Apartment Marketing Strategies: SEO, Video, and Industry Trends with Paul Burke

Maximizing organic reach, leveraging video content, and understanding leading marketing indicators are essential for multifamily marketing success.

In this episode of The Apartment Department, Paul Burke, Director of Marketing and Customer Experience at Oakwood Management Company in Columbus, OH, joins Anne and Chris to share his strategies for improving SEO, creating high-quality video content, and using e-commerce insights to increase organic impressions—which can predict clicks and leads.

The discussion also explores bold predictions for the industry following the recent Rent. and Zillow merger and what it could mean for multifamily marketers.

In this episode we discuss:

• Using SEO to increase organic reach and lead generation
• Creating high-quality video content to engage prospects
• How e-commerce strategies can improve marketing efficiency
• Interpreting organic impressions as leading indicators for clicks
• Predictions for the multifamily marketing industry after the Rent. and Zillow merger

Key Topics:
multifamily SEO, apartment marketing video content, organic impressions, lead generation strategies, Rent. Zillow merger impact, property marketing trends

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

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:03

Hi, everyone, and welcome to the Apartment Department, the podcast for multifamily marketers by multifamily marketers. I'm Anne Baum, your co-host, VP of Marketing at Town Properties. With me as always is my co-host, Chris Johnson, marketing leader at Irwin R. Rose, down in Dallas, Texas. We have a fun episode today because we have a fellow marketing leader with us, Paul Burke from Oakwood Management. They have 11,400 units and uh they are primarily based in the Columbus, Ohio MSA, which is one of the largest growing markets right now. Like people are all excited to talk about Ohio all of a sudden, which is great for us. But we're excited to have Paul on for a couple of reasons. One, I have a funny story about how Paul and I met that I want to share with everyone. So Paul, maybe six or eight months ago, was running a LinkedIn campaign. He basically put together this wonderful marketing white paper as a lead gen tool for third-party management. And I filled out the form and he got in touch with me, like, hey, you're probably not looking for our services. I was like, no, but this is the best thing I've ever seen. And so we then became friends and we ran into each other at an event at Columbus, and now we're here. So Paul is really excited because he's really diving into the world of SEO, which is huge because SEO is one of those things that the foundation and the idea of it always stays the chain the same. However, some of the tactics and other things, you know, have grown over the years. And so with that, I'm gonna go ahead and hand it over to Paul.

SPEAKER_02 1:39

Uh well, first, thanks for having me. I've uh it's been great listening to you guys, especially because I'm somewhat newer to this industry. And so to actually have a resource to listen to and be like, oh, what do what do other marketing leaders think has been actually really helpful. So I've learned something from every episode I've listened to. But yeah, so I think SEO in particular is really so it's something I've worked on previous to this job. And I wasn't really sure how it worked as far as being a more like local sort of service and with SEO changing, you know, sort of, I guess famously in the marketing world, like HubSpot's traffic has gone down like 80% or something like that in the last six months because of SEO. Um, but I think one of the interesting things that we're seeing a ton of growth in that channel because we're investing in the right things and not just sort of content. You know, I think when a lot of people think of SEO, they think of, oh, we need more landing pages and blog posts. And I think all that stuff is certainly true. Um, and backlinks and domain authority and and all that. But I think also when you think of the actual content in terms of images and videos are part of sort of generating a lot of trust and topical authority to, you know, broad searches. Because I think we know, you know, no one's gonna, you know, compete with Zillow or Apartments.com for the top one, two, three spots on Google, right? So you kind of have to get creative and and find the marginal wins where you can because that organic traffic is so valuable. So that that's one thing I'm super excited about. You know, it's changing so much, and uh, there's a lot of like doomsday, like, oh, SEO is over and stuff like that. And I I mean it's definitely changing, but I I would I at least from where I sit, I definitely do not think it's dead. I don't know what I would love to hear what you guys think.

SPEAKER_03 3:22

I think SEO should be a part of every marketing program. I don't think it's gonna die. It is a descriptor of what we're trying to do, and it helps people find us and it helps the engines find us, however, those engines are gonna be. I would imagine even AI is gonna have to use something, as Ann and I were just talking about the other day. They're still gonna need something to give them the information and fill it. I like that you're thinking about images and video. I've been doing a lot of that this year. It's it's my focus as video for the entire company. How are we gonna use video all over the place? Not just to drive prospects, but also for our residents. Even internally for HR purposes, how can we use video differently and images differently? I've even thought about having action shots in my photos instead of just empty spaces. And I'm playing around with that idea on how it looks because at a pool it's gonna be full. I don't know why we always have empty everything. I know fair housing, of course, we need to be careful about who we're putting our images and make sure we're marketing to a broader class of people, because of course anybody who qualifies can move into our communities. But I want to make our pictures more fun. So I've been thinking about how we can do that and and have some fun with it. So I don't think it's dead at all. I love this conversation.

SPEAKER_01 4:36

I don't think it's dead either, but I think it's it's like, I don't know, like I said in the intro, it's changing, but it's the same, right? Like foundationally, we have to be providing information that our prospects are looking for and that can be categorized or indexed, you know, in a way that it's then returnable by a search engine or Chat GPT or whatever the case may be. And so I think it's really fascinating to think about does how we categorize, index, organize our information shift as you know, the ways that people find information are different. We've talked a lot about TikTok being a search engine, chat GPT is rapidly becoming a search engine. And so I think I don't have an answer by the way, but that's what I think about a lot is like, well, then how how do we how do we tell these engines the information that we think that they should know? So how are you doing it? Like what tell us more about your video and image strategy. What are what are you looking at right now?

SPEAKER_02 5:40

Well, I think probably the the first part is just investing in a really good content machine and you know having someone who's really good with content. We have, you know, kind of one and a half to two people almost fully focused on that. Um and so it's you know, and I I think the the great thing is too is you know, when you're getting this rich content, right? You can use these videos obviously for organic on YouTube and it and Instagram, but you can also leverage that across pay channels, right? Through, you know, Google Ads Demand Gen campaigns or Performance Max or, you know, meta retargeting stuff. And so I I think video is like such a powerful thing. And I mean, I'm I I mean it's hard when you have you know a larger portfolio, right? And you're trying to like, okay, how do we get videos for every single one? But I think content is you know sort of one of those things that just like we can never like we we we never not have content that we can produce, right? Whether it's related to actually like our properties and trying to, you know, even like you know, I mean it's also an asset on your website, right? And so you hope it's a conversion tool and people see it and are like, oh, this is great, even if they didn't find it on YouTube or Facebook or or whatever. So I think there's just so many purposes of video. And I've you know, I think it's probably one of those things that's under leverage because it's really hard to do well. Um and that's where having, you know, like really creative people who know the industry well are, you know, can actually make compelling media that people want to watch. And it's funny, I actually got one of our ads while I was watching YouTube. I was like doing dishes or something like that, and I was like, what is it? I was like, oh my god, that's one of our ads, you know? And so yeah, I think it's I think it's just like a really powerful tool that you can deploy in a lot of ways.

SPEAKER_03 7:30

Yeah, I totally not to switch totally on you, but just to talk about SEO for something that's a little bit different than I'm doing in my descriptions that I'm sending out. I'm not doing the usual community, you know, located in XYZ. I'm talking about the amenities that people care about there. We're pet friendly, we have this, we have that. Here's what people are actually renting for, and I'm putting that into my descriptions, my short descriptions that are going out on the web. It's specific to that community instead of just the general marketing fluff that we've used for all these years. And that's something I'm doing different for SEO to try to be different, to try to pick up maybe one or two extra pieces of traffic if I can, because the spider picks up that content that they're searching for, whether it's pet friendly, which most of us are these days, or non-smoking or whatever is unique to your community.

SPEAKER_01 8:19

Yeah, I think that's interesting. I'm still I'm gonna go back to the video, Chris, because I'm still kind of fascinated by this. Because we talked with Chrissy Ficker, and she was kind of saying the same things you are about like how difficult it is to produce video at mass scale. They obviously have a solution, right, that that they're selling, but it was kind of fascinating. How are you then? Tell us about your team structure to be able to deploy that video in the strategies that you were talking about, like in, you know, streaming ads, YouTube, meta retargeting, et cetera.

SPEAKER_02 8:49

Yeah. So, you know, what we try to do, at least for new development, we'll try and get one, you know, solid two to four minute video that, you know, tells the story about the property, like Chris said, highlight the best amenities there, highlight the neighborhood, things like that. And then literally just like get it on the website, get it in our you know, performance max ads, get it on Facebook, kind of just get it everywhere. And then also with short form video. And so there's, you know, you're just kind of like trying to like cover all your bases and find that like if there's any platform that someone is on, like they could potentially surface this. And I think, like you said, Chris, like you're trying to get like marginal wins here and there, right? Where you're not gonna get like, I don't think there's you know, a billion people a day searching, searching for apartment tours in Columbus or that sort of thing, right? But you're trying to like sort of just maximize the piece of the pie you have so that you own that organically, and then also on a paid side, like it it the numbers make sense and you know it's having an impact on people who are thinking about your community and and all that sort of stuff. Because I think, you know, and I I guess to kind of backtracking a little bit to what you're saying, and the last before I got in this industry, a lot of my time was in e-commerce. And so in e-commerce, it's video is utilized so much because you don't have a storefront like all of our properties do, right? People drive by, like, you know, attribution I think is a lot more actually hard to track in this industry, whereas e-commerce, I think it's actually a good amount. I mean, it's still impossible, but it's a lot easier there because it's almost all digital, right? There's word of mouth, there's awareness stuff that you may not be able to track, but in e-commerce, the basically the entire focus is on content and on ads that convert because otherwise people have no other way to find you. You know, if you're selling like lotion or something like that, people are not going to Google you and find your lotion, right? And so you're like fully focused on like how do I create an ad that converts? And if you find that winning ad in e-commerce, you just like scale it to the boon, right? And like, you know, sell out all your inventory and all that sort of stuff. Whereas in this industry, you know, you only have a a certain amount of inventory and you know there's a bit more in terms of market forces that actually impact whether the ad converts or not. So I think that I mean there's a lot of different things, but I think sort of at least my inspiration is just like, you know, people are looking for like like to be persuaded. They're looking to live a lifestyle. And that's not always gonna happen through sort of the traditional, you know, text and blog posts and whatever. It's gonna be through like really good video. But again, that's hard to do, and that's why we have like the first thing was like, hey, let's get a really good content person, let's get sort of our production on point and all that sort of stuff.

SPEAKER_03 11:39

Well, it's funny you mentioned that. I have a big team too for the size of the company I'm at, and we're investing in microphones, better microphones, because we're doing so much video now that we want to make the quality to that next level where it it is gonna make a difference with a boom mic or uh a different lapel mic or whatever we're choosing to use for that video. I mean, it does make a difference when you have a team and you can get the content. For us, the content, at least on video, is just doing things that are different, you know, and I talk about that all the time. For us to compete with the Gray Stars and Willow Bridges of the World or Christian Wakefield, whoever you want to name is one of the big companies out there, we have to take the time, just like you're talking about on the video content or on the SEO description or figuring out how to do our images just a little bit different because that's what makes you stand out against everybody else who's templated or just doing what they can because they have 300 communities that they have to manage. I mean, we talked about this the other day with Sarah. It's like some of these companies, when you have 300 communities, like do you really want to have 300 individual websites? Like, that's a lot to manage, right? Uh, and that's why a lot of people are going back to single domain and and and I know you're newer to the industry. I talk about this a lot. We used to do that back in the day. But to to the point, like, we know digital better now, maybe a single domain works better for these larger companies. But for for us to compete, at least in my shoes, if we do the video the way that you're talking about it, and you have a plan and you try, we're not brain surgeons, we're not gonna kill anybody. We can we have the ability in our industry to go try something and let it fail. I have many failures under my belt, but I've always learned from them and try to get them better. Not everything is gonna be a grand stem out of the park.

SPEAKER_02 13:27

Yeah, and I I think what you touched on is key is like the bigger dogs don't have time for this because they dominate like you know, Zillow or CoStar, right? They don't care about the Columbus market, right? They're like, you know how much we spend on backlinks and you know, we you know how much Google respects our domain authority? Like they don't care. So the the marginal wins you can get in video and all that sort of stuff, I think, you know, again, it's it's it's not gonna overtake their, you know, number one position ranking for basically every apartment search term under the sun, but uh, it's still a way in which you can grow your organic presence and at least have an edge on that front.

SPEAKER_01 14:04

Have you found anything? Because you said you came from e-commerce. Have you done anything to your property websites to make them more e-commercey like? Like have you found that you've been able to pull any of your e-commerce experience over to the website specifically? Here's kind of a good failure.

SPEAKER_02 14:21

Um I'm not sure you call I guess I mean it was a test that did not work. We had so you know, basically on the front cover of your your property website, you have an image of the property, right? Or maybe a carousel or whatever, right? We're like, oh, let's get like such a cool like drone footage and let's get like really cool, you know, shots at the amenities and the properties, and it'll be like a beautiful day. And let's run like an A-B test and see like what changes as far as like founce rate leads, like conversions, like time on page, you know, like I mean, just general stuff to see like, hey, did this actually matter? And we saw, I'm not even kidding you, we saw zero change whatsoever. And I even thought there'd be a little bit of change because I'm like, even the season normally changes it, right? Like March is maybe like slower than April, and you know, but there was literally zero change at all. So that was one of those things where I was like, you know what, there is a lot I can bring from e-commerce and thinking about it differently. But you know, the product we sell is like fundamentally different, and certain things are I think there's almost a lot more like subjective here just because there's, you know, I mean, you're this is the biggest expense people have, right? So you could have the coolest drone shot in the world, but if like someone can't afford the property, it's like okay, they they don't care how cool that is. Uh so that was what one of the things that that was, I guess, a learning of like, oh, not everything, you know, perfectly translates or cooler doesn't always mean like better results. I don't know if you guys have had anything like that where you're like, oh, that was it just didn't work. But it sounds like a great idea.

SPEAKER_01 16:00

I mean, probably no. I the only thing I can think of like was we tried to change the name of the floor plans link once to something else to see if it would get people to click more and it didn't. And so we, you know, floor plans is the second most visited page typically on our website. So, you know, to to lose navigation to that was was kind of not the best thing. But that's the only real like task that I can think of that we ran. But same thing. I was like, well, I'm glad we did this on like two properties because now we know that you know it wasn't the best idea. But we've talked a lot about this idea of like, even though apartments are at such a large expense, like, is there a way to streamline that purchase process? You know, just make it applications are daunting and just all of that. It's like, can we move people along a little better and and have it be more like buying clothes or something like that? But you know, if you ever figure, if you figure out the the secret, come back like us.

SPEAKER_02 17:05

Well, I so I got a phone call from someone who's working on a startup in actually in in Cincinnati, and they're trying to do a thing that's almost like a universal application system kind of deal to, you know, kind of like you said, like a one a a one-click checkout for property management. I was like, oh, that's a great idea. It's gonna get hard, you know, to adopt. You gotta integrate with all these softwares and all that sort of stuff. But you're right. So some of the stuff is just like, I don't know how much that that's gonna change unless the industry just flat out is like, all right, we're done sort of doing like the norms here and you know, these really lengthy applications with credit checks, like very personal information. Like that stuff is you know, hard for me because I'm coming from e-commerce and it literally just like reduces as much friction as possible. And here it's it's like just not possible. Or if it is, like, yeah, I haven't seen it.

SPEAKER_01 18:40

I don't know. Like I always equate it to like you can go to a store and give them your social security number and they'll approve you for a credit card. Like on the spot, like at the little point of sales. Hey, do you want to save 20%? Yes, okay, felt application on our little point of sales thing, and it takes like three minutes. I anyway, so I'm like one day that will exist.

SPEAKER_03 19:04

I think it's a little bit more complicated just because of this is somebody's largest expense. When you go to buy a car, you go to buy a house, I it's complicated. I mean, it is, and we're renting apartments. And if you think about it, on the low end, people are spending$15,000 to$20,000 a year to live in our spaces. And so I think you want to make sure that they're paying. Obviously, if you have the asset, that's disastrous, as we know, if we bring in low quality traffic that doesn't pay at the end of the day. So I think that's why it's been so complicated. Doesn't mean we can't fix it. I think there are some tools that are coming out. We know we talked to Yarty and they have some fun. Paul has some great stuff coming down the pike that they're working on to tie into businesses and kind of do some of the steps ahead of time. But at the at the end of the day, you have to verify who the person is, and that's why it's so complicated. And actually, we go pretty fast. Maybe not as fast as a car, but certainly faster than a house if you you know, for those of you that bought a house, uh that process is pretty lengthy. So I think that's part of it. You know, all in talking of all this, you talk about attribution, which I think is really hard in our industry and it always has been. I don't think you can have perfect attribution no matter how much digitally you're trying to track, because there's just so many unknowns. What are you doing? Are you doing anything, trying to do anything to to help with your attribution? Do you use a straight attribution model? Do you try to split it? What's your process?

SPEAKER_02 20:34

Yeah, and I totally agree with you. I I don't think I e even in you know e-commerce where it's much more like trackable, I think almost every like if you get 80%, 80%'s still really good. So I like to think we're closer to 80 set 80%. And I uh for me when I came into my role, there wasn't it wasn't so much of a focus. And so that's why when I came into this role, I was like, oh, okay, it needs to be a really big focus, and we can always dial it back and say, hey, you know, we don't know, you know, whether this is actually driving actual like leads or leases or they didn't click on it or whatever, but we can see sort of other top of funnel metrics, like, oh, the engagement's really good. That shows us like, hey, it probably had an impact. So we, I mean, I generally will look at first touch and multi-touch and from there get just a sense of what's working. And I think a lot of time too, you're you're able to see like what is really not working. So for example, there was one ILS that we were spending a lot of money on, and pretty quickly we found out like they're not super strong in our market. And you know, even just through some basic Googling at popular search terms, I was like, oh, that's funny. Like they're pretty big ILS, like, but they're like not ranking for like most of these keywords in the top three to five slots. Um and so from that, it's and and so just looking at and comparing, hey, ILS A to B, like we're not getting that from A. So a lot of that was from attribution that we got that. But like you said, it's definitely not perfect. And you know, the process too is so long, it's two, three, four, five months sometimes. And so you never know a person could be driving around town or they heard something from a friend, or you know, there there's just so many different ways people can find your place. And so we try to treat it not as, oh, this is a hundred percent fact, but like, oh, this is like generally trustworthy. And I think that's maybe the the the I don't know if that's the best you know we can do at this point, but maybe it just is.

SPEAKER_01 22:38

I kind of agree with you. I think I always say like our data is probably about 80% good, and but that's enough. As long as it's 80% good across all of our sources, across, you know, then that's enough to guide us to make decisions, you know, and and be able to at least spot like, okay, where are their opportunities to change? Or so I'm with you. I don't know. I don't know if the time put into trying to figure out an attribution model would change the performance enough to make it worth the time put in when, you know, we kind of have a a guidance already from the data we have.

SPEAKER_03 23:14

What's interesting too is we just talked to Grady, who is the owner and founder of Resi, and he said, you know, in your industry, you don't have a lot of data. And it's true. Like we get 10,000 visitors a month to the website, which, yeah, that 10,000 is 10,000 people, but Amazon, they probably get, I don't know, what, a billion a day or something? I don't know. I'm just making up a number. I have no idea. But for how many searches does Google do a day? So the data we are getting actually isn't even that much. So we have to dial it in as best we can. We know it's not gonna be perfect, but it's not like I mean, you know, it's true, right? I mean, that was really kind of insightful and really got me thinking on what the data I'm actually looking at. Because in our little world, it seems like, oh yeah, we're up or we're down, or that's a lot or it's a little, but like compared to other industries, it's nothing, right? It's just a drop on the bucket.

SPEAKER_01 24:03

Yeah, that's a good point. Actually, I have a random question for you guys talking about speaking about traffic. Like, are you looking at traffic trends on a weekly basis, on a monthly basis? Like, how do you look to see if property traffic is trending up or down? Like, what is your time frame that you're comparing?

SPEAKER_03 24:21

I'll go first. I look at I'm sorry, so random, but I look at it weekly and I look at it year over year, and I judge a lot of what's going on by the leases that we're getting, the net leases that we're getting. And I look at I as you know, and but Paul, you may or may not know. I I don't market to current occupancy. I don't care what we're currently occupied at. I I do care though what we're trending to. And don't get me wrong, of course, I care. We want to be highly occupied, but I'm looking at the trend. And so I look at the trend of this year to last year as well to see are we in the same ballpark? Is this the yearly trend, or did this property fall off compared to what we were doing last year, same time period, because it helps kind of conceptualize how many more levers do I need to pull, or can I just wait this out because I know that we're just gonna have a dip? So, and I I kind of look at it from a couple of different I use a couple of different data points. I certainly look at it every Monday, but I compare it to year over year. And then if there's a problem, I I pull the data for the last quarter, and then I'll pull it for year to date, and then I pull for the year prior, same time period, and just compare it that way and just see how what are we doing, up or down. I have a couple of properties right now. I am not performing as well as last year, and we can't really figure it out because I think we're doing better marketing that was in place than when we started doing what we're doing. But then a lot of properties were outperforming. So, you know, as you know, it could be a sub-market thing, and that's what we're having the conversations. But by pulling the data the way that I'm pulling it, it opens up the dialogue to say, okay, what is different? Why aren't we where we want to be?

SPEAKER_02 25:50

And uh question for you, Chris. Are you guys are you guys well, what property management uh software do you use? Uh what real page. Real page, okay. Just curious. But yeah, so we'll we'll do, I mean, I'll I'll look at it, of course, on like a weekly basis and sort of same thing. You know, we we we realize pretty early on that like, oh, it's really only the trending that matters, and you're gonna adjust advertising spend based on that and and what you have available and whatnot. But I would say it depends on like the season. Like in the fall and winter, we were like very much like tracking like, okay, what were we we doing like week over week? Um, because when your numbers go down, like you know, this business does seasonally, you're like, oh, is this normal, right? Yeah, how much of this is based on uh what's you know, the market, the economy, how much money we're spending, how much money we're not spending, all those sort of things. So I would say probably as we've got out of the winter, I've been a little bit more lax on that and just seeing like, okay, what's like week over week? Are we growing? Are we going downhill? Do we have a bunch of properties that are struggling? Do we have a bunch of properties that are doing really well? So I I would I I think that's is that an adequate answer?

SPEAKER_01 26:58

Yeah, no, it was just something I've been thinking about. So I was like, we're kind of talking about it, so I'm just gonna throw that out there. How do you do it? Both monthly, we'll look at it year over year, or excuse me, weekly, sometimes year over year. But I had a comment the other day about like, oh, traffic has really gone down week over week. And I was kind of trying to figure out like, well, what percentage would concern people? Do you know what I mean? Then it made me start thinking, like, well, of course it goes down, you know, of course it goes up and down, but like what percentage is a threshold of concern? And so it just started making me kind of think about all these other things, like, do we need to kind of have a standard where we say like we expect traffic to fluctuate 10%, you know, week to week if we haven't made changes. I'm making the 10% up, but like, you know, week to week if we haven't changed anything, and if it's more than that, we're you know, we'll look year to year or something to that effect. So as a just kind of thinking about it.

SPEAKER_03 27:58

But well, I actually do a Monday report that I send out to people that's just a marketing report. I put the traffic on there, but I also put the conversion rates for the communities on what how they're converting that traffic. So we're looking at like the conversation that I'm always having when this comes up, because as you know, it's always mark marketing first. What are you guys doing? What's wrong? It's like, okay, well, we can spend more money. I mean, that's never gonna be an issue. I'll be the first to raise my hand to do it. But if the communities aren't converting and I'm showing you here's five weeks in a row and your conversion rate's 10%, it doesn't matter if I send you more traffic. Like we gotta do something on the on the team, or we gotta have them get shopped, or we just need to have a discussion on what's going on. Why aren't they converting? What is it price? You know, get it back into the four piece. And so having that that report, Paul, I'm all about opening up conversations. I it's I've been doing this so long now, it's nobody, it's nobody is fully responsible. It's a team effort here. And so by having the data and just get force feeding the data to the regionals into upper management and just saying, here it is, all right, now it's open. Here's what the traffic is, here's what our conversion rate is. Let's go talk about it and go figure it out. That's just it's helped me be successful my my whole career because we're just being transparent. And then you can have the conversations. And was it raining that week? Was it did you get sleek? Did was you know, there's some crazy accident on the highway that shut down, you know. I mean, Dallas, there's you know, millions of Iowa. I'm sure you guys see it all the time. It's taking me time to get used to. Even coming from California. I mean, weather here changes, and we were 50 degrees one day or 90 degrees the next, literally, overnight. And so that's gonna affect your traffic. Some and you know, you guys are experiencing that kind of stuff too. So, I mean, to me, it's like if I just put that in front of them, then we can have the discussion of it.

SPEAKER_01 29:49

Yeah, then it just opens up the conversation. No, I think that's I think that's fair. I used to work for I did marketing for a lawn care company, and it was crazy to see how the lead volume would change based on the weather. Like it was, I never would have thought of it. And we actually ended up building a system where we would, based on weather forecast, we would increase bids and daily budgets if it was going to be nicer out, and then we would decrease them if it was gonna be like rainy or cold or whatever. Like that's how much it depended on the weather. So anyway, I digress. But Paul, what else? So let's talk about. We've talked about SEO, we've talked about attribution. Has all of this focus from an image and video standpoint, have you seen increases in organic traffic to your websites?

SPEAKER_02 30:40

Yeah, yeah, we we definitely have. And the increase in actual like clicks has been slower. It's still increased a good amount, but probably the biggest is impressions, which is normally the thing to actually what actually lists is like kind of or I guess what I've seen is that your impressions go up, and that's normally the first sign, like, oh, actually we're doing better. And then the clicks generally follow. And so we've definitely seen that, and that's been a huge win for us. But one thing that we sort of touched on before we started the call, but I think is really interesting, is obviously with Zillow sort of acquiring rent.com's listings, business, and all that sort of stuff. I think for me, one of the reasons why we have gone all in on organic is that you know basically Zillow and Apartments.com own at this point, I don't know, 80% of the market. Like it's basically just two oligarchs. And I've always loved like the pay-per-lease model. And I I'm not sure if that's universal because I have met people who are like, I I don't like love it, which it always surprises me. But but like my my bold prediction, I don't know how bold this is, but in 2020, as fast as Zillow can legally get out of their contracts to go to a subscription model, that they are absolutely going to do that. And that was always already like kind of, you know, our Zillow rep was like floating that around, but just as like I've thought more and more about it, I was like, oh, this is like this is definitely gonna happen. I'm just like waiting for them to roll it out, but they're probably gonna wait until January 1st to like actually do that. I don't know if you guys have any bold predictions on that front.

SPEAKER_01 32:18

I I wouldn't be surprised, but I think what you're talking about is interesting because it's this idea of basically like you have to build your own marketing. And Chris and I were actually talking about this the other day. You have to build your own marketing funnel. And that means like owning your ads, owning where they're going and really building it ultimately so that hopefully it's leading to your website, you know, because that's an owned asset as well. And so that way, when changes happen, like what we saw with Rant and Zillow, and you know, as apartments.com continues to, you know, be kind of a a leader from a traffic standpoint and all that, it's like you almost don't have to rely on them because you've built your own traffic machine. And so I think that's what I'm hearing you say is that all of these things that you're focusing on, like ultimately will allow you to be self-reliant from a marketing standpoint as you know the market and sources kind of continue to shift, which I think is the smartest thing ever.

SPEAKER_03 33:15

They're for sure gonna do it. And I'll be in that bold for you to say it. They've already approached me and said when my contract's up, they're gonna have that option available, which is coming up in August. It's not gonna be till July. I don't think it'll be maybe it'll be January 1st for everybody, but as contracts run up on what you're doing, they're gonna bring that to you. They already kind of had it with Zillow Boost and some other stuff that they were doing, and just makes sense now that they have the rent um that they're leasing from you know whatever's left of Redfin, that they're gonna go to that model. I love paper lease. I don't know why anybody on this planet would not love a paper lease program. I use apartment list, I use a lift with apartment list, I love it. To me, it's like the biggest no-brainer, and it's gonna really hurt because Zillow has been one of those tools that for my community is a lot of my competitors are not on it because they don't think Reggers and B and when I was in doing some C stuff were not using Zillow, and they absolutely are. Everybody uses Zillow, and so I was winning on the Zillow front. I mean, I was getting tons of leases that my competitors are just missing out on because they weren't there. In some of my markets, I was the only one advertising, which is incredible. So, but I do agree with you. I don't think it's so bold. I think uh Ann has some bolder. If we're gonna end the podcast with bold predictions, I know Anne has one that she loves to talk about. You know, I don't have anything really bold this year. I was surprised with what happened with rent. I mean, apartment guide was the longest living, I think, one of the longest living in our industry. It's it's really shocking that they're just gone overnight almost seemingly. I do think that we'll probably see some more consolidation. I don't think it's gonna happen this year. But to Ann's point, I think we have to get smarter. I mean, it's we talk about this all the time. I mean, people who listen regularly are just gonna say you guys keep repeating yourselves, but it's true. How many industries literally pay to put themselves next to their competitor and pay a lot of money for it with no guarantee that it's gonna work? I mean, at least with hotels and airlines, at least you're putting in like a like a stay, and it's like you're going somewhere, you need a hotel for something, like this is where you're gonna live and spend 20, 30 grand a year, and we just we're great just throwing it up with everybody else, and with no real changes to the model and not a lot of help from our ILS partners on attribution, mind you, they all kind of want to keep their data kind of separate instead of making sure that we can get the data and everything ties together. And it's just it's kind of wild. I mean, we're all playing by the same rules, but at some point I think we need to just get out of it. And that would be my bold prediction. And I think probably AI is gonna change that a little bit. And as the next the low these generations behind us come up, they probably don't they're not gonna talk to people as much, and they want to they want it to be seamless and they want to be able to do all their business how they want to do it on the sites that they want to do it. And I don't think our model is gonna work for them.

SPEAKER_02 36:06

One one quick thing I'll add to that, Chris, is uh we were running a multi-touch report on a couple of properties, and you would think, and I was surprised by this, you would think people go, you know, use Zillow, you'll use apartments.com, apartment list, you would use a bunch of different ILSs. But what we saw was that if you used apartments.com, you maybe use another ILS, but a lot of times it was not Zillow, and vice versa. You may use apartment list or rent cafe ILS, but it was pretty rare to see people both use both use Zillow and Apartments.com, which I think you know speaks to the need of, hey, people are using different ones, and that's sort of what Zillow is going to come back with June, July, when as soon as they can do it. And and they're like, hey, you can't play ball without us. And now marketing departments like us are you know being forced. Hey, do we are we spending monthly dollars on both you know apartments.com and Zilla without any guarantee of performance. And, you know, exactly like you said, advertising next to our competitors, showing a lot of, you know, oh, we have a gym. Well, we have a gym. I mean, okay, great. Everyone has a fitness gym except, you know, other except a few communities here and there, right? So I I think that's the the really interesting thing is like both cannot win for every marketing department, you know. At some point, they'll be like, hey, you choose one. And then that's where you're gonna have to rely on, oh, the organic stuff now, like you said, and your own marketing machine, does that work well enough to compensate for you not being able to spend three, four, or five grand a month on just subscription products?

SPEAKER_01 37:49

Yeah. I no, I I I think that's interesting. I would hate to see, I guess the only other thing I would say too is that maybe if we can somehow prove out that even if an ILS isn't performing from a lead standpoint, that the lift that we're getting from impressions or being seen is then somehow contributing to the rest of the marketing funnel. That would be my only other argument. Like, do we start thinking about ILSs as more of like display advertising or you know, more in the awareness as opposed to now we're kind of looking at it from a consideration and purchase standpoint, but maybe we move it up in the funnel and look at it like a cost, you know, CPM or something like that.

SPEAKER_03 38:36

It's a good thought, but some of these ILSs are pretty expensive for just trying to get some impressions.

SPEAKER_01 38:42

No, I I know. I, you know, yes, I understand. And then you have to start considering, you know, what we've talked about before, like so. First of all, people are looking at first they're filtering, right? And I think like 30% of people use filters on ILSs. Then they're looking at price and thumbnail. And so like you have to win like on that. But if they're seeing your name with the other, I'm I just don't know. But you're right. In some markets, I mean Columbus, Paul, you and I both know that the the rates are very high on some of the ILSs in Columbus. It's very fascinating. But I would say some of our submarkets, there are rates that are more reasonable. But then we also see our rent ranges are different in the submarkets. So we do actually see from a performance standpoint better results in kind of our submarkets. And I think it's because of package price and then also rent range that those kind of two marry nicely together. I digress. Anyway, you're right, Chris. But that's just kind of my thought. Like, is you know, do we just think about them within the funnel differently?

SPEAKER_03 39:45

I just wish we could, as an industry, come up with our own ILS that we're just posting our own stuff on. Have some guidelines, post it. I don't know, do somebody as an industry.

SPEAKER_01 39:54

I don't come up with our own ILS.

SPEAKER_02 39:56

We could do it just the three of us will have our own ILS in the five markets we're in. That's fine.

SPEAKER_01 40:03

Yeah, we could like combine forces like our own private ILS.

SPEAKER_03 40:07

You guys have some overlap. I'm just winning. If you're searching Dallas, let's go. Just win, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 40:11

Yeah, Paul and I are fist fighting over like which one of our properties is in the first position. You're fine.

SPEAKER_03 40:18

Maybe that's what the bold is. And I've seen people talk about it. I mean, there's there's some people out there talking about how we can reshape our own industry doing our own thing. And I don't know, maybe it's one of the associations kind of runs it, and we can all list, you know, if we're a member of the association or something. I don't know. I'm just spitballing, of course, but it just seems like something is gonna break because we can't all spend two grand a month and then PPC, and then you know, that's why paper lease is so great, because I mean I don't care. I I don't care them out there, I don't care what that, you know, if I get that lease, I know I'm getting the ROI. With some of these other ILSs, I mean, I had to take a hard look in the mirror. I cut my budgets on most of them because you know, if you do the cost per lease on some of my communities, I'm not making this up, it was five grand at least, six grand a lease. I mean, it's unjustifiable. No, it's too much. And some of them were, some of them were 200 a lease because that market loved apartment, you know. So I use apartments.com fine. They love that market, you know, and I got cost per lease at 200. And so, of course, I'm gonna spend the money, but it's not like that everywhere.

SPEAKER_02 41:23

Yeah, and I think uh, you know, like one thing I haven't heard people talk about that much is how bad this is for the actual consumer. Of you think you're fine, you think you're going, you're spending all this time going through apartment guide, for rents, Zillow, and you think you're finding different listings, and you're actually just finding the same exact listings. And I think that sucks to go, you know, on if I go on Yelp or God, I'm not a foodie, so this was a terrible example. But if I go on all these like food things and I'm getting the exact same results, that's just a really bad search experience. And I think, yeah, if there was any sort of disruption, uh, and that's why I hope apartmentless wins, not just because they're pay per lease, but because they're just kind of doing something different. So I think that's a real bummer that it's just like there's two companies that control it, and if you don't find your list like a listing on there, it just doesn't exist really.

SPEAKER_01 42:15

Yeah. That unless, of course, as people start going away from Google and using other places to search, you know, is there an advantage there where there's a little bit of window for individual properties or property management companies to really get visibility where maybe some of those larger organizations might not? I don't. I'm just kind of thinking this whole thing is, I don't know, it's just really fascinating. Apartment list, I was gonna ask you something too, Paul, kind of around your your I was like, I had something. Your comment about the consumer, the prospect experience. The other thing I'll say too, that's kind of interesting. Have you used Ed and High's shop tool yet? From Flo?

SPEAKER_02 42:59

No, we have not used it yet, but we've been meaning to.

SPEAKER_01 43:04

Okay. Well, it's awesome, and you'll find lots of things. But one of the things that I thought was really interesting that I found was how many emails a prospect gets from an ILS after they submit a lead. So not necessarily from your site team, but from the individual ILS. And so, you know, going back to the consumer experience and building your own marketing machine, just all this stuff. It's like I was I've been texting Chris. I submitted a lead to Zumper. I've gotten those two days ago, I've gotten 11 emails from Zumper. 11 from my one lead for one property.

SPEAKER_02 43:41

Not even the property itself, just Zumper.

SPEAKER_01 43:44

Yeah, no, the proper and the property didn't write me back because it's ours, and I said, you know, whatever, fine.

SPEAKER_00 43:49

But like that's okay.

SPEAKER_01 43:51

But yeah, from Zumper. Hey, you contacted the property. Hey, here's other properties you might like. Hey, yeah, it was, and I was like, oh my gosh, why are we doing this? Like, why would we, you know, and I'm not trying to call that's they're not alone in providing that experience, but it just, you know, to your point, kind of why are we why are we doing this? Like, why are we inadvertently creating this experience for the prospect?

SPEAKER_03 44:16

We gotta get better. That's the disruption. And I think conversations it will at some point it'll catch on. But you know, for the again, for the big boys that have 300,000 units, I mean, they just need to get the name out there. They have all the pool, they get the bets rates. Of course, they're gonna be on these things. Because that it they're you know, it helps them. So I don't know. I mean, great conversation. Let's see if we can get the ball rolling. Are you going to aim, Paul? Yeah, I yeah, we we are. Oh, we'll hang out. Let's all meet up. And we can with some of these, some of our colleagues and say, let's do it. Let's get our own house going.

SPEAKER_01 44:52

Yeah, wow. What a big thing. Big ideas happening at AIM. I love it. So the the last thing, Chris, you've been liking to ask people something about Chat GPT. Google. What have you been asking people?

SPEAKER_03 45:06

Oh, I just no, we were messing around. It's just, do you think do you think Google this is Google's crossroads uh with all the AI coming? I think Google's gonna survive. I think Ann thinks they're gonna die. What do you think, Paul? You can be the tiebreaker.

SPEAKER_02 45:20

Oh no, I don't think Google's gonna die. I think I'm way too tied into Google that's not search related. And if Google started charging me more for my Gmail, my Google Drive use, all the Google products that I use on a daily basis, I would have to. I I don't know where else I would take it, you know. Um, but as far as their search business, I mean, I which is the majority of Google, you're right. I have no idea what they're going to do about that because that is a that's that is quite the predicament. But they have to me, they have so many other lines of businesses and they're so diversified. And even you look at YouTube, like YouTube itself is a massive search business. So I definitely don't think Google's going away, but I'm curious as to how dead you think they're going to be.

SPEAKER_01 46:09

Like Yahoo dead.

SPEAKER_02 46:11

All the way.

SPEAKER_01 46:12

All the way. Now, to be fair, Paul, I think that is good that you're saying that. That I also agree that like maybe Google Photos and Google Gmail, like that that's not gonna go away. But so I I need to clarify my statement. Google search. I I think that's fair. Okay, cool. You can be a guest anytime. Thank you for agreeing with me. Paul, we've really appreciated having you on. This was so fun. I can't wait to continue our conversation at AIM and just in general, it sounds like you're doing some really amazing things. So thank you for being a guest. Thank you to our listeners, thank you to Carlos, our producer. And until next time, this has been the apartment department.