate early to our site. She can create a profile, a feature which launched early this summer and was the first in the single-family homes industry. She can save favorites. She can submit a lead. She may search for a while, on average, about nine minutes per session when looking for homes on our site, and then maybe she gets interrupted. We will come back and remind her later with an email that has a personalized list of homes for her and other recommendations. She may have also submitted a lead on another website, in which case, she would join our reminder journey and will be retargeted with our ads to attract her while she's spending her two hours on Facebook.
By using this multi-channeled strategy powered by this prospecting engine with emails and digital ads, Facebook property ads, and exclusive inventory, we're keeping prospects engaged, but we're also able to score our leads. Alicia's going to go a little deeper into pre-leasing, but the process of getting the information we're gathering to our agents to score our leads is an important one. We also had mentioned that Pam might be driving neighborhoods. We build awareness with radio and Pandora ads, like this one. I'm going to share a radio ad.
Before you sign a lease with just anyone, check out what the nation's premier home leasing company, Invitation Homes, has to offer. A home that's nicer, a process that's easier, a company that's friendlier. Look for the green exclusive banner on invitationhomes.com. Find the perfect home for lease today before it's listed on sites like Zillow or realtor.com. Invitation Homes, lease friendlier.
Our awareness has increased by over 30%, and we also see organic traffic to our website increasing. Email marketing is also performing. We've got higher click-through rates and open rates than industry benchmarks. Let's talk a little bit more about our website. We're constantly optimizing our digital experience. As you know, it's a landscape that moves quickly and changes fast. Our goal is to engage, keep them engaged, and convert quickly. We've talked about a few website features, exclusive inventory, profile, featured homes, favorites, but we're looking at these next-generation tools. Dynamically serving homes that are relevant to the search, adding login with social media to make it easier than ever to start an application, and maybe even pre-populate that application, so that by the time they've finished searching, you're mostly done with the application.
On the right, you can see a concept of how we're looking at refining this experience on mobile, where about 70% of our users are coming from. We're looking at tools like web chat and rent calculator that will really facilitate the pre-approval process. As we get smarter about this, we can implement these new design tools with our in-house developers. Also looking at adding floor plans and 3D tours, which really facilitates the pre-leasing process, helping them have a feel for the home before they've even seen it. All along, we are also continuing to tell them this story. They've told us what's important to them. We understand everything that they are ranking in importance. They're hearing our story.
They're hearing the differentiation, like ProCare that you heard about from Tim, Smart Home, you'll hear a little bit more about from Charles, and the investment that we are making on average of $22,000 per home in our homes. They've come to expect the quality and the differentiation from the brand. We know from our focus groups that not only did our easy search process relieve the rent head anxiety, they've come to trust our brand. The chart at the bottom shows the continued growth of our web traffic. It's at 16% year-to-date as we continue to attract prospects from our site.
This is important because we know they are spending about 27 minutes with us across multiple sessions. We know that prospects who submit leads on our website are four times more likely to convert than a prospect who submits a lead on an independent listing site. It makes sense. They've come to know us, they're attracted to our promise. They've learned more about what we offer and the points of differentiation. They convert at four times. We've talked about how we're using research and insight to continue to get to know our prospects, attract qualified residents, and also how we're using the latest in digital experience. This is an evolution. This is not where we were, certainly on day one, but not even a few years ago. It's going to continue to evolve.
We're excited to think about where this can go next and the upside attached to those initiatives. As we get smarter, we're getting better and better. With that, I'm going to hand it back to Alicia to talk about pre-leasing and our strategy there.
Thanks, Jiggs. Some pretty cool stuff when we're able to understand and know our customer before they even know. Pretty cool. Thank you, Jiggs. Let's transition back to pre-leasing. When a home is pre-leased, in reality, a prospect is actually making a decision to move into one of our homes more than likely before they've ever seen it. They're provided this opportunity of exclusivity, and they're able to secure the home. The application is received prior to the make-ready date. Many times, the first time they ever see the home is at that pre-move-in orientation. That's the first time they get to see it. We know that with more effective pre-leasing, that we can take our days to re-resident. Right now, our re-resident, 34 days faster when a home is pre-leased versus not pre-leased. 34 days we save in vacancy time.
If you look at our pre-leasing bar graph on the left, you'll see that year-over-year we've continued to improve through the quarters in our pre-leasing efforts as we put our initiatives into place. Overall, just think, even a 5% increase in pre-leasing percentage, that could reduce the portfolio average days to re-resident by a delta of two days with an average turnover of 30%. You can understand certainly why pre-leasing and focusing on those initiatives are really, really important to us. Our current pre-leasing initiatives, we've covered most of them. That prospecting engine and the education, making sure that a consumer has the opportunity to go ahead and pre-lease one of our homes and has enough information available on the website, but also the convenience of an agent for any additional information or any initial information that they'd like.
Our agents are on the ground seven days a week. They're totally available, special in the market. If you remember, you might not have seen it, but Charles had his slide up and he showed Atlanta. In Atlanta, we have 17 agents on the ground ready to serve our customers. We also have our exclusive homes, as we've talked about, that syndicate to the website. Those agents that we have on the ground, it's a real team atmosphere, and if any of you have ever worked with an agent or sales environment, you know it's competitive. We have a great scoring process that we use with our agents. We measure the various activities that they do, whether it's the amount of homes that they're carrying, the amount of conversion, the amount of move-ins, the amount of pre-leasing, you name it.
We measure it on a scorecard, and we share it with them so they know, and it keeps everyone abreast and with accountability. What's to come? What lies in the future? We do have a few more things that we're working through. You've maybe heard a little bit about our pre-approval process that we're working on. Right now, we don't have that in place. What that would provide is an opportunity for someone to go ahead and pre-apply, okay, and know that they are ready to go, that they're not going to have to face any issue when they actually do find the home of their choice. We are working on 3D tours and floor plans.
It would be really nice, okay, for the consumer to know that, gee, the way this house lays out, the proximity of the children's bedrooms to the master bedroom is going to work. The Jack and Jill bath that's for the kids' rooms is actually going to be okay. Additionally, standard home upgrades. We're currently offering some standard home upgrades. We know that the consumer really, really likes a luxury vinyl planking floor versus a lot of wall-to-wall carpet in the home. Additionally, stainless steel appliances, and we've got other things on the horizon that we're working through. The other opportunity is to continue to enhance, to capitalize on the consumer that we're already serving, listening to them, which will help us capture that future lookalike audience. You've heard a lot from us. You've heard a lot from me and Jiggs.
A better way, though, is really who is the judge of everything that we do, and we'd like to share firsthand from one of our Atlanta residents, Lincoln.
When I knew that we were about to have a baby, I was like, "Okay, we need a house because this apartment isn't going to work." I went on the internet, and the answer was Invitation Homes. I was like, "Okay, now we just need to find a house." When I saw the website, I was like, "Wow, it has everything you need." It was so easy to search for a house, the fact that Invitation Homes lets you use a passcode to actually go into the house and look at it yourself, that was it for me. I was like, "This is amazing.
Thank you so much. Now I'll hand this over to Charles, who will take you through the resident enhancing experience.
Thank you, Alicia. Am I on? Every time I see Lincoln, our Atlanta resident, his enthusiasm just makes me smile. I want to take a moment and thank Jiggs, Alicia, for walking us through their knowledge of our processes and going deep there, but also giving us an insight into our residents and our deep knowledge of how we target, attract, acquire, and ultimately retain our residents. What I want to share with you, because every time we move a resident in or out, we're learning something about them. It's telling us, what did we do right? Where can we do better? Why did they move out? Why did they come? What channel did they come through? All of that helps inform our process, makes us more efficient, but ultimately makes the process better for our residents.
I want to give you just one other look at the demographics of our residents. Let's take another cut of that. She gave you the expecting and the transitioning and all that, but who's in our homes? We've alluded to it, but we know that on average, about 39 years old. Dallas mentioned it, we have this large millennial cohort coming our way. They're not 39 yet, but they're growing, and they're going to be there. It's in our portfolio now, but that's the tailwind at our back. 57% are married, 60% have kids. A lot of pets. 56% have pets. These are all opportunities. What do we do with this data? A lot of them are educated, and most importantly, on average, household income of $100,000. You put that against our rent, that's a five to one ratio. Really healthy. $100,000.
There's growth that we can use, capitalize on. How do we know all this about our residents? Like I said, in our natural process, we get to know them. Jiggs, as she talked about, we do surveys, we do focus groups. They inform and tell us to share with us what's important to them. That's at the bottom side here, the interest in additional services. What we got out of the last time we did this, it became very clear that our residents want additional services, but they need to be something that's going to make their life easier. What are those topics? Pest control was a high one, Smart Home, pet care, lawn care, cleaning. We look at this, we look at the demographics, we look at the additional interest, and we see opportunity. We have opportunity to grow our ancillary income.
We see it as kind of the next frontier of where we need to go and where we can go. It's not only going to be a financial benefit, but if we make it easier for our residents, they're going to want to stay longer. They're going to be stickier. What do we do with it? We're running, see? After the opportunity. Right. We stood up an ancillary income group where we asked them to put together a rigorous process to understand, identify, and prioritize how do we attack this opportunity in front of us. So you can imagine over the seven years, all of the smart people that you've heard from and in our organization, all of the ideas that we've pulled together. Frankly, in meeting with many of you, Ernie and Dallas and I, you shared some opportunities.
Have you thought about this? Have you thought about that? We thank you for that. That all went into the 60 plus ideas that we had to kind of figure out. How do we prioritize this? How do we deal with them? We put them in these categories, and we got them down ultimately to seven different kind of high priority ideas. What categories? How could we go about this? We first looked at it as what are the quick wins? What are we doing well? What can we build off of? Those became pretty clear. I'll walk you through that in the next slide. The other bucket, if you will, category is there are obligations, Tim talked a lot about this, within our lease. When we do the ProCare service, we educate the resident, what's your job? What's our job?
There are obligations that they need to live up to. They either need to do it themselves or hire somebody to do that. These are obligations that we can help them do, make it easier for them, and possibly capture some of that income ourselves. That's kind of core lease category. We have some good ideas there. We have about three of them. The next one is white glove. That's the next step and above. What goods and services can we provide that just take them to the next level? What are they willing to pay for that we can offer to make it easier for them? We have a couple ideas there in this initial seven. Last one is this blue sky category. We're still very early in this. How do we think big?
What are the ideas that you've given us and said, "Eh, didn't make the first cut, but we're going to work on that one." As we sift it down, we'll put it into one of the other categories. Briefly, how did we get there? Those are the categories, but then we had to think about what's the value proposition? Does it fit the brand? Does leasing friendly a brand, ease of doing business, as Jiggs talked about. What's one of the top three items? Ease of doing business. Does it fit that? Is it easy to adopt for the resident? We want to make sure that in these high priority items, how easy is it to adopt? The next one is it a win-win? Is there a benefit from an IH perspective and from the resident perspective?
The last one is there some benefit of cost control or asset preservation that we can get by doing this? That went into the analysis of our first priority items. The last thing that's not on the page is how easy is it to implement from a technology perspective, which is driving a lot of what we do. From an operational perspective, you looked at what I gave you earlier. How easy can we implement that? Frankly, from a financial perspective. Okay. What are our categories? What do we end up? What are the 7 priority items? I'll walk you through them in the 4 buckets, 4 main buckets. The first one is the quick win. We've talked a lot about Smart Home. It's been discussed in the videos. Let me take you back a little bit on the Smart Home journey.
We started this several years ago with an idea of we had more keys than you can imagine. When you have tens of thousands of homes, getting access to the homes becomes a problem. How do you deal with it? We saw the Smart Home technology, a lock, as an opportunity to address that issue. We started installing it in our homes. It allowed Tim and his team to give access to our employees, give access to vendors. We knew who was coming in, who was coming out. Real benefit. The other thing we did is with the lock, now we put a thermostat in. During construction, we could control the climate. During the rental period, we could control the climate. Every night, after a certain time, we're not showing the houses anymore, we could bring the temperature up and down depending on what state we're in.
We controlled our energy cost. We saw two immediate benefits. We had them in there, and we realized, wow, we could do this self-guided tour. The leasing agents got that in their head, and we started looking at that, and we saw the productivity of our leasing agents almost double. Because they could be at multiple places interacting with our residents, or they could describe the house, go see it. They got individual codes, and all of a sudden, we saw that productivity go. The last frontier in this base package, again, base package is the lock, the thermostat, and a hub that controls it with your smartphone, easy access, was that the residents started using the self-guided tour. Next thing you know, they're like, "Hey, I want this. Is this going to stay with the house?" Yes, for a cost.
We now have over 20,000 paying residents who are using the Smart Home technology. On each move-in, we have a really healthy adoption rate of 75%. Every new move-in, it's growing. Long story on the quick win, it's a quick win because we did all that pre-work. We were early adopter in the Smart Home space. We can now think about what's next. Video doorbells, security, cameras, Internet of things that could be built on. Quick wins are about the cameras, about the video camera. A lot of packages being delivered to houses. Who's coming up to your door? Can you see that? Can you give them access? Are they who they say they are? Security systems that go around, cameras that we can work on. We see that as one of our initial quick wins.
We're looking to pilot that pretty quickly over the next 6 months. That's quick win. The next one is the core lease. We see three opportunities with the core lease. I'll walk you through each one briefly. First one just being pest control. You saw it. It was a high list item. We deliver the house free of pests. After that, it's on the resident. They're going to have to call an outside service. Why can't we provide that? Make it easy for them. Again, that win-win. Ease of use. We can get a commercial package, look at our procurement. Where are we buying with our scale? Can we do it at something that's cost effective and becomes an annuity for us? Something that we're going to look at trying to pilot coming up here.
The next one is a big one in my mind, HVAC and filters. We know that if you change your filter regularly, Tim will tell you this, that it's going to extend the life of that appliance or of that system. We're not going to have to visit as much because you're going to have less work orders, and your energy cost will be better. Not to mention the healthy effects of having clean air and thinking about the sustainability side of the business. We look at that as being a real benefit. If we can automatically deliver filters on a timely fashion in our pre-move-in visit or orientation, we show them how to change the filter. This is how often you do it. They're going to show up at this time. That's a win-win. That's the definition of a win-win.
We're looking at that and performing market analysis and cost as we speak. The next one is a big one, too, landscaping. We deliver a house with the landscaping done. It's on the resident to maintain that landscaping. What do they do? They're going to cut the grass themselves, trim themselves, or are they going to hire somebody to do it? Again, can we make that easy for them? Can they do it through our portal? Can they order that one-off, or can we do ongoing service? We see that's a real benefit on the landscaping service. We think the first opportunity is think about some of these HOAs. Some of our HOAs can be pretty stringent, and they want to make sure that they have control. We start to provide that service as part of the lease. It's something we're looking at there.
The next one is this white glove service. You have the core lease, the things that we're doing as part of the base, their responsibility, but what might they be interested in that goes beyond that? You saw the interest in pets that I said before. 56% have pets, and there's a high interest in additional services. It's amazing how many services there are out there for pets, by the way. People are willing to spend a little extra, a little premium. They love their pets as much as their kids. I have two dogs. I spoil them. I'll spend some money on them. That's a great opportunity. We're looking at where do we start that pilot and performing market analysis as we speak. The next one is white glove is insurance. Right now, we provide renters insurance. We can provide it better.
There's technology out there that might be able to make it more efficient. There's all kind of insurance out there that can provide ease of mind for our residents and an ongoing annuity stream for us. That's one of our top seven items. The last one, kind of the strategic item, thinking bigger, cross-functional, is on the energy space. There's deregulation happening. Many states are already deregulated. With our scale, we qualify under commercial side. Can we look at it commercially while providing an affordable cost to our residents? We still have an opportunity to participate in that. We're analyzing that one. That one may take a little longer, that's why it's in the strategic bucket. We're discussing looking into deregulated states and what we can do. All right. What does all this mean? What's the opportunity as you add it all up?
We discussed the current state. We have our Smart Home in place. We have our base service in place. If we just stay with that, don't do the add-on, we think this year we're going to have around $1.3 million estimated for 2019 on just the base Smart Home as it continues to grow. You look at these high priority, the seven high priority items, and what's in the future. As we project out over the next three years, we see $15 million-$30 million over the next three years. As you think about that number, it's significant when you add it all up and go to the bottom line. To get to that number with 80,000 homes, you only need a little bit extra on each lease to add up to that number. This is just the beginning.
We think it's a good start. We're going to have to ramp up some of these things. Like I said, many of them are piloting, but we see there's a real opportunity. Going forward, just like we did with the Smart Home, each one of these things we're going to get better at. It's going to grow. We're going to get smarter. We see a lot of kind of blue sky opportunities on how do we build on these. You think about what Tim is doing with ProCare and our ability to make that more efficient with technology. How do we think about getting out ahead of the predictive analytics of sensors in our homes that might make us better? What else can we look at in terms of the future processes that evolve off of what we start, just like we did with the Smart Home?
We see a lot of blue sky opportunities, we are growing the base. We're doing the job right in terms of delivering the right house, right neighborhood, ProCare service delivered with genuine care. We start thinking about what do we do to grow this ancillary base. It's not only going to be a benefit on the revenue side, but it's going to make our residents happier, which means they stay longer, and that's the win-win ultimately. We see this ancillary frontier as being a big opportunity in front of us, and we're excited to get after it for the rest of this year and looking over the next three years. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Ernie, who's going to wrap it up for us and take us through the rest of the day.
Thank you, Charles. We are just about there. We started today discussing about we are ready to run. We talked about industry fundamentals, what makes us unique around location, scale, eyes on market, innovative team, and what we're trying to do now to create further value. We went from we are ready to run to ready to grow our lead, and we think that has good financial implications for the organization, for the company, and for our shareholders. You think about the three different categories of things that we talked about today, can really be broken into buckets of organic growth, external growth opportunities by deploying capital, and then additional strategic operating initiatives that we've gone through.
The fundamentals set up very well for this space for us to have excellent organic bottom line growth, revenue growth, NOI growth, maybe more than you'll see in some other real estate classes. In addition, the things that Tim talked about today, a lot of those things are newer to us in the last year and a half, two years. All those things that we walked through, the technology that we're enabling, those weren't available seven years ago. We're getting smarter every day. John talked about it with regards to revenue management. Our system's getting smarter every day, the system we've put in place, taking the best from our prior systems, getting more information, leveraging data. We're very excited just looking at the organic opportunity to have some outsized growth for what's coming up over the next few years.
Layer on top of that our opportunity to deploy capital. Deploy capital through the great acquisition opportunities that we have, channel agnostic, location specific, as we roll those out. Be able to buy today at a compelling long-term, risk-adjusted return, as well as great current yields, current cap rates, deploying capital in a very efficient manner. Also deploying capital to improve our homes. Deploying capital to improve our homes not only helps with the second item here I'm talking about, but also the first item in terms of putting in value-enhancing CapEx, hardening our assets, bringing down our maintenance costs long-term, but also generating an even better risk-adjusted return than we may see in acquisitions today. Very excited about those two places. Also remembering that when we're doing that, we do it on a home-by-home basis. We have this living laboratory of 80,000 homes.
We're going to go home by home and make the right decision. Do we want to keep it in our portfolio, revive it? Do we want to improve it by deploying capital in a cost-effective manner? Do we want to sell it? Sometimes the right answer is just to sell and move on to the next house. Finally, when you take that organic growth that on a relative basis could be stronger than you'll see in other real estate classes. You take our ability to be able to take capital, grow that capital, grow our bottom line. Some of the items that Charles and Jigg s and Alicia just walked through. We think it's reasonable targets to think that if we can get our days to re-resident down to somewhere in the 30s, and Charles just walked through those ancillary income items, strong bottom-line impact to us.
Understand, we've gone from a business that five or six years ago, where margins were in the 50s to when we IPO'd, where margins were in the low 60s. Today, we're in the mid 60s. All these items that we're talking about here drop right to the bottom line with regards to margin improvement. A business today that's in the mid 60s, you could certainly see get to the higher 60s.
Pretty exciting stuff. You start thinking about multiples on those numbers. You take the organic growth rate that we could have, you add in another 2.5% to 5% type growth on top of that over the next few years. We're certainly very excited about where that can take the business, where we can go, the kind of value we can drive, most importantly, to residents as they get a better living experience, but also translates to a better bottom line for us in creating value for our shareholders. With that, I'll pause for a moment and ask some of my colleagues to join me up here. We're going to have the opportunity to take some questions that you may have. As a reminder, we are webcasting today. Because of that, we have Bensing and Karina, who will be walking around with microphones.
If you do have a question, we'll ask you to please ask the question using the microphone so everyone can hear, not just in the room, but the folks who are listening as well on the webcast. With that, as everyone's coming up, we'll see if there's any questions.
I'm going to grab the podium.
Why don't we start with Tony here?
Right up.
Yes, please. It's coming.
Thank you. My question is, you talked about 15 million single-family homes. You have an attractive cost to capital. You showed that you have the scale and the ability to operate. Why not buy more?
Such a simple question. Well, a couple of things. We're certainly happy with the fact that our currency seems to be trading a little bit better. I think many of you know, it was publicly announced, we did put a tool like an ATM in place. I think John highlighted it pretty well that we've started to pivot a bit more to some growth. We're seeing some opportunity. If that opportunity exists, and we're constantly reminding folks, when the supply is there and the risk-adjusted returns stay meaningful, we can buy a lot of homes with the machines we put together. In the first 18 months of the business, we bought 30,000 homes one by one. First two years of the business, we got to 40,000 units, all one by one.
If that opportunity is there, Tony, and the market is still a little bit tight, but I mentioned earlier, markets like Seattle, we're seeing some interesting opportunities to invest. Dallas, Denver, a little bit in Phoenix. There's some markets that are still really tight, like California and Las Vegas, but we're incrementally trying to add to the portfolio. If we saw something that made sense, either a market opening up to us, I think we're more in a position today where we could lean in. I would also add that we still want to stay pretty strategic if there's some M&A out there. We've talked about some of the smaller bulk and some of those opportunities that we've been able to seize upon because of our proximity to those locations and the amount of scale.
I think hopefully we get an opportunity to see some other opportunities of size. There's no guarantees there, and we're just as happy to grow one by one if we need to.
Michael. Just wait for a moment for the microphone, please.
Why do I think this one's going for Tim?
I feel like I'm blinded. I already asked him all my questions before. It's really helpful to really understand how the company does what it does, right? Really getting under the hood and understanding your business. It's interesting from the potential incremental opportunity, this 2.5%-4.5% from these other items, reducing your number of days and the ancillary. How should investors think about the baseline growth that the company's going to have over the next three to five years that all these things would be additive to?
Together with that, how should they think about the balance sheet over that time frame to really understand what is the baseline growth that investors should expect as you execute against the plan?
Absolutely. It's a good question. We're in a very unique position right now with where the fundamentals are, where things are at with supply and demand, that we expect to have relatively strong growth that we certainly potentially set up for greater inflationary growth on the top line, on the revenue line. Without giving a specific number, we feel very good where that's heading. On the expense side, we think we still have some initiatives where we can do to help control costs. Now, we do bump up against some challenges with things like real estate taxes, as home prices continue to increase. We'll bump up against some challenges in some other expense items as well. You have expense for some of the things we're focused on some of our controllable expenses to try to offset that as well.
Over the next period of time, it certainly feels like we're in a sweet spot with what can happen around revenue growth, then we have initiatives to try to keep expense growth in place over the next few years. How that ties into the balance sheet is, we're committed and talked about many times that we want to continue to delever our balance sheet. One of the things that we have done is continue to have a low dividend payout ratio, which has allowed us to take excess proceeds from operations to delever our balance sheet to pay down debt. In addition, we need specific NOI growth and EBITDA growth going forward as well. We're sticking to that.
What's really exciting is with the opportunities that we're seeing around where things are at in terms of acquisition opportunities, balancing that with our VE opportunities of value enhancing CapEx, also remaining focused on the balance sheet. We believe the balance sheet to stay as safe. We're comfortable with it. We think it is important to bring leverage down. Leverage down will have two benefits. One, it'll probably get us closer to getting to an investment-grade rating sooner than later. We've been on that path now for a couple of years. You'll recall we had a pretty high number when we came out with our IPO, and today our leverage will likely come in at the end of the year around eight times. We're getting closer and closer to where we may need to be to get to an investment grade.
Importantly, by having lower leverage, it also allows us to play offense in a couple of different ways. Certainly, when you have a cost of capital advantage with your equity, that's one way. If we're at a point where leverage is low enough, and it's not today, but if we're low enough, we could also consider using leverage as a way to grow sometime in the future. Again, not in today's world, but sometime in a future world. Earnings profile, we feel really good about, and we'll certainly provide more details of that with our fourth quarter earnings call in terms of at least for the next year from a guidance perspective. Longer term, though, we're seeing good trends. From a balance sheet perspective, I'd say Michael's going to be more of the same.
I guess the thought process of not providing a three or five-year sort of building block growth outlook. You gave us one piece at the end of, here's the added benefit we think we can get to. I guess, what was the rationale of not trying to go sum all this up and say, in order for the next three years, we're going to be able to grow, let's say, 8% a year, and these are the components of it, and by end of year three, our balance sheet's going to be in this spot.
Yeah. Michael, I think what we wanted to focus on today were the good opportunities, understand the business. We have a wide range of people who are listening in today. Many of you have been following the space, really from the beginning. A lot of faces that we've known. Many are newer to the space. With the time that we have today, we thought it was important to let people understand how the business works. Our understanding is that a lot of people don't get that often from days like this, to really dive in, meet from the broader team, and understand how the business is put together.
Frankly, we wanted to give you guys the confidence that that core is that strong, so that when you think about where the business can go from an organic perspective, you see we have the people, the tools, the technology to make that happen. In addition, though, we know that people get excited about what is to come. We get it, and that's why I wanted to sprinkle in and talk about in the second half of the day, what we're trying to do around growing the business, where we see we can grow our lead, and some of those initiatives that are out there. By putting a specific number on it, now, different people are going to have different views, and we didn't want to spend a lot of time then justifying whether a number was a 3%, a 4%, a 5%, or an 8%.
We want to focus on the pieces that are there. You've seen the trajectory we've been on. There's people who are out there who are a lot smarter than us from an economics perspective, who can give you a sense for what's happening in the overall economy and things like that. We wanted to see the things that we control, that we're focused on, and where we can go. Jake.
Thank you very much. I was wondering, Blackstone and Invitation Homes together were pioneers in the securitization market for single-family rentals, and the recent trends we've seen in commercial real estate is the re-emergence of ground leases. I was wondering if you would consider unlocking some of the value in your land holdings embedded in these homes, and enter into a ground lease, similar to a blanket mortgage. The duration would be around 99 years. The ground rent would grow at around CPI, which is about half of where your rents have been growing. It could allow you to unlock significant capital, which could be reinvested in new acquisitions, dramatically growing the size of the company.
Jake, that's an idea that we haven't spent a lot of time thinking about, I can certainly say that. You can certainly see that in the real estate classes where that is happening. All ideas, that's what we try to do, is come up with new things. You're right to point out, the guy who actually did the first securitizations here with us today, John Olsen, and John's in the back, and worked with us and the Blackstone folks in getting that done. For us, it'd be weighing the opportunity and the financial upside you get that from also the complication and making sure we continue to control the assets. Like I said, it's not something we've given a lot of thought to, but something we can certainly give some consideration to. Aaron?
Yeah. Oh, he's here. Well, good.
You want to go ahead? I'm sorry.
No, we'll go Aaron, just because the microphone's close.
All right, great. Thanks. Hello. You talked a bit earlier about the financial benefit of getting from mid-40s to mid-30s on the days to re-resident. I'm curious if you're thinking that's the high watermark, the opportunity. I understand that you may never get to the apartments for various reasons. Then curious also about brand value. Is that resonating in the marketplace? Are residents coming to you? I understand you're making investments in your online marketing effectively, but are you able to gauge at all if your brand is now able to generate leads to you without having to spend incremental capital?
Sure. I'll answer the second one first, then get to your first question. In terms of brand, Jake does a really nice job with this, we do measure awareness, there's a number of different ways that you can look at awareness. When we run a radio campaign in South Florida, we'll see those spikes in terms of, call it, general awareness. Taking a step back, just being rational, go kind of to the earlier point, 16 million units for lease in the U.S. in a detached basis. Our average market footprint's about 5,000 units, if you look at it across the 17. In a market like Atlanta, where we have 12,500 homes, we may have better brand awareness around our footprint and who we are and the type of business we run.
I do think it takes time and economies of scale, and I still think, I don't even know if we're in the first inning of brand awareness, to be totally candid. I think customer experience piece of the brand, if somebody's a perpetual lessee, I do think matters. The efforts that we're putting into retention and trying to steer traffic to our own website so that we can control that experience is meaningful. Jake's mentioned this, but our conversion rates are much higher when we can get somebody to our site versus maybe just figuring out our home on Zillow and then calling a number. That conversion is really important. I do think you start to build a brand.
Any good brand takes years, decades, time to evolve, and quite frankly, we still represent such a small part of that footprint, even in a market like Atlanta. We're in the lowest of low single digits in terms of total single-family houses that we have an influence on that are for lease in that market. I think brand takes a while. Your first question was around days to re-resident. Multifamily has gotten really good at this in terms of being able to cycle people in and out of a property probably inside of 20 days. The really good companies do it inside of 20 days. I don't think in SFR that's necessarily achievable in the near term. By the way, let me pause right there. I think we can get into the low to mid-30s over time as a business.
We have to get really good at the pre-leasing component of our business. Our revenue management curve's pretty good today in terms of how we have leases come off and start on a cycle in terms of where that lease starts and stops. We've got to get probably a bit more dynamic, which will just take time and maturation in terms of accelerating
Not only just the pre-leasing process, but how quickly we can turn a home and ultimately get somebody in that home to view. There's a number of things. I don't know if Tim or Jig, somebody talked about this earlier, but we're looking at mapping softwares in terms of mapping out our homes and creating maybe a much more digital experience to where somebody can look at a home and really kind of play with the way that room's set up based on their furniture needs and things like that, so they can maybe make a decision much quicker versus having to maybe physically set foot in the house. All those types of things will drive that down.
I think getting into the 20s or the teens will take a long, long time to get there, but I think it is a pretty achievable opportunity for us to see our days where residents start with a three. I think there's just a few things that we've got to do better and get more robust at doing in a quicker fashion to get there. Where do you want to go? Let's go to Aaron. We said we'd go to Aaron next.
Dallas, you gave a couple of examples of outsized HPA in California that caused you guys to dispose of assets. When you're thinking about redeploying, do you redeploy back into California? How do you think about the market today, given legislation that Gavin Newsom is looking to push through, where it limits rent growth to, I think 5% a year plus inflation?
Aaron's question is around AB 1482, which is the bill on rent control in California today. We talked about this, I think on our last quarterly call, but forgive me if I'm wrong. First of all, that proposal that appears in all likelihood to get signed, we would agree, is the 5% plus CPI rental cap on anyone that owns 10 or more single-family homes, and also the multifamily space. Generally speaking, we don't cross that threshold on average very often. Just on a looking trailing 12 basis, we ran some math at 5% plus CPI, and our total exposure was half a million dollars plus or minus. You certainly see some new lease growth in the summer that could push through 5%.
It's important to remember that the way that that bill's being introduced and the way it's currently written is that there is no cap on setting new lease rates. It's truly just on the renewal. If somebody vacates, we have the ability to set the price, or it's a follow-up called market pricing on that new lease opportunity. In terms of how we think about California specifically, look, we're really clear about the fact that we're part of the solution in California, and we feel strongly about that. We fit a part of a housing continuum there that, quite frankly, is not 64% or 65% homeownership. That state, especially in the parts of the markets we are, is a lot closer to 45% or 50% homeownership. The norm is actually to lease in those markets. We think we, quite frankly, offer a better product that's more dependable.
By the way, that's a little bit of a plug, but that's the truth. That's how we feel. The piece about it that I think we can continue to refine and get better is your point about reintroducing homes for sale back into the California marketplace, which we do all the time. We see less of an opportunity today to invest in California like we did maybe five or six years ago, but we're still seeing some interesting opportunities. We're really, I don't want to say we're agnostic about which markets to invest in. We certainly have a buy box for each market. If there's something that fits that box, we want to take a look at it. Regardless of whether we think it's too expensive or too cheap, we want to look at it.
If it's in the strike zone, we want to see what that is saying to us about value, because it doesn't only reflect how we're going to invest today, it says a lot about what our portfolio in that area could be valued at real-time. Having that kind of on-the-ground feedback is really important. We do make decisions. All the time as we're doing that rebuy analysis that John Gibson talked about, we are culling and selling homes for a variety of reasons. A lot of times we look at assets and say, "You know what? It's just worth too much to an end user." We can't justify holding this for our shareholders in a 3 to 5-year outlook because we think we can actually make a better return by selling, and maybe it's a blend of reinvesting.
Maybe we sell a home in California, and we reinvest it in two assets, one in Atlanta and one in Charlotte, that are both going to offer kind of a mid-fives call it going-in cap rate, but we believe in the upside in terms of some of the HPA potential as well. That's really how we think about it.
John?
I completely forgot two microphones.
I was hoping to understand the vintage curve on all-in cost to maintain. You buy a home, you put $20,000 into it. Years one through three, it's pretty minimal. At what year do you hit your roughly $3,000 number of all-in cost to maintain, and what do the out years, 10, 15 years look like so we understand how the homes age?
Go ahead, Tim.
Well, I think this is a multi-part answer. I think over time, there will be cost increases, right? Inflation is going to cause that. Labor rates, cost of materials will be impacted. I think we're going to be offsetting that a lot through resident education, through hardening of assets, through our ongoing procurement efforts. We'll see savings in other places. I can see a day where we have a permission to enter program where we're able to optimize our team of maintenance technicians, further driving down our maintenance costs. I think we also do a good job of maintaining houses along the way. That's one of the nice things about not being a mom-and-pop operator. If a roof needs to be replaced, we're replacing the roof. If an HVAC system needs to be replaced, we're going to replace the HVAC system along the way.
I think we'll see a balancing act over time of things causing it to go up, but we're also driving it down through some of our thoughtful programs.
Follow up there. If the average, again, is roughly $3,000 in today's dollars, and that's an average, what are the oldest homes in the portfolio run at if that's the portfolio average?
Yeah. When you say oldest home, be careful. You're saying those are probably the ones that have gone the longest, is what you're referring to.
Yes.
We have a wide range of homes in the portfolio. John, a lot of it really comes down to when a home turns. If the home hasn't turned for five or six years, we haven't gotten to that level because we're seeing some R&M that's happening along the way. When they move out, we're going to have a higher than average cost turn that happens, and that's what gets you that average over the period of time. Also, it has a lot to do with geography. We do have some markets. In markets like Phoenix, Las Vegas, our average cost to maintain a home is much lower, where in some markets in the Southeast, for instance, and in Florida, where you have more moisture, they're going to be a little bit higher. I'd be careful about speaking in generalities.
We do have the benefit of having 80,000 homes, and you can get stuck in the average. Tim puts us on a home-by-home basis in terms of how we look at it. I don't know, Tim, if you want to add anything to that.
I think that's a great answer. Again, I will say that the role of the resident is so important. An HVAC system, it could last three years if somebody totally trashes it. If somebody's changing their air filter out regularly, an HVAC system in Phoenix can last 20 years. Again, we are really focused on the core of that triangle on our expense management philosophy and driving the behavior. We're just early stages. I think we're onto something. It appears to be working right now, though.
Thank you.
Since Scott's right here, we'll do that. Karina will go next over there.
Thanks, guys. Just wondering how your thoughts around the build for rent concepts are evolving, with more builders validating the concept and investing more into those types of homes and carving out sections of master plans to potentially build a rental pod around. What's your appetite around build for rent? Is it changing? I think you mentioned that you bought a few houses from some builders. Is that appetite increasing in terms of partnering with other home builders?
I think spurred by location. We talk about this, that we really can't compromise. I think, some of the revenue growth numbers, some of the NOI optimization, all of that is ultimately a byproduct of demand. Right? If we can buy homes from builders in areas that make a ton of sense, we're all over it. For the record, we get this stuff coming in our door literally every day. From the public side, the boutique builder, and then some of these groups that are now forming to build the rent communities. It really comes down to location, footprint. Is it the type of home that is synonymous with our quality and our brand of business? I'll give you an example of that.
There's a lot of people out there calling themselves build to rent today that are building an 800 or 900 sq ft garden apartment footprint. That's not our business. I would never snub our nose at it to say we wouldn't want to look at it, something if it made a ton of sense, it could drive shareholder value. At the end of the day, we're building a playbook and an offense that centers around doing the same thing over and over really well and figuring out how to drive down costs in that process that will make a certain customer profile stickier to stay with us longer. That's a winning proposition for our business. The more we deviate from that in terms of footprint, location, type of home, I think we bring noise into the business model.
Will the day ever come that we would be open to buying communities? Never say never. I would say it better line up with our investment strategy around providing what we think are some of the higher barrier to entry risk-adjusted returns that we're seeking, which quite frankly, have been a winning formula for us thus far. I'd never say never. We're certainly doing some of it in terms of buying product from builders, but we're really channel agnostic, and we try to stress this everywhere we go. I don't think we have an appetite for taking any balance sheet risk on right now to be a home builder. That's not in our foreseeable future right now.
We certainly should be the best buyer of single-family homes in the country, and that should lend itself to publics, privates, unique investors that have footprints that make sense, and what other opportunities are available to us that will fit into the offense we're running. That's the way of answering that question.
Two unrelated questions. Number one, I might have missed it, but what % of your leases are represented by pre-leasing now? The second one is, you mentioned having a sale leaseback program kind of in the works. I'm wondering if that is driven by an opportunity for tax arbitrage. Taxes are deductible to you, probably not to the homeowner, and if that could have a steep learning curve or acceleration curve.
You want to talk about leasing?
I'll go ahead and take that first question on the pre-leasing, that's a great question. Currently right now, since integration at the beginning of this year, we're trending at about right in the 30% range of our leases that are pre-leased. However, we have many markets that certainly exceed that. That's an average of all of our markets. We have markets that have exceeded that. As you know, we've spent a lot of time. What's that saying? You got to walk before you can run. We've spent a lot of time focusing on occupancy, rent growth, and the other metrics that are important. Now that we have everything in place, as we've told you, including the initiatives and future initiatives to come to work on the pre-leasing to continue to enhance that because we know how valuable it is to days to re-lease.
Yeah. I loved Alicia's stat that she called out in her presentation. If we get better at pre-leasing by 5% plus or minus, we can pick up two days. Two days equates to $3.2 million to our bottom line in terms of days to a resident. It's meaningful. In terms of your question on the sale leaseback side
We really love the idea of figuring out how to build the right structure to capture customers that The biggest pain of moving is figuring out the timing for selling your home and moving into another property, right? For some people, they have the luxury of saying, Look, I can move out. I can go buy or lease another home, then I'll sell my home. Majority of Americans need to sell their home, or at least have it in contract, to have peace of mind they want to go put something down on something else. I think we can fit that opportunity really uniquely with our business, so long as we're not compromising, as I mentioned to Brock, location and that it fits with our normal business model of what we're trying to own long term.
We've worked with Zillow, we've worked with a couple of the other iBuyers to try to start to target this. Still early stages, done a couple of them. I think what you could ultimately envision is an opportunity set where buyers and sellers of homes in our market know they can come to us as really a bridge, right? If we can agree on price, to your point on can we arbitrage, I think what we can do is have zero loss to lease on our initial acquisition cost of that asset. Plus, we can probably delay any potential CapEx or rehab dollars. On average, we spend about $22,000 a home up front. We can actually have that asset cash flow until that customer were to move out or to make their next purchase.
I'd hope that we would be able to run this business to where when somebody sells us their home and leases it back, they'll ultimately not want to stay with us a year plus, maybe 2 years, while they evaluate and make that kind of market decision. I think it's a great tool for us. It's really early stages, and I think the trickiest part about it has been able to try to create how do you create the awareness? You have to do that through a partnership. This is something we need to kind of brand a little bit louder in the marketplace, like a number of other organizations that are out there saying, "sellusyourhome.com" and some of these other things. I think it'll be an interesting tool to us as the industry continues to evolve, though.
Drew?
I was hoping you could maybe frame for us the bulk acquisition opportunity set. We're hearing a lot about specificity and certain things that make an Invitation Homes property what it is. I guess, could you characterize who would typically own a portfolio of, call it 50-100 homes in your markets, up to your quality standards, and kind of maybe shrink the pie charts down to kind of what that opportunity set looks like in your markets?
It's a good question. I'm going to answer it a couple different ways. There are plenty of operators that have between 30 and 100 homes in our market. They're just crossover markets. I'd put that. There's got to be 50 to 100 operators that have 50 homes, plus or minus, that crossover into some of our markets. Now, what's ideal for us in terms of bulk acquisition? What would be ideal is if it was the right product in the right location, but also had that spec standard you mentioned in your question. That's the trickiest part, for the record. We underwrite that, and we can solve that in terms of what the interiors look like over the long term.
The acquisition we did in the first quarter in Las Vegas and Atlanta, I think it was about 100 and-- now it's getting wonky, but I think it's like $130 million transaction that we did that was a few hundred assets in Las Vegas and a couple hundred homes in Atlanta laid up really nicely. Now, we underwrote, as part of that acquisition, some pretty material rehab dollars into our models in terms of getting it up to what we call the IH fit and finish standard. We do not see a lot of portfolios that go the distance in terms of rehab and CapEx on the front end that we do. Now, there are certainly a couple of our larger peers that are doing a pretty good job of it.
Generally speaking, I think people are pretty careful with what goes in on the front end, and then you feel that in the recurring R&M. We learned that, by the way. Seven years ago, as we were buying smaller portfolios, you really quickly figured out if we didn't get in there and do our scope, what Tim's team does every time we buy a home and just make sure that we put in not only the cosmetics, but like supply lines, T valves, toilet plates. This $5 fix toilet plate. Just by doing that, we may fix, I don't know how many hundreds of maintenance calls you could get on a home that had one sitting there for 10 or 12 years. It's just the little things. We don't see a lot of footprint of portfolios that have the spec level.
We certainly see and come across several operators on a weekly basis that maybe are exploring thinking about selling their 30, 40, or 50 homes. Getting all those homes to fit can sometimes be tricky. Where we have a lot of success is when, and this happened in the Las Vegas trade earlier in the year, is where somebody is willing to part with parts of their portfolio and maybe not all of it. That's where we tend to do some of our best work. In terms of bigger footprint, and we look at like our top 10 peers in the space, and really in our markets, there's something like 120,000 units of crossover, more or less, in kind of like-minded markets.
Over time and distance, being a great operator, having great relationships, I hope we get a chance to look at some of those opportunities as well.
Doug? Give me one second up here, nothing for Doug.
Thanks. Can you talk about your appetite to do joint ventures as a way to kind of grow the home count, but still be able to control the homes you're purchasing?
Yeah. Certainly an opportunity that has probably been available to us and could be available to us in the future. Don't know if we're going to need to do it. We'll see. Time will tell. I think it'd just be depending on circumstance, opportunity, current currency in terms of how much buying power we think we have in the marketplace. All that would weigh into it. I think in terms of ever doing JVs, we would probably never do anything that would compromise the way we run our portfolio. We get the question a lot around, would you guys third-party manage? I would never say never, but it's really hard to manage your portfolio in a number of different ways. Good example of that, even though both companies were basically doing it the same way, was last year when we were on two systems.
Just trying to do things differently just doesn't work. You want to run your office, right? It's better to be able to run your business the same way over and over. If we had an opportunity and we had a partner that was open-minded to us running our office, I would never say that that couldn't happen. Could be an opportunity. You never know.
All right. Well, we're going to be around during lunch to answer any other questions you may have. I'll just kick it over to Dallas to kind of wrap us up.
Yeah. Look, first of all, I don't want it to ever be lip service. We really appreciate the shareholder base that's on the room, in the phone, and generally that supports our business. We would not be anywhere without you guys. Thank you. The analysts, sell-side guys, everyone that covers us, thank you for your thoughtful approach to how we do things. As you know, Ernie, Greg, myself will always make ourselves available as we can. What we want to be known for beyond a great company is great swag. We have awesome bags in the back, Nomatic bags with a little IH love inside of it for each of you. We hope you grab a bag, take it with you, and enjoy the day. We really appreciate you guys coming today. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thanks.