Rental marketers don’t have a data problem, they have a clarity problem. Today’s highly digitized multifamily environment churns out an overload of fragmented data from a wide range of disconnected dashboards, reports, and spreadsheets.
If marketers could more easily synthesize that information, they'd better understand what drives leasing activity and where their properties excel or fall behind.
Yet, as many marketers told us through surveys and direct feedback at 2025's Unlock by Zillow Rentals, that kind of automated analysis has been out of reach. Instead, they’ve had to spend significant time and energy manually gathering the context needed to understand their market.
“The biggest challenge has been fragmentation,” said Ben Alton at Zillow. “Marketers have been asked to pull performance, spend, market context, and renter behavior information from different places, then stitch it all into one story. That’s hard to do quickly, and it makes it harder to act with confidence.”
That’s changing. In this article, we’ll share the rental marketing reporting and analytics capabilities that multifamily operators told us they want, and how we’re incorporating them into Zillow’s all-new reporting and analytics platform.
What reporting and analytics capabilities do rental marketers want?
Marketers don’t want passive, static reporting. They want an interactive, decision-oriented experience that lets them search and understand the data in the ways that best serve their needs. In this way, they can better understand not only how a property is performing but also why it is performing that way — and what to do next.
Comprehensive reporting should be:
- Self-service. Operators want the ability to break data down by market, package, and portfolio. Usability matters, too. Presentation-ready exports meet marketers' need to put their data into action in real time.
- Trustworthy. Marketers need local market context that they can trust. Zillow’s reporting tool pulls in external data from sources including the U.S. Census Bureau and Moody’s Analytics, enabling marketers to better understand the forces shaping the market in which their properties compete for tenants.
- Detailed: Today’s numbers only tell part of the story. The ability to make historical comparisons, zoom in on specific cities and submarkets, and compare individual portfolios to full markets all help operators make better decisions for the future and tell a more complete ROI story.
- A single source of truth: The entire team should have access to a single, comprehensive, consolidated view of their portfolio’s performance so everyone is working from the same baseline of information.
These capabilities enable smarter, faster rental marketing operations by making it easier to spot underperforming properties sooner, directly connect ad spend to outcomes, and get a clearer view of the market, renters, and competition from a single place.
Why operators and tenants win when performance data is connected
When operators’ rental marketing data is all in one place, they can feel empowered that the decisions they make using the data will sharpen their competitive edge and improve the leasing experience for staff and renters, from how to position a listing to where to put their ad spend.
For example, if a property is underperforming, the issue may not be marketing alone. Digging into the data will reveal other, less-prominent factors that could be preventing otherwise interested prospects from reaching out, such as pricing, listing quality, nearby competition, or a mismatch between what the property offers and what renters in that area are actually looking for.
Integrated platforms enable:
- Performance in context, not isolation. “Don’t just show leads or spend,” Alton says. “Show how a property is trending over time, how it compares to the market, and what external factors may be influencing the result.”
- Faster, smarter action. Making high-stakes decisions without the full picture can lead to slower decision-making, weaker budget justification, and less confidence when presenting a business case to owners or leadership.
Critically, integrated reporting and analytics can help ensure operators have the data foundation they need to leverage new technologies that are already amplifying search, such as AI-guided rental search. Higher-quality listings, better market context, stronger insight into renter behavior, and a clearer view of performance are all essential to the depth of information needed for properties to attract renters as AI becomes a core feature of the rental process.
“Renter insights must evolve alongside changes in search behavior,” Alton says. “This isn’t just about reporting on the past. It’s about giving multifamily operators the foundation they’ll need to make smarter decisions as the search experience keeps changing.”
Zillow Rentals is the most visited and most trusted rental network. To learn how Zillow is leveraging its own data on what prospects are searching for today to uncover leading indicators of future demand, visit Zillow.com or join us at Zillow’s Unlock 2026 conference.
