Are Multifamily Property Websites Built for Renters or for Us?

Your property website is your most controllable marketing asset. But is it designed around how renters actually behave?

In this episode, Jon Simpson, founder of Swifty and Criterion.B, walks through the data behind how prospects interact with multifamily websites today. We discuss the pages they visit most, the features they rely on, and where marketing teams often miss opportunity.

We also explore what comes next. The future of apartment websites includes dynamic content that adapts to the renter, personalizes the experience, and supports stronger conversion.

If you are responsible for marketing performance, leasing results, or digital strategy, this conversation will challenge how you think about your website and how you measure its impact.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Hi everyone, and welcome to the Apartment Department, the podcast for multifamily marketers by multifamily marketers. If you've been listening to past episodes, you know that Chris and I have been talking a lot about the modern apartment website. And is it time for a change? Can we make it better to fit consumer habits and expectations? And so we are really excited today to have the founder and CEO of both SwiftD and Criterion B, both companies focused on multifamily marketing from website, digital, branding, customer experience, all of the huge, very foundational, important things that we as marketers should be thinking about. His name is John Simpson. Hi, John. Thank you so much for being with us today.

SPEAKER_02 0:53

Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here.

SPEAKER_00 0:56

So can you tell us a little bit about yourself, how you got into multifamily, how you started Swifty and Criterion B.

SPEAKER_02 1:05

Absolutely. So I'll keep it short because it can get to be kind of long. But I started the my agency, Criterion B back in 2008, and we weren't focused on multifamily at the time. So it took a few years to get us there. In 2020, 2008, say 2009 or 10, we started working with AMLE. And so we got to work with their Dallas office, and we ended up getting to rebuild their website, the corporate website. So our first experience in multifamily, and we worked on a few other properties for them, and then we were able to work on a property with UDR that same year. And we looked up, there's cranes all over Dallas, and we were kind of tired of being the lowest man on the totem pole when it came to the other side of our business. So we said, it's time, let's move out, and construction's booming, so let's go after construction. And kind of the rest is history. We really were a we the agency side is more of a traditional branding and marketing agency. So it was on the higher end of things. We were working with ground up developers. We worked with a lot of the Dallas developers here that were starting to open properties across the country and really just started doing a lot of that brand work later on in 2018 or so is when we really started seeing the need for a property, a specific answer, like to from a marketing perspective, because we were so high-end and high cost that most class B and C properties really couldn't afford to use us. And so we had gone into a couple meetings where we'd been presenting names and brands for some of these class A and ground up high-rises, and the management companies were present and they were like, Oh, we love this. Can you do it for us? And at first I was like, Oh, I'd love to. And I show them our pricing, and they're like, Oh, never mind, you can't do this for us. Okay, well, we obviously have something we need to work on, and so that's really where we started working on Swifty. So this is in 2018, and as it started out, it really was just trying to find a marketing platform that could be affordable. It wasn't so focused just on the websites, but as we started asking our clients, you know, what really is needed? How can we help you? What the marketing people in the multifamily world, I've noticed this over the last decade or so. I've never met anybody that is as busy and pulled in more directions than the marketing director. Um, especially uh if you're over more than 10 or 20 or 30 properties. I saw our clients were having to go to events at different properties and go to openings, and they were having to do business cards and then floor plan sheets and then brochures, and they're being asked by 30 or 40 bosses, right? So all the managers are asking for stuff. And at the end of the day, they got so overwhelmed they were just like they they'd almost shut down. We turned to their actual boss. I'm like, what can I do for you instead, right? And and they really were, they were just frazzled. They're they're pulled in so many directions. And so I said, you know, what can I do? How how can I help with that? I love solving problems with technology. Is there anything that I can do? And at that time we started talking about how many logins they had. And they had logins to their web tools, they had logins to their AdWords tools, they had logins to their Google Business tools, they had logins to their PMS, they had logins to everything they do, their CRM, they had so many logins. They said if we could simplify and not have to go to so many places, that would be amazing. And so that was one place where we kind of started this whole idea of saying, okay, well, what about though on the website side of things? And they started saying, well, we have to relearn how to do websites every time we log in. It's challenging. Every time we go, we have proper, especially our third-party managers, because the third-party managers may be managing three or four or five different web technologies. They weren't all in a single technology. And so that even made it more difficult, right? So they're having to go in and learn to edit, and they're not editing every day. So they're they're going in there once a month or something to make updates, and they have to start over. So things that should take five minutes take them an hour, and so slowing the process down. And so that's when we said, Hey, you know, we want to really try to create a system that is, and I tell my developers this constantly, and we're not there yet, but I tell them constantly, I said, if your grandmother or your five-year-old kid can't use the website system, we're not done yet. We need to keep working until it's that easy. Long story short.

SPEAKER_00 5:45

I mean, that's great. And I love hearing how people are solving challenges, they're seeing challenges. You know, it's not what you perceived as a challenge, is what you were hearing as a challenge, and that's what you solve for. And I think that's really cool. So I know you guys do a lot, you cover the gamut, but let's talk about websites specifically and let's talk about data because Chris and I both like data. Can you tell us a little bit when you're looking at the websites that property management companies or owners are using for their apartments? How are people interacting with them? Like what are you seeing is really popular from a search or prospect standpoint right now?

SPEAKER_02 6:24

So I think one of the most interesting things that I found, and you you guys have already said it on previous episodes I've heard, but it is backed by beta. And I I even pulled more stats last night just to verify it again. But the number one page on a property website is not the home page, it's actually the floor planes page. And it's the only industry I've ever seen that has a secondary page that is more popular and has more clicks than the homepage does. And if I used to say it's it's about as much, but after I was looking, I would go several sites last night and I was going through the numbers, and they're actually five to 10%, sometimes higher than the homepage. And so really seeing how important it is is that when they come to your site, they already they kind of A, they know they want an apartment, they want to lead, right? That's another thing that our industry has that's different than a lot of industries is the intent. You don't accidentally randomly fall into an apartment website, right? You come there with intent already, which is a huge benefit to us, right? And so the very first thing you would think they would go to is like, let's see what they've got, right? They're looking for pricing, they're looking for the availability. And so having that connection and that tie-in to whatever your PMS is to have live pricing and availability is incredibly important, right? I feel like even though these floor plan pages are so important, we still see so many property companies put more of the emphasis on the homepage and on other pages, and they they treat the floor plans page just like any other page, right? So, and again, in most sites, your floor plan, you know, your your secondary pages, they may get five or 10% of your traffic, but in this case, they get more than your homepage. We should be spending a considerable amount of time and effort building out these pages and really thinking through them. If you take it outside of multifamily and you look at what the other world does, the rest of the world and marketing, right? We build funnels. We build these funnels that that kind of take the traffic where they're coming. We say, what can we do to make their process easier? How do we streamline it? How do we give them everything they need in one place so they don't have to go click around everywhere? And so you you kind of see this need that maybe we start looking at creating landing pages for specific units. Because and again, you guys, I've been I never heard of the podcast until a few weeks ago. And I had I I hired a sales guy and he came in and he was learning the business, he came from RealPage, and he's like, Hey, I found this podcast, you gotta listen to it. And I was like, Let me listen. And it was talking about AIM, okay. And I've I've known Dennis Cogville for a couple years now, and I've talked to him at a bunch of conferences, and he's always like, You gotta come to AIM, you gotta come to AIME, and I haven't made it yet. And so I listened to it, I was like, Man, I do need to go to AIM. I was like, so I was listening in on the conversations that you guys were having, and as it progressed, and went back as you mentioned Ed and Chai. And I had a client who just had introduced me to Ed and Chai about a week earlier, and so I had had some great conversations, and you know, we we were able to just we we're kind of competitors, but at the same time, it's like we we had a lot to talk about, and it was a really fun conversation. And at the end of it, like, hey, let's not, even though we're competitors, let's keep this conversation going, let's keep talking because it's it's actually it's it's really fun. But it's good to see how outside of multifamily you we create these funnels. Well, in multifamily, we really don't do that. We don't have these funnels, we don't have landing pages that take you from point A to point B in your journey through AI and through SGE and through AEO and all these new terms that are there, there's they're always changing and they're they're so they're all so new. But the whole idea is to make that search more relevant to this to the actual person who's typing it in. And when you're typing it in, you know what you're looking for. You're not looking for a three-bedroom necessarily. If you're a single person, you're you're looking for a one-bedroom or a studio. You're being specific in your searches. You're typing in one-bedroom apartments in a specific area of town or studio apartments in a specific part of town or studio apartments under$600 in a particular part of town, right? And yet when we when we take that search, we're still sending them to a generic page. Whether that's the home page or whether that is the floor plan page, even the floor plan page, we're we're taking you there, we're giving you everything, and we're saying, hey, good luck. I hope you can find what you're looking for, right? So if you're talking about e-commerce and you're looking at how is e-commerce different, well, e-commerce looks at your searches, it looks at what you're looking for, and it provides you very specific responses and answers to those searches, right? And so going down that that path of saying, you know, I want to I want a one-bedroom apartment that's under twelve hundred dollars, starting in their Google search. If you don't have one, you shouldn't come up, right? That you should be served with relevant results. And once you do click on that and you see that live price in the in the ad, it says we have one bedroom starting at a thousand bucks. And I click on it, I don't want to be taken to the floor plan page. I want to be taken to the A1 floor plan page. I want to be taken to that spot on the site that is gonna walk me through the next part of the journey, right? And because you're making my life easier.

SPEAKER_00 11:55

I think that's interesting. And Chris, I mean, you were like John mentioned, you know, what do you think? Because I know you're on a website journey right now to think about how you can present your properties differently.

SPEAKER_01 12:07

Well, that's exactly my thought process is why when we started this back in 08, 07, when we were doing these things, we used to have landing pages, then we went away from it. We used to put pricing in ads, then we went away from it. Now the pricing's back. So it's just interesting how it kind of cycles, just like anything else. Um but my question to you, John, is are you talking desktop or mobile? And how are people interacting with mobile? Obviously, it's really changed. It used to be 4060, 5050, 6040, now it's like what 90 10 probably, 80 20 for sure. 80 20 is what they're doing. So, how are we how are we supposed to account for that? Um, because we still want to have nice photos and videos and get people around and send them to a landing page, but obviously mobile works a lot different. How do we account for that when we're thinking about websites? Yeah, that's that's a really good question.

SPEAKER_02 13:02

It's it's really interesting because if you've read about AMP, like AMP pages, Google's AMP pages, right? So that the mobile performance, amplified mobile performance, these are if Google had it their way, your pages would be black and white with no image, right? They're gonna load lightning fast, they're gonna give the information, and then they're gonna go get get to where they're needing to go, and then they're gonna leave. We can't do that in our world, right? We we have to have some sort of a balance because people do want to see those things. So we do see 80-20 uh typically, and it's growing. So just like a year and a half to two years ago, we were seeing closer to be 60, 40, uh, 65, 35, something around that. And it's already gotten so much more prominent on the mobile space. So all sides, you're gonna you have to obviously make sure that your website is built to support mobile. We like to say mobile first, right? So you you want to make sure that it's going to be able to accommodate those searches. I still believe you you're one, it's even more important on mobile to get them to that result as fast as possible so that they don't have to fumble around, right? They don't have to go figure out where you put it because they have less viewing space. And so oftentimes you get to the floor plan page on mobile and you're scrolling and scrolling and scrolling because it's one floor plan, big price section. How do you get them to the the area where where they need to be as fast as possible? Right? So one of the things that we're working on right now is is really making those pages more dynamic in how they're being built based on the search terms that's sent them there. So through through the URLs, sending variables based on the search terms back to the site, so we know, hey, they're looking for an A1, let's start with the A1. Or let they're looking for a one bedroom, so let's start with the one bedroom. So you can still put the ones down below. If we have anything that is unavailable, so typically when we're looking at the pricing and availability, it's updated on an hourly basis and we can see what's happening on site. So if I'm out of a, let's say I have three different one bedrooms and one of them is unavailable and won't be available for more than 60 days, so it's actually showing as unavailable, we move that to a different section down at the bottom that says they're unavailable, right? Or you have the ability to do that. So you can have your available units up first, and then we order those available units based on interest, so based on what they were looking for. So again, just trying to get it, get the person that's doing the search to their results faster.

SPEAKER_01 15:28

Are you seeing by doing that that you're getting better results? Either somebody applying quicker, getting through the process faster, calling, taking some sort of action versus when you don't do something like that. Do you have any data around that?

SPEAKER_02 15:41

I don't. It's too early to tell. We're still working on the on the technology right now. So we have it released only on a couple websites, but it's something that we're actively building out and tracking. So I will, if we keep in touch, I'll I'll be able to let you know.

SPEAKER_00 15:57

And I just want to make sure I understand. So you're basically saying based on the search query, those parameters are being passed through the URL. When someone clicks like on a pay-per-click ad, they're being passed through the URL, and then the page is dynamically changing based on the parameters or the search query within the URL. So you're providing dynamic content to searchers.

SPEAKER_02 16:24

Dynamic in the sense of the ordering. Yeah. Okay. We're not changing the text on the page. So one of like we're not actually going to change like what it says. So I'm not going to say, hi Ann, thanks for coming to our website, right? Yeah, it's not that customized. Yeah. It's not going to be that customized or personalized yet. It's personalized to their search query, right? And so we can take that information and we can we can reorder a page based off of it. Reorder the the floor plans based off.

SPEAKER_00 16:51

Yeah, based. That's game changing. I mean, Chris, you and I have talked about we talked about that a while ago in our website episode. Yeah. Yeah. And we were actually, we then kind of followed up and we were sending tools back and forth that would dynamically insert or change content based on intent. And so that's really, really cool to hear that that technology is coming through Swifty and through your websites.

SPEAKER_01 17:16

It'll be interesting to see what your partners think about that and how it does change and make it easier for the on-site staff. Because I think that's that's our biggest goal, our biggest challenge is we can drive the traffic all day long, but are we actually making it easier for our staffs to do the work? I mean, they are the lifeblood, right? Like our staffs on site are the ones that make Ann and I look good because they're the ones that turn these leads into something and generate the revenue. So it'll be interesting to see how the staffs react to make their lives easier. Does this dynamic content work with all the platforms out there? Um, are you able to kind of integrate with Yardi, RealPage, Intrata in any of the CRMs that we have?

SPEAKER_02 17:58

We do and all the PMSs we we do integrate with. CRMs right now, we were integrating with Nock, of course, and ILM. Any of the built-in CRMs that are part of the PMSs we can connect with. A lot of the CRMs, you find a lot of the technology out there. Until you have clients on your system that are using their technologies, they won't let us integrate with their technology. And so some of them that are like, I really want that to connect with funnel, still waiting for a client to sign up that's using funnel so that I can do that. Right. So, but yes, we're we're constantly integrating, we're building out our integrations right now, full integration for Salesforce. There's not a whole lot of people out there that are using Salesforce, but we do have some of our larger clients that are winning that way, building out a lot of their own internal systems, and we're making our systems connect with them. Yeah, it's a it is a very interesting concept of looking at how do we make the the actual experience more personalized without and still abide by all of the fair housing rules and everything you're allowed to actually do and see and all of that. So it can be a challenge, I think, to make it happen. But right now on our sites, you can have the available the ability to have your floor plans automatically go into the unavailable category. You can do that right now across our whole platform. We've done that based off of Cortland, actually. So one of our clients came from Cortland and they worked on the web project there and they said, hey, this is something that we saw that we really wanted to do. Is there any way you guys can develop it into all of our current sites? And so we we did, we listened, we we developed and we built that and were able to release it earlier this year.

SPEAKER_01 19:40

So how do the other tools, your digital tools, line up with the websites to make this as dynamic as possible? How do you make that seamless?

SPEAKER_02 19:49

So the Swifty does only does three things. So we do web development or website development, we do Google Ads Management, and we do Google Business Management. So one of the first tools that we developed for Swifty websites was the Google business side. We had clients who said, hey, well, we have to update our Google business regularly. Can you help us with that and make it where our websites can connect and all of those things? And at first we started with just reviews, right? So we said, okay, we want to pull in reviews, and so we had we had built a tool that would connect to apartments.com and Yelp and Google Business, and it would aggregate the reviews from all of those and allow you to curate what you wanted to show on the website, right? So obviously, you know, you you shouldn't show all five-star reviews. You need to show some of those three and four-star reviews also, just so that you look authentic. Uh, but they could say, we we don't want to show the one stars on our website. So they could cut those out, right? And pull it in. Well, that that then moved into to saying, well, what if we made it where it will automatically update your Google business? Okay, let's let's look and see what we can do there. And so we said, well, we can update phone numbers, address, hours of operation. We could update quite a few things. And we started saying, well, in today's world, you guys like to use call tracking numbers, right? Call tracking numbers are all over the place. Well, if I update my website with my call tracking number, I really don't want it to automatically change my website, my phone number on my Google business because I might have a Google business call tracking, right? So we learned some things really quick, like, oh my gosh, it keeps overriding us. So we had to turn those things, those things off. But that tool basically became over the last year and a half or so, we've fully built it out now. We're our Google Business tool, it has a ton of automation and AI built into it now where it will, it'll actually it writes, it generates posts about the specific property. Okay, so it takes all the information that we know about the property, it takes all the location data, it takes all of the amenities and hours of operation, all of those things, it takes it all into consideration, and we we can put a frequency on it. We can set frequency and we can set a oh what's it's uh I guess you'd say temperature is kind of the way that they talk about in AI, but you turn the temperature up where it's more to property specific rather than area specific, right? And so we typically do an 80-20 split, but you have a slider and we can slide in and change that. We say, hey, we want to look at what's going on in the area, and then using generative AI, we can say, hey, here's the location, the address, what's going on in this area? Make sure you stay with the time of year, the seasonality, all that kind of stuff. So we might be talking about a farmer's market down the street, or we might be talking about the property, right? And so uh my editors then go in and they can edit that, add photography to all of that, and then we we schedule to publish that stuff out. But when we're using that tool, it now has the capability to answer reviews. So it through AI. So you have the ability, just like you'd see in a G5 or you see in some of these other tools that are out there, where we're notifying you hey, you have a review. Here's our suggested response for the review. Do you want to post this or would you like to edit it? You can go edit it and then you can post the response. Because the res the the reviews on Google Business are probably more of your lifeblood than you really want to think, right? And so oftentimes I was even looking at a one of my clients this last week. They have reviews, they're getting reviews, but we noticed that their reviews are just stars. Well, Google doesn't like that, that it doesn't give them as much relevance. So the ones that show up, they always show reviews. If you notice, they always show them in relevance order, right? And so you get them and they're gonna show the most relevant review first, and it may be from three days ago, or it may be from three years ago. It doesn't matter. So you may have a hundred reviews that are newer, but if they don't have any verbiage, they don't see them as relevant. They want they want content, right? And so that comes back to what you said, Chris, about your leasing team being the lifeblood. It's their job, it's their responsibility to go out and and get these reviews, right? Reviews, I I tell a lot of my clients, like nobody has to ask for a bad review. You're gonna get them, they're gonna come, but good. Those are free. Yeah, those are free. But the good reviews you have to ask for. And so you need to identify what are those key moments in the in the life cycle of a resident when I can ask for good reviews. You know, how is your leasing experience? How is your maintenance experience? How when you already you've already felt it out, right? You you already know they're happy, they're smiling, that you did a good job. That's when you ask. Ask them, right? And so figuring out the best ways to do that to get your reviews up. But we have a lot of integrations on the Google business side today. Frequently asked questions. Right now, we we're creating those and pushing them to Google Business. We're building out the integration right now that is also going to pull those frequently asked questions back into the website. So we'll be able to have the user-generated frequently asked questions as well as whatever questions you've generated and asked and answered yourself. All that'll pull back into the site without duplicating, right? So we'll look for duplicates and dedupe it and all that kind of stuff. But as we look at the world of SGE and again, a AEO, this whole like this whole idea of answering stuff and and really being the technology that'll make that happen. So we show up higher in the search results. We need frequently asked questions. We need to be an a question and answer type of organization, right? Because that's really what when people are searching and they're getting these results. I notice one of your episodes y'all mentioned, we don't see a lot of multifamily responses in the SGE area, right? And that may have been the one with Ed and Jack. And and we're looking at it and saying, okay, well, I started looking at it from that day until you know today. I've been like doing searches and looking. You're right. I've never I've never had one come up. I've only recently started, I do a lot of research in Chat GPT, as most of us probably do these days, right? And I always ask it to cite its references. And I want to make sure that the that the data is legit, right? Because, you know, everybody knows fake, it makes up stuff sometimes. So you have to double check everything that it tells you, right? Well, my marketing site started being cited. I was like, where did this, you know, where did this come from? I was like, where did this? I started looking at at and we do a lot of data blogs. So on Criterion B, we do a lot of more data heavy stuff where we talk about stuff like that. Well, I started being cited in in ChatGPT. And so I bowed my team. I was like, man, this is really cool. Look, we're actually being cited, we're being referred to when I'm doing searches for multifamily stuff. So that was really, really exciting. But we need to get us where our property sites are doing that.

SPEAKER_00 26:56

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 26:57

We won't do it without questions.

SPEAKER_00 26:59

I think it's interesting because what you're talking about is really I started at a digital marketing agency in 2006, and what we're talking about now are the fundamentals and the foundational items that we were talking about uh I 18 years ago. I think I'm doing the math right, 18 years ago. And so that is fascinating to me. It was always about Google My Business, it was always about websites, it was always about driving relevant traffic to your websites. And so I think that should be kind of, and even Edin talked about that too. I think that should be a lesson. It's like always have your foundation right and then everything else can follow. So I'm I'm fascinated by this. Going back to the websites, so you're working on dynamic content. How like what are you seeing? How often are prospects contacting the property after they go to property websites? What features are they using to contact the properties? Like what is kind of the usage there?

SPEAKER_02 28:04

Again, when I'm when we're when I'm teaching classes or whatever, oftentimes I like to say marketing is not one thing you do, it's everything that we do, right? Yeah. And so it's not an either-or with a website or an ILS. You need to be where you're where the traffic is, right? And and so ILSs are a valuable part of the process as well. On the website side of things, I feel like you you have a lot of property sites that are out there that do not do a good job with calls to action. You're missing calls to action in key places on the website. So the better you can get at putting in calls to action throughout the site without confusing people, right? And so you can have like overload, but they should always have at any given moment, they should have a call to action on the screen, right? You should always have that option for them to get there. We see people that we have a when I'm tracking, I look back at my statistics last night to kind of see what I could talk about from a from a hard numbers perspective. The numbers that we see the most that are that are most reliably tracked are going to be the numbers that coming from Google search. So when people have done a search, they found one of our properties and then they click on it, we can say that that traffic has about a 10 to 12% conversion rate into an actual lead. Okay, so we consider a conversion to be anybody who clicks apply now, submits a form, schedule a tour or contact, or they pick up the phone and call. Okay, so it's those those three conversion points. Would say, hey, this is going from a prospect into a warm lead that needs to go into a system. The websites uh typically most all, I'm gonna say there's we're everybody's trying to make innovations in this area of connecting the dots, right? And so, but most of the time the website stops being able to see what happens after they've done that action.

SPEAKER_00 30:05

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 30:06

So we can say, hey, we've we've taken them this far now, leasing team, it's up to you to kind of finish this and bring it home, close the deal, and sell it. So it's about 10 to 12 percent conversion rate on the site. Now, when does that happen? Right? This comes back to a little bit before the call started. We were talking about the renter's journey and how long does it take and what's the average that you see, right? And we're seeing around 60 to 90 days being being the average. Well, when you start like backing into numbers and really looking at well, what does that mean? Well, what happens this time of year every single year for the last 30 years? We're coming out of the summer. What I mean, what what happens, right? The the sky's fallen. Every every company we talk to, oh my gosh, my leases are in the toilet, we're doing so bad. Not we don't know what's going on. Because we just came out a leasing season where leasing was super high, the highest of the year, right? And so we always see a decline in rent.com and real page, every year you can you like clockwork, you're gonna start seeing articles come out. Hey guys, remember it's it's leasing season's over, we're going into the fall, we start to see a slump. This is kind of what happens, right? Well, what happens naturally when you're doing really, really good? When when leasing season is high and you're getting all these leases in, I think there's a mental thing that says, man, we don't need the market. Let's cut back. We we can we can save some money, we don't need to worry about it. But if the renter's journey starts 60 to 90 days in advance, and now we're going into a slump, when should we have started the real hard push? It was probably in the middle of leasing season, right? And start really like turning the fire up, spending more money on ads, doing more stuff there because we know that hey, that's the awareness when they're starting that search, and we know people are less likely to do searches starting in the holidays. So coming into October and then November and then December, it's always going to be slow. But every year, January, we start seeing that graph go back up. Yep. We start seeing more people come back in.

SPEAKER_00 32:14

That's interesting, and that's a good that is a good reminder to everyone. You have to start it can't be after the third call you've had with an owner who's upset because traffic's going down, and that's marketing's responsibility to be more proactive. It's you know, that is definitely a team effort. All right. So the big question, you've talked a little bit about the future of apartment websites, but uh what do you think what do you think prospects will expect in five years, three years, maybe things change so fast, heck, in a year. What what's the future? What are what are you guys thinking about?

SPEAKER_02 32:55

So you know you start seeing technology change over a lot, I mean, a decade ago or 15 years ago, I think technology turned over about every 18 months, and then it went to a year, and then it went to six months, and then here we came like 20 in 22 when Chad GPT came when when made it public, right? Where everybody has access to this, and now it feels like it's changing every month almost. You see so much new stuff coming out. I will be amazed if we don't move to way more voice. You're gonna have a lot of people doing their search, they're finding things. Even in my in my investing, the side of the business where I I just I do some personal investing in multifamily and single family and doing that kind of stuff. I start my searches there on Chat GPT and I ask it to go find me good deals in a certain area and what's going on. I need some of this kind of cash flow, and it does all of that that search for me. I do feel like that's gonna be where things start, where it can start saying, okay, do you want me to send it to your device? Well, send it to my device. Let me go look at it and then have it send that search where you can go then and look at what you've actually found. You know, find the top five. For all I know, they could be on different websites from different providers from you know different properties, and it sends me more of that. Just like you look at uh again, search generative engines, like when you're looking at what we're doing with SGE and you're seeing what's going on. We only can control that to a certain extent in what we do, right? We can only put those questions and answers out there and say, hey, Google, use us, use us, use us. Make sure you include us in these search results. AI, listen, we're smart, we know what we're doing. We're our property has all these availability. Include us, right? But at the end of the day, it's the AI that's pulling together that list. It's the AI that's saying, hey, John, we feel like based on what you told us, we think these may be the best properties for you. It's close to work, it's close to the daycare, it's close to all these things. Here's the ones that we we're serving up. Well, so we have to be ready for for that. And you mentioned it earlier, 18 years ago, we were talking about the same things. Video was hot 18 years ago, and video is still what they're saying. Oh, it's the biggest thing. It hasn't changed. It that's still changed. In Google, we get mad because they do these updates like BERT or whatever, what these other updates, right? These algorithm updates, like, oh, it messed us up. Oh, it messed us up. But in reality, Google has never changed. No, it shouldn't be messing you up. No, they say from the beginning, we're all about relevance. Yeah, that's all we care about. We don't care about you as a business. We don't care about your apartments or your floor plans. We only care about that guy doing the search. And was the result relevant to him? And so as long as we keep that same focus and say, we're not trying to skirt the system, we're not trying to beat the system, outsmart the system, work in the gray areas of the system, we're trying to do the same thing. We want to make sure that Chris has a place and he can find an apartment when he does his search, right? So we need to put all that information out there. Now, though because they're getting so smart and because AI is filling in the gaps, it's teaching us, it's teaching all of us something about search. It's teaching us that how people search. Before we're guessing, you look at how robotic it is to do a search on Google, right? It's like, oh, what would I search if I want to get the right results? I gotta, I gotta phrase it just right so I get the results I want. And now you look at the the LLMs, you're looking at all these large language models, and it says, look, don't just talk. Just just tell me what is it that you really want? And then it goes and it does all that and finds you something even more relevant, right? So, because of that, we're having to say, okay, well, what do we talk about then? How do we talk about it? How do we phrase it? What are we gonna do different on our sites? And that's really where I feel like we're gonna change. You're gonna start talking about your properties differently. You're gonna start. I mean, I I'm a big fan still of the of the like walkthrough videos, like where it's a self, where it's actually like a guided tour from a leasing agent. You don't see a lot of those out there. You see a lot of walkthroughs where it's like a professional cameraman walking through and doing it, but you don't see a lot of the leasing agent like walking through and talking about it, right? And giving that update, giving telling them about that specific unit, tell them about that that property. All of that, I feel like is gonna add to the search results in the future.

SPEAKER_00 37:17

I think that's interesting. We were talking the so we were in the car, the four of us, my husband and two boys, and we were talking about generations. We're I'm a millennial, my husband is the one above us that I don't remember right now, but literally by a year, my boys are gen alpha. So then we were like, okay, well, when did generations start? Right? Like, when was this concept of generations born? What was the very first generation? I kid you not, I spent seven minutes searching on Google. It was so cumbersome. I just kept coming up with lists, like no way that I phrased my question was giving me the answer that I wanted. I was getting frustrated. I'm like, stop asking me what the generations are. I'm looking, and like my sons are like, use voice search, it's better. And then I'm like, I can't, like, my brain's broken. And anyway, to your point, it was and we had the same conversation last night in a different context. Search has become cumbersome. It's become like you have to almost piece together all the details that you want from multiple searches, and it's you don't have to, you don't have to with ChatGPT. You don't have to, apparently with TikTok. I've haven't gotten into it, but apparently it just tells you everything you need to know. And so I think you're right. I think we're gonna start talking about talking about and representing our properties differently. I think that format of home, floor plans, photos, schedule tour, amenities, like I think those pages are gonna merge and the information's gonna still exist, but it's gonna be presented in a different way. Chris, this is your favorite thing. What is the future of websites look like to you?

SPEAKER_01 38:55

I can't wait. And so I'm really gonna focus in on it. I don't think I'm gonna use it for TikTok. I think I'm gonna throw it on the website and use it on YouTube and some of the other places and then allow our leasing teams to use them. I just did a couple of videos on Vacance where we kind of did take them along. It's not narrated, but it looks different than most videos that you have in the industry. And the teams are already using them. And as soon as we gave them these tools, they started leasing those units. It's pretty amazing how it works. But I am really interested to see what Google is gonna do to try to compete with uh people not having to know what they're searching for. And we had a really good discussion about that a couple podcasts ago, where TikTok just there is no there is no intent, it just tells you what your intent is, and Google is gonna have to compete with that because right now you still have to go to Google, you still have to type something in. I use it, we're all programmed to use it, but I think that's gonna change. And it's just gonna be interesting with AI and robots and all of the things that are happening right now, how that's gonna affect all of our industries, but ours for sure, and how we interact with our prospects. I mean, I was even thinking about John, you know, you talked about everybody's going to the floor climb page. Does the neighborhood page even mean anything anymore? Do people know where they are now and they don't need the neighborhood page? I know we do it for SEO, I'm not gonna get rid of it, but like it brings up a good point. Like, we have all of these pages, we have all this fluff. Yeah, do people even care? Um, I use it, but I'm using it for a different purpose because I'm doing research on my competitors or trying to figure out what I can promote on site or whatever that may be. But um what's the renter actually doing? Because with all the technology today, it just seems like they already know where they are.

SPEAKER_02 40:50

It is so funny that you bring that page up specifically because I would have guessed that yeah, it's it's it's used, surely they use it. We put so much effort into that page, right? We all these places, that's the least visited page on the site outs other than the contact page. Nobody goes to the contact page. So you cut the contact page. You still have about 5% of your users are going to the neighborhood page, but it's always the last thing. And it's not like they already know the area that they're going to. You're right. They already know what's good. Now you have those people that are moving in from out of town who may not be aware or may not know, they may go there more. But I feel like the place for that content is still probably going to be more in your FAQs than it is in there. In the question, what's around the property, you know, or even in your chat bot, right? The chat bot should be able to answer questions like that. I'm a single mom, I'm a single dad, I've got teenage kids. What is there to do for teenage kids in the area? And it should be able to say, hey, we're next to a main event. We're next to this. You know, you're you got a three bowling alleys within two miles from here, they can hang out or whatever, right? Well, again, that's that's pulling in AI tech into your websites more and relying less on the older versions of what we're doing now. I mean, you're right, it is an SEO play today. We I don't see it going away. I still think we need to do it for the neighborhood page. And but putting the more relevant, as relevant of content on it as you can. And maybe that page does shift some where it is more AI driven and based off of what they've been looking at on the site and all of that, you can give them more specifics in the neighborhood. But we're we have not started working on that page yet because it is such a low traffic page.

SPEAKER_01 42:34

Yeah, the contact us is probably all residents, like just thinking about it. It's probably all residents trying to figure out how to contact the office because they can't, you know, they didn't answer the phone or whatever.

SPEAKER_02 42:44

I think they're clip calling off your ads, and that's something you know that I think you you see a lot is the residents. They don't have your number, they type it in, they click on the first phone number they see, and it's the paid ad, right? It's the one that you're paying for. So you're gonna get a lot of false positives there. And I know that a lot of the tools out there are getting smooth to know if it's a resident or not, so it doesn't count it towards your conversions, but you do. I see that a lot.

SPEAKER_01 43:06

But just going back to your to your original question, Ann, I just I think we have to be in line with technology. Our industry has always been a little bit slower to adopt, um, but it's it's happening, and I think we just have to keep our pulse on it and choose the technology that's gonna work best for us. I mean, we are providing such an important item for people, right? Housing. It's so important. And so I think we just need to be able to use the technology to give them the information they need to be able to make the choice, the best choice for them on where they want to live. Of course, pricing plays a part, location plays a part, but we need to be able to serve that to them in a seamless way without them having I think the future is without them having to ask for it, we just serve it to them. We know what they are looking for, and then we just give them all that info specific, kind of what John is saying on the landing pages and things like that. That's the future I think our industry has to go into.

SPEAKER_00 44:02

I think you're right. And I but not everyone is our customer, right? Like not everyone we you know, I think there's this kind of like thought like, well, anyone that's searching for an apartment is our customer at this particular community. That's that's not true. Like that's you're right. There are so many filtering factors that if we're giving that information as quickly as possible and allowing people to to get the right search results, sometimes we're gonna be a good fit, sometimes we're not. And sometimes, like for our more expensive buildings, it might not necessarily be about price, but about the lifestyle or the feeling that it should always be about feeling, but I don't know. It's just it's not one size fits all. And I think technology's making us realize that and adapt to it quickly. And Chris and John, I think you're right. The the folks who aren't adapting are are gonna see that from a traffic standpoint, from a lead standpoint, they might have to lower prices, they might have to put concessions in place, other things to to back out traffic that is being lost because they're not ready for the future of search. So, John, any final thoughts for us before we say goodbye this lovely Sunday morning?

SPEAKER_02 45:16

Oh goodness, it'd probably just be to encourage you guys on your seasonality stuff. Like if you're listening to if it's to the fall when you're listening to this right now, I I did again just some stats for you from NMHC. They say that if you increase, let's see, leasing slows by 15 to 20 percent every year this time of year. And if you increase your digital ad spin, you can reduce the decline by 30 percent. So that's something to think about. And then one other thing that has nothing to do with me, but I I do feel like it's something that we should think about doing. And I don't know if y'all talk, actually, I haven't heard you talk about it, I don't think, but geofencing. When we do geofencing in our ads, specifically this time of year, we can also increase foot traffic. So find somebody. Um, I'll do a plug for Parvisgeofencing.com. If you haven't used them, they're great. And that's something that I feel like is is lacking still in our space. You don't see a whole lot of people doing it. But brand awareness, getting in front of it, get in front of it early. Next year, start this in July, June or July, preparing for the fall.

SPEAKER_00 46:20

I think that's smart. And it's budget season now, so you know, our budgets specifically, they're month by month. So you can build in in June, July, higher ads, you know, March, April, whatever, higher ad spend to prepare for leasing season, and then like you're saying, June, July ish. So I the math is hard, but to so it's very easy, at least from some budgeting standpoints, to prepare for next year now on using seasonality as your driver. Thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_02 46:52

This has been awesome.

SPEAKER_00 46:52

I really Yeah, this was really great. I wish we had hours and hours to talk, but unfortunately, it always goes too fast. We appreciate you. I think you know, something that's so special about doing the apartment department is the fact that we get to talk to people who are doing things differently and they're thinking about apartment marketing differently, multifamily marketing differently, and they're making a change. And so that's really exciting. I feel like I learned so much. Felt like you reiterated that we're kind of on the right track in terms of what we're talking about and how we're trying to move forward. So for that, I'm very grateful. Chris, any parting words before I uh sign us off?

SPEAKER_01 47:33

John, thanks so much for your time. We really appreciate it. You brought some really good insight, and uh, we'll stay in touch. Absolutely. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 47:40

Thank you. All right, well, thank you to everyone for listening to the apartment department. Thank you to our producer, Carlos, because as always, he's gonna make us sound really, really good. And until next time, we will talk to everyone soon. Thank you. Bye.