Unified Multifamily Marketing: Centralization, Tech, and ROI with Grady Newman

Data silos, clunky platforms, and fragmented marketing systems can hold multifamily teams back from achieving their full ROI. A unified approach to marketing can simplify processes, improve performance, and give operators a competitive edge.

In this episode of The Apartment Department, Grady Newman, founder of Resi, joins Anne and Chris to discuss the messy realities of multifamily marketing and how smarter tech, combined with a human touch, can transform workflows. Grady shares how Resi helps operators centralize marketing efforts, break down data silos, and improve ROI across campaigns.

Marketing and operations teams will walk away with actionable strategies for centralizing campaigns, leveraging technology effectively, and collaborating more efficiently.

In this episode we discuss:

• The challenges of fragmented marketing systems in multifamily
• How centralization can improve marketing ROI
• Smarter tech solutions to simplify workflows
• Balancing automation with human touch
• Lessons from Resi on unifying marketing operations

Key Topics:
unified multifamily marketing, apartment marketing centralization, marketing ROI, data silo solutions, property marketing technology, operational efficiency

The Apartment Department explores the people, systems, and strategies shaping the future of multifamily.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi everyone and welcome to the Apartment Department, the podcast for multifamily marketers by multifamily marketers. My name is Ann Baum, and I am one of the co-hosts. I'm the VP of marketing at Town Properties. And my co-host is Chris Johnson, and he is a marketing leader at Irwin R. Rose down in Dallas, Texas. So we have a really great guest with us today. And I'm excited about this for multiple reasons. But one of the reasons is really uh so first our guest is Grady Newman, and he's the founder of Rezi. And we're really excited because he's really focused on things right now, both from a personal standpoint and from a company standpoint that are really hot trends that we've been talking about from a multifamily marketing standpoint. So today we're going to be talking to Grady. Well, he's going to tell us about Resi, and then we're going to be talking to him a little bit about the trend of efficiency and multifamily marketing. We're going to talk to him about this trend of centralization and private ILSs and driving traffic to a corporate website. We are going to also talk about really the intersection of marketing and asset management and how data can be your best friend when you're trying to sell yourself to asset management. So with that, Grady, welcome. And if you can go ahead and just tell us a little bit about yourself and about Resi.

SPEAKER_02 1:27

Sure. Well, thanks for that great intro and pleasure to be here with you and Chris. And yeah, like I'm Grady. Uh founded Resi about, well, now it's just over 11 years ago when we built our first multifamily property website. And, you know, I really started out as an entrepreneur in real estate and was just a young, hungry guy looking to try to figure out how I can add value here and looking to try to find different ways to do that. I my first stab at it was in creating an energy efficiency, renewable energy kind of consultancy and looking to try to drive dollars to NOI. And we put together some really great, attractive investments. Um, but my timing wasn't great because it was 2009 when I first started that company, and it was a tough time to get private private owners to spend any capital on something that was definitely a newer concept to them at the time. Used to say I feel very passionate about it, but learned um after some years of um being a founder, learned a lot of hard lessons and learned how to pivot and ended up going back to a lot of the same relationships I had made and asked them if I could try building them a website, try doing their marketing, trying to help um get traffic through the door, and ended up finding it a lot easier to sell a property website with no promise of a return than having uh guaranteed energy savings and you know, uh put the put all the financing put together like we used to in those old projects. So it definitely was a a newer positioning of uh of how we came about. And uh, but we were able to drive really great value this way as well. So my first tasks were jumping into some new developments as I was working with some friends that are developers and trying to figure out how do I fill up a building that doesn't exist uh other than just this big hole in the ground right now. And there were not that many tools at that time. You know, renderings were extremely expensive. Um, so I had to get creative. And I was a guy out there flying the drone around trying to get pictures of what the views were gonna look like um out the windows, and you know, working with some European company I found that was dabbling into some, you know, rendering tools really early on, and you know, strapped together some some good looking stuff and found some successes. The things I did find is that I just wasn't very pleased with what the options were from a website perspective of like, how do I create something a little more flexible and what kind of tools were available? And so we sought out immediately to to try to fix that. And after some years of doing that and um building up our portfolio, um, started to get a little tired of trying to sign into the back end of WordPress on every site to update some some code to update the the special on a weekly basis and needing to create a tool to manage that at scale. And that's when the concept of Resi was really born. And so since then, we've iterated through and brought a lot more of the content into this back-end sort of centralized management tool. And our goal with that today is to help marketers actually be able to do marketing by offering a much more scalable solution to be able to make changes, view data, and um and dive into other aspects of their marketing stack.

SPEAKER_03 4:33

So you want marketers to market, right? Great, is how you're just making it easier for us to actually do our job?

SPEAKER_02 4:39

Yeah, I mean, these are the problems that I hear about all day. I love talking to marketers, love just listening to problems. And I started out by solving my own problems and what I saw, and you know, that turned into all right, well, what are the problems you're having and how can I help solve them for you? And so, really, what we've built today is just the culmination of solving a million problems along the way that we've that we've learned about. And, you know, now just trying to continue to tackle the biggest and greatest challenges that I see in the industry, and that is, you know, having um, you know, fully integrated systems is crazy. It's crazy how disconnected and siloed our data is today. Um, you know, we're just ages behind you know any other industry in terms of these systems being able to speak to each other. So we're really focused on making easy and much more deep integrations with the tools that everybody here is familiar with in their tech stacks. Um, we're looking at trying to make content much easier to change and update. And you know, every time that we can shave off a day or an hour or a minute of any process, we look at it as a big win for marketers today because you're operating off of really small budgets and you know, on small teams that that just aren't properly staffed with the amount of work and the responsibility that they have to drive business today.

SPEAKER_03 5:56

Grady, you do a lot with the funnel, right? And you do a lot of research on how our how our prospects are finding us and how they're converting. And you and I do appreciate all the data that you bring to our fingertips. What are you seeing today? I mean, is is the length of making a decision getting longer or shorter? Are conversions based solely on what they're seeing on the website? Are they having a call first? What do you think our next move is as an industry or as marketers to really get the in these competitive markets? I'm in Dallas and you're in a bunch of competitive markets up in the Midwest. I mean, how do we really maximize what we're doing to get to grab on to the prospects that are giving us a call or are contacting us through ILS or website?

SPEAKER_02 6:41

Certainly. Um I think overall the journey doesn't change too much. It changes in terms of the tools that people use, but the overall journey is the same. Uh someone understanding that they're looking for something, going through a discovery phase, looking to try to learn more, going through and trying to dive deeper into what they what they really want and finding options that fit their budget, their timeline, and then making sure that what they see online today or what used to be within an apartment guide back in the day, you know, really match what they're actually looking for. And and so it's just a matter of trying to connect those tools. Now I think that they've gotten more and more complicated to aggregate data from, and that's what we're really trying to solve. Um, but overall, I don't think that the journey has shifted. It's just about, you know, how, right? I think discovery is changing pretty significantly today. I think there's like a huge opportunity for um, I guess, the the younger generations as they are searching in a completely different manner than than have than they have been for the last decade.

SPEAKER_03 7:53

How do we pivot to that?

SPEAKER_02 7:55

How do we start uh having our floor plans show up in the TikTok shop?

SPEAKER_00 7:59

Oh my gosh, Grady. Oh, that's what I talk of. I talk about that sometimes. I'm like, one day someone can rent an apartment from TikTok. When? When is this happening? Are you making that happen?

SPEAKER_02 8:12

It's a it's a scary venture, right? Because we want to be at the forefront of where people are, but our systems aren't cooperative in allowing us to keep up with those trends. And that's where the problem is, then we just end up with one more data point that we have to check in our audit that now takes up a significant amount of marketers' times to make sure that their data is is correct everywhere around the web. Um, because you know that that makes for a pretty terrible renter journey when you have incorrect information out there.

SPEAKER_00 8:39

Yeah, it's crazy. I think I counted, I'm probably gonna misquote myself, but I think I counted like 16 or 18 different sources that one of our properties was on. Like what? I I was embarrassed. I was like, oh my gosh, I'm embarrassed that I didn't realize. But to try and keep track of all that is um it's daunting.

SPEAKER_02 9:01

It definitely is. And and so I I think that the um pressure of the market is uh pushing some of those call it just like legacy um legacy technologies to be more cooperative in the space, um, both from an integrations and a data sharing standpoint. Um, I still don't quite see the data sharing that I would love to from the ILSs, but you know, then we also get into how do you how do you define all of these data points? What it what is a lead and and uh what's a conversion? And um, you know, I I think there's an opportunity. I've been saying for a while, I'd love to see an ILS be able to operate and and offer the solutions all the way through to the to the lease and um you know, including the property website, and say, well, well, we don't ultimately care then what source we're here to generate leads for you. I haven't seen that yet come to fruition, but I'm hopeful.

SPEAKER_00 10:45

That's kind of an interesting, I feel like like there, except for the website, some tools like that exist for smaller owners, like Zillow. If you have, you know, a single condo that you want to go rent out, like you can go and they'll do the application check for you and all that stuff, but you're right from like a larger scale. I think it's interesting when you're talking about defining the data as well. That was a topic at Retcon. Um, was the idea of when companies are you know implementing data strategies, your very first step is to actually define, you know, not only decide what data that you want to look at with KPIs metrics, but then how are they defined within your organization?

SPEAKER_02 11:24

It's wild to look at the Google Tag Managers that we get access to and to see that you know the different events that uh some groups will count as a conversion. And you know, they're not necessarily looking to inflate numbers, it's just it maybe be there for a different purpose, right? They may need to count it for a purpose to be able to have this system count it. And so you end up with those disconnected tools. And sometimes we find ourselves pushing back a little harder on some clients than they may be uh used to. And we're really trying to do it for their own benefit of like, yeah, your data is really clean right now. Let's not just throw more events in here. There's there's no need to overlap. Let us let us talk to, you know, sure, we provide PPC services, but you have another provider, we want to talk to them. Let's make sure that the events that we're the custom events we built on the website, they can use. Uh and you know, allowing for more cooperation like that. And I think a lot of that just it takes some education um of marketers because again, you guys are just too busy to be able to have a lot of those conversations. It's it's difficult to be able to pull all those pieces together, which is why I I think oftentimes uh groups become a little frustrated and end up wanting to pull everything in in under one roof, um, because then they have at least uh at least the appearance of symbiosis.

SPEAKER_03 12:40

That's me. I mean, how much should I talk about this? It's so important to have your website and digital advertising as one for that seamless connection. To me, it's it's it's so hard to pull data from all of these spots. I mean, this is so small and this is what we deal with all the time, but we we literally just had someone did to come in the other day for a property at six weeks ago, they were on apartment lists, they contacted us. One week later, they were on apartments.com, contacted us. And so it's a split app attribution, and that's how people really are searching us. Um, and it's it's so hard to get all of these things to kind of talk. And to get to that level of data, by the way, that took time. We had to go back and like research and like go back in time and figure it out. Um and it and we did it just for another purpose, but you know, it just kind of speaks to what we're dealing with out there. It's just it's never easy um to get all this stuff talking, and so having it under one house when the house is doing a great job really makes a difference, especially on these conversions. Centralization is part of it too. I know you're big on this. Um, how does this play a role with what you're doing, with what the industry is doing? Do you think centralization works? We tried this. I've been in this, I've been doing this a long time. I mean, we tried this a long a while ago. We were centralized and then we split, and then we come back, and then we split again. But we have more technology these days than we did 18 years ago or when I started it in the game. So, how does that change everything? How does centralization actually work today? Can it work with the tech stacks that we have? With every, you know, all the issues that we've been taught discussing?

SPEAKER_02 14:15

Well, that's certainly a loaded question. Is centralization is pretty broad reaching, but if we're going to stick to at least focusing on the marketing aspect of centralization, um yes, I think I think it absolutely can. And I also think that there's a gigantic opportunity that many may seem to forget that the benefits of centralization don't necessarily stop at you know your organization. And that we haven't seen anybody really take a big stab at you know that opportunity. Um, I think that's something we'll see in the next couple of years. Um, but there's humongous advantages to to pulling that stuff together. I think from if you're looking at centralizing your leasing office, that's that's one thing. And you know, the way that we centralize needs to match your approach to the market. Every company is different, and not everybody is a great candidate for offering a centralized leasing website. Um, I think it makes a lot of sense where you have density and or when you have that, um, when you're really trying to develop a brand and and have that lifestyle brand and where the location sort of like takes a back seat, or the property rather takes a back seat, and it's more about a location and a lifestyle than it is about a particular address. So I think we're going to continue to see those grow. Um, I think though we also end up with the problem we've had forever in this industry with third-party management, and that that becomes really difficult when you don't own the whole process and that you're ultimately not the final decision maker in some cases. I think we're starting to see um a preference for third-party management companies that offer that full stack uh and like vertically integrated approach, um, and that owners can see the advantages that that brings versus a company that is operating off every PMS and every website provider and every PPC provider, it's really hard to have efficiency there. And um, so I think we'll see that continue to rise in the in the years ahead.

SPEAKER_03 16:18

And he's speaking to you. I mean, how does that resonate with what you're doing? Because you have both. Um, how does that sound?

SPEAKER_00 16:24

Yeah, I mean, I think what's interesting um is that as these, you know, so we haven't really approached the centralization subject from like uh having a private IOS where we're driving traffic specifically, you know, trying to consolidate pay-per-click campaigns and um all of that. So I have not then gotten into kind of, well, how does each third-party owner feel about their property being next to another owner's property and kind of the concerns that might come along with that? Um, however, what I will say is what I like is that as these conversations continue, um, especially at conferences and just other kind of learning and network marketing events, I think the idea is going to become more normalized. And so I think we will start to see, like you said, Grady, third-party owners coming and saying, like, hey, we understand the risks here, but we're interested because we understand overall there are efficiencies or that this type of strategy will strengthen the performance of our property. So I think there's kind of going to be an intersection of like companies pushing that, um, but also third-party owners coming and saying, like, we're okay with this now because it's an industry norm.

SPEAKER_02 17:41

I think so for sure. And we're trying to be helpful in solving some of those problems. And that's uh really the approach we've taken is to try to be as agnostic as possible so that we can help third-party teams work with multiple systems and work with multiple providers, and that we don't have to we don't have to be the service provider in every case. Certainly, I don't want to be. Our our focus is in helping all those tools connect well, uh, talk to each other, allow you to normalize and truly centralize your data because that's what ends up allowing you to have informed decisions, and that's where you can actually bring greater value to your owners.

SPEAKER_00 18:21

Yeah, absolutely. Um, I think it's interesting too because it's like one property is not like the other. Now, I know all portfolios are different, and there might be portfolios that only have like one type of property, and so maybe the target audience is a little more similar, but like in a case like ours where we have a a mix of properties um in one geographic area, the audiences typically aren't the same, right? We might have um, and so kind of thinking about this centralized marketing idea, I think there's arguments to be had that maybe the properties, although they're in proximity of each other, they're not actually competitors because the audiences are different. So I don't know. You're making me think. I think there's a story there.

SPEAKER_02 19:04

Yeah, I mean, and ultimately they're even if they are quote unquote competitors, there's different value that each property is gonna bring. And they're unlikely uh exact competitors. There are those, uh there are those situations. Um, but I think a a little bit too much gets put on that. It's gonna benefit one property in some cases and the other in other cases. Um, but overall, it should be a net win that that comes from being able to share those leads and not lose them to somebody else outside of your system. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:37

Um, that's a very that's a very good point. Are you you mentioned that you're starting to build corporate websites now for some clients, and that is specifically for the purpose of funneling their marketing to that website for their portfolio, or is is that the primary purpose?

SPEAKER_02 19:57

Um, the primary purpose can change. In some cases, we're building truly more of a corporate corporate portfolio type website, and then in some cases, we're trying to be a little bit more of a lifestyle brand and helping drive and be a central um central stop for that brand. Um, and then we have some products that uh we're releasing that are gonna be more for centralized leasing capabilities, where like uh think of it really being a use case in a metro area like New York, where the property may not really even be the driving factor. It's all about location, and so you'll just have apartments listed on a single map.

SPEAKER_03 20:31

That's pretty neat. You guys are working on that. That's cool.

SPEAKER_02 20:35

Yeah, we want to have a solution for just about everybody we see in the market. And I just want to take a step back. You were, you know, I want to just draw a parallel. You said, you know, you have products with different audiences, and you know, that's absolutely something to keep in mind. You know, there are lots of e-commerce examples all over or businesses all over and many industries that have different products that are for completely different audiences, and you can still run them through the same site and they're not cannibalizing each other. In fact, there's generally a net gain from being able to bring them under a single brand or a you know, a single value system, uh, however, however, a company decides to incorporate that brand concept into their approach.

SPEAKER_00 21:18

Like eBay, like they're right, they all the traffic is getting driven to eBay. Um, so there might be like competitor products, right? Like the same person might be tell selling two things, but the benefit of it is that you're associated with the brand of eBay, so you have some sort of clout, their eBay is paying to drive traffic to their site. Um, and then you as an individual seller have to decide how to stand out in order to have someone buy your product versus, you know, and that might be rating or price or pictures or description or uniqueness or some other factor, but the benefit is being under that shared brand of eBay.

SPEAKER_02 21:57

For sure. If you guys don't mind, can I switch things up and throw a question your way?

SPEAKER_00 22:03

Yes, sure. So to Chris first.

SPEAKER_02 22:06

Well, you guys obviously know my perspective um and what I like to focus on, but I'd love to, you know, I always like to try to learn what marketers are trying to solve. So I'd love to ask you like, what are your biggest problems and challenges that you're trying to solve today? Where do you see the um you know biggest way to make an impact? I'll start.

SPEAKER_03 22:26

That is a there's a lot there to unpack. Let me just start by saying I want to be different, and I don't care what that is for me to be different, but I need to do I don't want to be like every other marketer in our industry as much as I can. It's impossible to be totally different, but I like. To take the approach, although I'm I'm at smaller firms and you know some of the big boys out there, what can I do that they're not going to spend the time on? And where can I really find that value? I think first and foremost, I like to have partners who I can trust, who I can rely on, who I know have my best interests at heart when I'm working with them. And it goes both ways. I try to treat all of my the people I'm working with with the same respect that I'm expecting from them. And it usually works out. Getting our data in line is first and foremost, I think it's hard. Um, you know, greedy, you've helped me with that. You we we had a lot of issues before I came to you with our data, and that was one of the first things we one of our first conversations. I think that's why we hit it off so quickly, is because we care about the data and we want to get that clean. But just in a sense of marketing, how can we be different? Right now, I'm working on video. Our websites are different. Are they like groundbreaking? Are they anything that you know Cook Cole's gonna see and be like, oh my God, look at what they're doing over there? No, but for our industry, they are different and they catch your eye and they we do something a little bit different than everybody else. And I just think if you spend the time to do your audits and make sure your information is correct and you're with the right partners, and you break your budget up specifically for the property that you're focusing on, instead of just a mass, I'm doing all of this for every property, I don't care if it works or it doesn't work, just isn't my approach. And I that's really what I'm focusing on. But it's hard, it's hard to do that. It's hard. I mean, things break all the time, our industry is so competitive, or you know, we go up and down, and Dallas is a tough market in general, and San Antonio as well, you know, Austin adjacent. And those are the two things that I'm solving for. How do we get one or two more people on the door every week differently from the competitors? If our whole market is slow, can I be the at least be the leader of the traffic or one of the leaders of the traffic in occupancy? And that's that's what I'm really trying to solve for. And I can't do it alone. We have to have partners in the industry like Areszi and others to help us get there with our product and and how we can just tweak things to be a little bit different, but also make sure everything is working. I mean, I think that's the biggest piece. Phones go down, power goes out. I mean, there's so many things that happen every day. Literally, our phones stopped working yesterday through our third party partner for an hour everywhere. There's no explanation, it just was a glypse, right? But those are the things that we're that we can't solve for, but the things that we can solve for is what I try to work on and try every day to just inch it a little bit better.

SPEAKER_00 25:17

I'm I have like 10 things. No, I have ask me next week, it'll be one other different thing. But um I am working on um the idea of brand and customer experience and how to measure that, um, how to implement it, how to define it, how to measure it, and how do you balance the property management brand with the individual property brand? So that's a long-term project that I'm working on right now. We have one of our kind of, I would say, like um like a flagship properties uh that we're that we're going through this process on. So that's something that I'm really passionate about is this idea of like how do we measure the experience at a property um through the entire funnel, and then how do we impact it by making decisions based on the based on both the foundation of our property management brand as well as making brand decisions based on the brand of the property and then measuring that it's successful? So um, and that came from AIM last year. So um, I'm sure I'll get some other big idea this year. I only have like one month left before I, you know, have some whole other thing to go on. And then the other thing that I've been focused on recently is just this idea of like connectedness between our systems. So um are the settings on the back end of our websites correct? Are we pushing data out properly? Um, I kind of went down a myth rabbit hole uh the other day about like what information are we actually pushing out? And then on the flip side, like what information is being digested? Like just because we're pushing it out to ILSs, for example, through feeds doesn't necessarily mean that's being ingested. Chris is like, nah. And so, right?

SPEAKER_03 27:08

I feel your pain. It's it's so true.

SPEAKER_00 27:10

It's crazy, like we're having to go in the back end and like manually add amenities because some of them don't pull through. Like, what? I don't even and so um I think that's you know, I'm kind of the same as Chris, where I do like I like having big ideas and I like being different, but ultimately our performance depends on uh the foundation and making sure that we're doing things the right way. And so um, those are the things that are important to me right now.

SPEAKER_02 27:35

Yeah, I mean, that makes so much sense, right? We like we got we still have to nail the basics in the end, right? Of let's make sure the information is correct everywhere.

SPEAKER_00 27:44

Uh which I mean it's great, you know, it's like of course it is, like all these systems, and then it just I don't know, but every once in a while you just have to sweep through or else uh, you know. And it's not tragic. Like it's not like the world so for example, if like the fact that someone has a business center doesn't get pushed to one of the ILSs, like that is not the most like tragic thing ever, right? Like it's kind of small, but over time it starts eroding the the value and and kind of the consistency of the brand, and then that does become a problem. So it's like one little instance, fine, but if it starts to build up, then that's kind of what concerns me. Um, you know, if that does happen.

SPEAKER_03 28:24

But Grady, I think your question just brought us all full circle to the beginning of what you're trying to do because right doesn't matter which PMS you're on or anything. I mean, for my case, I have to make a change in four different places to be sure that it's gonna get pushed out correctly to all the ILSs, to the website, to everything. Um, and it's a it's marketing one-on-one, and I talk about this all the time. It's it's really getting back to basics to make sure just the info is correct. But in today's world, with the way that it's disjointed, I mean, even rent sometimes, as I think you know, can just they live in a lot of places, they can live in a lot of places in our PMS and even to sometimes get the rent correct is and I mean at the end of the day that is a problem.

SPEAKER_00 29:11

That is a problem. That's no business center missing. That's like huge.

SPEAKER_03 29:15

And and it could be ten bucks, it could be two bucks, whatever. But if your rent isn't correct, it's setting the tone for the rest of the experiment experience with a prospect. And yeah, I think it you know, it's just about getting it right. And it and sometimes it's art in our industry. And I and I think it's great that you are talking about this. I wish more of our partners talked about having us just be able to get the basics correct so we we could just put that on the side and not worry about it, but we do, we do in monthly audit, sure enough, every month we find something, sure enough, we fix it somewhere else, it'll break, you know. I it's just wild that we can't with all the technology that we have, it's just it's wild to me. It's those kind of full circle to what you're trying to do to centralize all that data and all those integrations. I wish it wasn't so hard. I think some of it, and I'll get off my soapbox because I want to hear what you guys think, but I think some of it is these technologies were built, I mean, long ago, and I don't think the back end gets changed all that much uh on their platforms. You know, the the race of it might change, but the the back end and what they're pulling maybe is it. And so that's part of the problem, too, is some of it might just be outdated and it goes back to our industry sometimes being a little slow on this stuff for whatever reason.

SPEAKER_02 30:33

Yeah, I mean, I can definitely relate to I think some of the problems we see and maybe why they exist. So we've been trying to build what is you know really a universal system for uh a lot of years now, and I'll just tell you candidly, it's hard, it's very it's really hard. Um, this industry is just a mashup of customizations that all sorts of different businesses have asked for. So you can solve a problem five different ways in a PMS, and you don't necessarily know there's no uh commonality in how uh different operators might approach that same problem. So we end up with groups that have tried to solve it different ways, and the PMSs don't have an integration that's going to normalize that because at this point, how do you track all those different customizations? It's an insane amount of code, not to mention the fact that they have just gobbled up more and more companies that are, again, built by different developers and trying to get that all to work. It's it's a big job. And we started from scratch and have our own developers working on it the whole way, and it's still hard. Um, so it'll come with time and it takes on this is the biggest challenge that we face is how do we get these systems aligned? How do we establish commonality? You know, and that's where I that's why I've really tried to position Resi where we're headed today is really the app most app description would be a middleware and that we sit between what you use for operations and what you present uh in your marketing and allow you that normalization layer, both of your content that's going out, but of your data also that's coming in. And you know, to be able to even tackle and some of the things that you're looking at of like, you know, the effect of branding, and it's you know, we need to be able to solve those basics first and to be able to even have data that can make sense. We aren't dealing with gigantic sample sizes of data here, right? We don't have like millions of visitors or hundreds of thousands of visitors to a website each month to be able to really dig in. We have small announcements, so any miss is going to have you know a major impact on how valuable that data is. And you know, that's the message that I really if I could get one thing across to asset managers, that's why the investment in marketing is so important, is because the data is so small that you need it to be accurate. Um, anything less makes it useless, and then you're kind of just guessing and or following your neighbor thinking that that's the right approach. That's amazing. Yeah, and I think it's great to wrap it up in a pretty bow in a conversation, but how do we actually make it happen? It's it's it's hard. Um, you know, if Ross right now, it's piece by piece, it's challenge by challenge. It's you know, we can't take on all the PMSs at once. Um we're just a bootstrapped company, so I don't have a a pile of cash to dive into to go build them all, um, which also I think has taught us um taught us how to operate well and efficiently and and be able to focus on what are the most important problems for us to solve for our clients. Makes us focus on, you know, really listening carefully to to you all and to to hearing what the pains are, um, and also trying to figure out, you know, and try to read between the lines. And maybe there are some that we can discover that just may not be as apparent to you that may be able to add a lot of value, you know. But yeah, I love Chris that your your thoughts on you know wanting to stand out in this industry because it is a fee of um sameness to a great extent, both from sure the templates that are out there, but it's going to happen in every aspect of how we try to get to scale, right? And we end up as we focus on scale and efficiency in any type of company, we end up losing some of that personalization. So, you know, that's been at the core foundation of what we tried to focus on is balancing scalability and we've always said flexibility, but really the way that that flexibility relates to multifamily marketing is how do we offer personalization at scale? How do we incorporate and the way that we're gonna stand out, I think, today is humanization, right? Like we absolutely are gonna have advantages of these AI tools, and that's gonna change the discovery process, it's gonna change how information is is is is found and is distributed. Um, you know, but then how do we incorporate you know the the human humanity back into the equation because ultimately that's what establishes connection. And there's you know no shortage of studies out there to demonstrate how important that is into people's buying behaviors.

SPEAKER_00 35:31

Yeah, I think it is. And I think that that's a conversation that's kind of we're starting now to hear that like AI plus human and uh very much you can't, you know, it's not about replacing humans, but about kind of having a nice little partnership. So I think you're right. And the scalability is interesting because we're basically, you know, depending on the size of your portfolio, like we're basically repeating the same process, but it has to be personalized for like a hundred, hundreds again, depending on your but like that's crazy. That's like to be able to keep, you know, track of all of it. And so there do, there have to be efficiencies while still understanding the property that you're marketing and making sure that you're putting its best foot forward. I do want to go back a little bit more to um just because I thought it was really interesting when we were talking um before the episode, this idea of intersection of marketing and asset management, and you talked about it just a little bit about kind of your system, you know, Resi being mid-funnel. But can you tell us a little bit more about, you know, success stories that you've seen from marketers and how they're really telling a story to asset managers, you know, using data?

SPEAKER_02 36:41

Yeah, I mean, I'll share it with even just one of our first clients. You know, I was able to find I I found myself in jumping in as a marketer, spending most of my time at the conference table trying to translate to the asset management team. Here's the value of what we're doing, here's the ROI, here's the IRR, here's you know, how to look at this and how to look at this beyond a single leasing season. And you know, you're able to do that in new development to some extent because you've got a little bit longer of a time horizon there built into the entire project. I'm looking at, you know, they're looking at this from a three to five year perspective, you know, but that's not always the case in a you know kind of daily decision making around you know stabilized assets or new acquisitions or value add opportunities. So um, you know, I really think that it's being able to package that data to tell a story in the terms that asset managers think. Um, and if there's one thing that uh I took away from my first business in energy efficiency, is we I needed to learn how to tell that story in many different ways. Uh we shaped the return curves in a chart, in a table, in a graphic, in a paragraph, like every way that we could try to communicate the value we were creating, we would take that stab because everybody looks at information differently and processes it differently. Um, so being able to tell those stories, I think is vital. And that comes back to then why that data is so important. Um, so you need to have it at your fingertips and you need to be able to communicate it in the dollars and cents terms, the ROI terms, um, the terms that asset managers think. And so I think a lot of that comes down to education for some for some marketers, as well as time to be able to do it. And so there's a just a combination of factors that all comes down to we need tools that work for us and with us, and ultimately aren't spending so much of our time just like really working against the the grain um with the tools we have today. So that's my two cents on the approach to to data and like how we can start to solve it. Yeah, what I mean, where have you guys struggled or succeeded in your communications with ownership, asset managers, um, to put forth new initiatives?

SPEAKER_03 39:20

For me, it's just speaking the same language. And we talked about this last year at AM. You know, there's a lot of terms that we share in marketing and operations, and I think it gets lost in the shuffle sometimes that us marketers can be data driven and numbers driven. So that's been my my career and my success is that I can break down those walls. Um, I don't want to speak for Anne, but I know she does that as well.

SPEAKER_00 39:39

Yeah, same trying to find a common language, and I think trying to find the most important metric to the person you're talking to, because it's not always the same. Um, so I think that's been kind of you know what I like, it's like hey, we did really well, whatever. I can't even think of anything. And they're like, yeah, but what about this? Oh, that's how you like, okay, got it. Like, so it's almost even when we're talking about scalability and flexibility, it's like you want one report that fits all the needs, but that's not always even the case because um who you're reporting to um might want to look at the data differently. So that's kind of an interesting um that becomes interesting too.

SPEAKER_03 40:22

Great. We're coming up on it. Um this has been a really great conversation. Is there anything you want to leave us, audience, with um, that you're looking at trend-wise, what you think is coming down the horizon? I have one kind of wacky question for you. Is Google dying here? Are they gonna be able to withstand the storm here with AI? And and you know, I mean, that's just a wild guess, but you know, are they is there a little maybe chink in the armor here?

SPEAKER_02 40:46

I definitely think there's gonna be a pretty big shift. And I've been seeing it come for a while. You'll notice that out of most of the website providers or other providers in the industry, we might be one of the only ones that haven't created a chatbot or an AI tool uh that's at least customer-facing yet. And the reason for that is because I see them as a pretty short-lived solution, at least that's my interpretation of where things are headed. Um, that we're gonna end up with three, four, five primary tools that people use on a daily basis to interact with information, just like we have today. I think Google will be one of those players. It'd be hard for them to screw it up with the amount of market share that they have. Um, so you mean you never know, time will tell. But um, you know, they have a significant market advantage in their position today to be able to be one of those players. Um, but just think to the extent that we're all using the tools like ChatGPT and Claude and you know other AI tools today, and that that's a why we it's a great question. Why would we go search in Google to then have results that we have to filter through when we have another system that can just generally give us the answer that we're looking for? So, one, we have to develop trust around that system, and that's important. And I think know that they're working pretty hard on that to make sure that we have great results, have transparency in those results. So I don't see there being a huge shift in um how data is distributed. It's more so how we're interacting with it. And so that's why we haven't spent too much time focused on that, um, but more so in how do we be become an important um stakeholder in in uh providing clean data to those tools so that they can communicate well.

SPEAKER_00 42:38

Yeah, that's kind of an interesting. So I think Google's gonna die. So um thank you, Chris, for asking that. Um, I asked ChatGPT if they thought Google was gonna die. And they said, like, that's not the right word, like that's not fair, but basically like that. And and you know, chat GPT is like so nice. They're like, no, you know, Google has like lots of good qualities. And I was like, okay, but what about in five years? And they're like, you never know. I'm like, okay, I got you. Got you, ChatGPT. But it it's interesting that the data does still have to be because ChatGPT or whoever else still needs a source for the data. They still need the internet to pull the data from. I don't really know how the internet works, but like they still need the internet and the websites and the data sources because Google is really just an interface and like a cataloger of information. Chat GPT is as well, it just interacts with it differently. And so you're exactly right. You still need the source of the data, which is provided by us or the businesses to be understandable, clean, etc. It's just how is it being digested?

SPEAKER_02 43:46

Yeah, I mean, it'd be pretty uh remarkable to see something that's been become such a uh at the core and like we weaved into the fabric of our society and our language. I mean, you don't search, you google something. And so I have a tough time believing that it will die. I think it will morph. Um, but you know, there are certainly if if a company is not great at adapting, it will. And we've seen that time and time again. Uh little Blockbuster and you know plenty of other great examples.

SPEAKER_00 44:17

Yaff Yahoo.

SPEAKER_03 44:19

Netflix. I mean, look, Ray, I don't think you can ever say never. I like Google. I always have a fan of the company, they've done a lot, but I don't think you can ever say never. And a lot of these companies do have a 50 year kind of run. I mean, even Bezos talks about it with Amazon that at some point somebody will pass him. Um, when that is, we don't know. Maybe they have longer lives these days with technology shifts, but I think we just figured out a part two on our pod with 20. He's got to come back for a Part two to dive into this because that's wild. That we could definitely do a whole pot on. The changing of the guard. The changing of the guard. Or just how people are going to switch their search. I mean, I mean, I think it's real. Um, I'm not there, but I'm sure my kids will be. Uh, you know, I go back to that story of name last year. You know, we talked about this, these tidbits we we talked about, but a gentleman up on stage was saying that his daughter, you know, he asked her to search for a car and she used TikTok and YouTube. She didn't use Google. Um, and that really kind of framed it right there. There's people's generations are searching different. Period. So um, we'll see where it goes. This is great. Thank you for coming. Thanks.

SPEAKER_02 45:24

Yeah, for sure. If there's one thing I could, you know, leave with today is my uh advice to fellow marketers in the industry, it's it's to definitely focus on uh scalable tools, but a personalized or humanized output that that connection is just so valuable and that like while we want to be focusing on scale and efficiency, we can't lose that because ultimately, I mean, of all businesses, we are in a like a person and like oriented business, and uh that's just so important with your your branding, your messaging, um, and and how you're coming across to prospects today.

SPEAKER_00 46:06

Yeah, no, absolutely. You have given us so much to think about and so much for our listeners to think about. Um, and we really appreciate it. I think it's always wonderful for us to hear from people who have access to a lot of different marketers. And, you know, you're really like you talked about, you're building systems for marketers to make their lives easier. And so you really have a broad view of what's going on, and so that's invaluable to all of us. So we really appreciate you being on the show. Thank you to our listeners, thank you to Carlos, thank you to Chris, thank you to Grady again. And um, Grady does have a webinar coming up, by the way. We will post it when we post this episode. It will be fun, it's about websites, and um yeah, we appreciate everyone. So thank you, and until next time, this is the apartment department.