From Photos to Performance: Building a Visual Content System That Drives Leasing

What role does visual content actually play in apartment performance—and why are most operators still treating it like a one-off asset instead of a system?

In this episode, Anne Baum and Chris Johnson sit down with Izzy Carunungan of LCP (Lights, Camera, Pixels) to unpack how photos, 3D tours, and unit-level media are evolving from marketing “nice-to-haves” into operational infrastructure.

They explore how the rise of sight-unseen renting, inconsistent unit upgrades, and fragmented property data are forcing a new approach—one where visual content becomes standardized, scalable, and deeply integrated into the leasing journey.

This conversation goes beyond content creation to examine:

• Why your website should function as a true source of truth for prospects
• The operational challenges behind maintaining accurate, unit-level visuals
• How inconsistency in media impacts trust, conversion, and leasing velocity
• What it looks like to treat content as a system—not a campaign

If you’re thinking about centralization, standardization, or how to better connect marketing to operations, this episode offers a practical lens into where the industry is heading.

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Transcript

0:01

(Transcribed by TurboScribe. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) Hi everyone and welcome to the apartment department. My name is Anne Baum. With me as always is Chris Johnson. Today we are so excited because we are joined by an industry legend. As Chris mentioned before we started, this is one of his idols and heroes. No pressure. Izzy Kiranungen from LCP. He is the industry principal at LCP. LCP, by the way, stands for Lights, Camera, Pixels. And LCP is a company that makes it easy for communities to create individual photos, 3D tours of units as well as amenity spaces. And we know that that's becoming so important right now in the industry. Everyone's talking about how do you make your websites a central hub for information for the renter? How do you cater to people who want to rent sight unseen? How do you establish consistency across different upgrade packages, finishes, all of the things that we know happen over time at properties? And so LCP is solving a real world challenge that we're all facing right now from a marketing standpoint. So Izzy, thank you so much for being here. We're so excited. Thank you for having me. I am really excited to get the invitation to speak about visual media. And just a little bit about me. I've been in the industry for quite a bit now. The majority of my experience in multifamily has really been on the property management side. I started my career at Bizudo and then spent a significant time of my career at Graystar. And then I moved over to the supplier side with LCP Media. And in a lot of ways, I know people say, oh, I'm living the dream or I have the perfect job. And I can honestly say in most days that that's the case because my two passions in life, obviously outside of my family or in addition to my family, are two things, marketing and photography. And with my position at LCP, I'm able to marry the two. And then you put travel on top of that. It really makes it amazing for me because I always bring my camera with me. With photographers, you tend to wake up early because you want to catch the sunrise. And so that's what I do when I travel and attend these conferences or visit clients. It's just making sure I have my camera with me so I can capture these beautiful locations. And that's just my job. And so I'm really, really excited for what is happening in multifamily today and what's going to happen to multifamily in the future for a lot of us that have seen a lot of shift happening over the years. There's many shifts that have happened over the years in how we're marketing multifamily communities and apartments. And this is such an exciting time for it. I agree with you. First of all, we did not know that you were a secret photography influencer, so that's good. Legend, influencer, the list goes on. Tell us a little bit more. This is a very broad question, but why unit level media? Why is this becoming a game changer for for properties when they're using it? For sure. For many, many years, our industry, we've really been marketing the community. When you go through the renter journey, top of the funnel, people are searching for location, closer to work. So they start the search that way, and then they ended up visiting these property websites. And then they kind of go down the funnel. And for many, many years, the search basically stops at the floor plan level at best, where they can see floor plan type A1, one bedroom, one bath. And it kind of really just stops there. But now the availability of unit level content, and when I say unit level content, I'm speaking about the actual apartment, the actual unit, unit 101, unit 503, the specific apartments. Because as we all know, we will have multiple units within a floor plan type. You may have 10 units to floor plan type A1, one bedroom, one bath. But these units could be in different floors. They'll have different views. Some of them may have different finishes. Some might be renovated. Some may not be renovated. But they have the same floor plan layout. They're the same floor plan type. But if you're able to show prospective residents on these actual units, not just the unit type or the floor plan type, you're really pushing them down further down the funnel. And what's really happening is these prospects become more educated about, can I see myself living in this exact apartment? You know, not the floor plan type, but this exact apartment with this view, with this finishes. And so in a lot of ways, they're pre-qualifying themselves, right? Because what's the next step after that? They're going to make contact with a property, right? They're going to make that phone call. They're going to fill out that form. Eventually, they will visit that property, right? But make them educated about what are the actual units, what are the actual apartments that they are interested in seeing when they actually get to the property, right? And inversely, I always talk about this, what are the units that they don't want to see when they get to the property? Because I think that's equally as important, right? Because from a leasing agent perspective, your typical tour is what, 45, 30, 45 minutes on average, maybe, right? And you're showing them this model unit or this unit, but they may not necessarily even want that because they've already did their research prior to even getting there. So even from a leasing agent perspective, it makes the in-person tour more efficient. And really, that's why we're seeing these higher conversions with properties that are showing unit level content, whether it's tours or still photographs, videos, because they are putting the prospects inside that actual apartment, not just conceptually of a floor plan type. I love it. It's a good idea. I just can ask one quick question, and I know you have some follow-up here, and I want to get the numbers. Of course, you talked about conversion, and of course, we care here at the apartment department about data. So my brain is now spinning on how I can do this. And if you've listened to the pod, I love video, and we're doing some really fun stuff with video at my current shop. How early in the process of marketing the community are you seeing success with marketing unit? So I know Anne has been a big proponent of this unit marketing versus property marketing or floor plan marketing. Have you seen anybody actually put their toe in and test this to how far up the funnel you can actually get the unit in front of somebody and get interest? Absolutely. So with LCP, our virtual tour platform is called TourBuilder. And we have two types of virtual tours. One is what we call TourBuilder Pro, which is property virtual tour. So you're really talking about the exterior, the amenities, the common spaces, even model units. But we went to market a couple of years ago with a product called TourBuilder Go, and that's really designed to capture unit-level content. We use a 360 camera. It's super easy to use, and it's synced to an app that we built. And so what I wanted to do from a marketing perspective is really quantify what's happening when you capture this unit-level content. So what we did was we partnered with a major management company on a lease of property they have in Austin, Texas. And we said, hey, we're going to go out there and shoot every single 311 units on this lease of property. So tons of vacancies. And then we told them, we said, we'd love for us to compare that property with unit-level tours shot for every single unit, compared to another similar property in the same sub-market in Austin that do not have unit-level tours. And let's see what the difference is. And so we did. So we went out there. We shot every single unit. It's a new construction property going into pre-lease, going into lease-up. And so it was a perfect time to capture those units because everything's vacant. And this is what we tell our clients as well. It's like, if you have a lease-up, especially if it's a new construction lease of property, that would be the best time to shoot these units because while they're still vacant. Not that you can't do it in stabilized properties. You can, obviously. But you have to wait for the turn. So it may take, depending on your renewals, it may take a couple of years to have a digital inventory of all your units waiting for the turn. But lease-ups would be perfect because now you'll have a digital inventory of every single unit that you can use to market as you go through this lease-up and beyond. Okay. So let me just talk about the case study real quick because even I was amazed with the results. I completely did not expect this, right? So from a lead gen standpoint, the property that had the unit level tours for every single unit versus compared to the property that did not have it, generate 40% more leads, generated 80% more applications, 72% more leases, and then that 38% higher lead-to-lease conversion, right? Now, I know that the leads, application leases, those are big numbers. But to me, the 38% higher lead-to-lease conversion, I think is huge, right? And again, it quantifies what we have been thinking when we went to market with this product, right? Which is we're going to try to pre-qualify this prospect by pushing them further down the leasing funnel, make them more educated, which is what I was talking about earlier, so that when they transact with a property, they have a fairly good idea of what units they want to live in or they want to see, right? And there lies that conversion piece, right? In a lot of ways, you're eliminating the guessing game, right? Where they would go to the property, the leasing agent will do the show-and-pony tour, I'm going to show you this, I'm going to show you that. But here, it's more targeted. By the time they make that transaction, by the time they step foot in that property, they're way further down the funnel than they normally would. So I love this case study. I love talking about this case study because in a lot of ways, the industry is still shifting towards this unit-level content. And we at LCP were really trying to preach the value of this unit-level content to the multifamily industry in general because we know it works and we know the impact it has in leasing apartments, right? No, I think that's interesting. I mean, I recently found out 40-year-old property, so been through many renovations, lots of floor plans, unit, all the things. Well, anyway, I found out it was taking sometimes two hours to do a tour because it was like, well, I want to see the one that's renovated, that's on the second floor, that's on... You get the idea. And so the idea of the unit-level media is also what you're talking about. Not only are prospects qualifying themselves, but I think the leasing team can also use the unit-level media to pre-qualify the tour in terms of like, this is what you've told us you're interested in. I'm going to send you three units we have available. Here are the 3D tours of each. Write back and tell me which ones you don't like or which ones you like or whatever the case. So I think not only from a website experience or standpoint, but I think also integrating the media into the leasing process would allow us to see an improvement in maybe where some leasing funnel metrics might be breaking or lower than a benchmark. And here's another story I want to share with both of you too, because this was interesting to me because we, again, when we were going to market, we were positioning... I, as the marketing guy, was positioning this product as a pre-visit tool. So this is, again, going down the funnel, but it's before you visit the property, making the prospects more educated before they visit the property. So the way I position it is, oh, this is going to be a great pre-visit marketing tool for you. So my CTO, his name's Tom Chomiak, he's the brains behind TourBuilder. He built TourBuilder from scratch. He was moving from Chicago to Naples, Florida. So he went down there checking out some apartments, right? And so he was by himself. He didn't bring his wife and he was visiting multiple properties. Like what a normal prospect would do, right? You would visit multiple properties and guess what? You will visit multiple units within that property, right? So you do the math, right? You visit five units in a property and you visit five properties, that's 25 units. Okay, right? Easy, right? So he's like, I go back to Chicago, I was telling my wife all of these things that I just did, right? And they're all like literally blending together. And then I'm like, Tom, we can also position this unit level content for post-visit right? As a follow-up tool, you know, and that's how we created, so we have short form videos available now for every single virtual tour, right? So not just the virtual tour itself, which is interactive and you control the experience, but what we were able to do is create the short form video, 30, 45 seconds of videos off the virtual tour, right? And I said, you know, we can tell the leasing agent to include these short form videos as part of their follow-up, right? Instead of like just your typical, you know, text follow-up or, you know, sometimes you'll maybe attach a floor plan maybe, right? But now you can actually say, hey Tom, here's the units that you visited, right? And then I'm like, you know, that would help with conversion too, you know, not just as a pre-visit tool, but as a post-visit follow-up tool. And now not only you're standing out with the four other properties that you visited, that the prospect visited that do not have this tool, right? But from a prospect perspective, I'm like, yeah, I'm going to show my wife, here's all the units that I visited. I can't remember the 20 other units that I visited with the four other properties that I visited, but for this one, I can show it to you, right? And so now we talk about that. I talk, tell that story all the time now, because, you know, while we initially positioned this as a pre-visit marketing tool, now we're also positioning it as a post-visit follow-up tool that helps increase with your closing and your conversion. Well, our renters are more sophisticated anyway. So when they come to the property, they know what they're getting into. And don't you just think that it just, it plays to the customer service piece that we care that you're coming, here are the units that you're interested in. Okay. Maybe those didn't work, but here's what we looked at. And this is what you ended up being interested in. And it kind of ties the bow, the nice little bow on top of the package to get that closing. If they're comparing you to two or three other communities, which they probably are. Absolutely. And again, this is what the case study case study was referring to, right? You have unit level content on one property and you don't have unit level content on the other property, right? And so that's why I think we're seeing these results that we saw in the case study, right? Because one, you know, this property that has unit level tours, not only they're able to market the units themselves, not just in the initial pre-lease or lease up phase, but on an ongoing basis, right? If you have a digital media inventory of every single unit, once that unit doesn't get renewed, you can start marketing it as early as you can, right? You don't have to wait until, you know, you get the, you know, that they're not going to renew that unit, you know, as long as you, you know, you have that digital inventory, you can start marketing, right? So, so I think there's just a lot of value in, you know, in developing this, you know, this unit level content and with LCP, you know, what we really been, been really working hard on is just making that capture process as easy as possible, right? Making that capture process easy as possible, because as you, as you both know, you've been around in industry too, sometimes a barrier to entry in our industry is, you know, kind of like fear of technology, right? Or, or fear of something new, right? And you'll always gonna hear like, oh, you know, we don't have the bandwidth or our team can't do it or, you know, and all these other kinds of things that won't allow them to capture the content, right? And, and so, you know, what we're really doing is, okay, you know, we'll have a photographer option. We can send a photographer out there. It's going to cost you a little bit more because, you know, we're paying the photographer, but really the most cost-efficient, you know, option is to do a self-capture, right? Whether the leasing team is doing the self-capture or in some cases, in fact, when we were piloting this, this product, you know, we piloted on 12 properties and there was one property that stood out because they were churning this tour so quickly and a lot of them, right? And so I called up the marketing person for that property. I'm like, hey, what are you guys doing? I mean, because this is exactly what we've kind of been wanting to do. It's like, you know, here's the kit. We'll train you how to do it. You know, the app is super easy to use, right? It syncs, it syncs together once you capture the content. And, but this one property is just, they're just knocking it out really quick, right? And so what the marketing person told me, and I always share too, when I talk to folks about this is they trained their maintenance folks, not just the leasing team, but they trained their maintenance folks, which I thought was brilliant because why if they're doing it on the turn, obviously the maintenance folks are involved in that. Right. But you know, they added it as the last item in the punch list. Okay. So once maintenance, that's all the things that they do in turning that property. Well, the last step is capture it, capture what it looks like. One, the unit's going to be in its best shape before you lease it again. Right. And two, it just makes complete sense that the maintenance team is doing it now. It's not, it's a new skillset for them. Right. I don't know how often maintenance folks, you know, capture content like this because we do it for marketing purposes. Right. You know, but, but the, you know, when I talked to the marketing person, they're like, oh my God, our maintenance folks love it because one, they learned a new skillset and two, they're showing off their work, you know, with a turn. And so I'm like, that's great. It's a win-win, you know, now you, now you have this content, now you've captured it. Right. And now you don't have to worry about that unless you're doing some type of renovation in that unit. Right. That, that's it. You've captured it. You move on to whatever the next one is. Right. And so, so I think, you know, you know, there's some education that we need to do in terms of, you know, don't be scared of like technology. We're going to make it as easy as possible. Right. And we're going to make the process as simple as possible so that, so there's not a heavy lift on the onsite folks. Yeah. That's brilliant though. You left out one other important piece. If they're capturing the video, then they got to make sure it's clean. It's got to look good that they actually punched what they were supposed to punch because they're taking video of it. It's going to be pretty clear if they didn't, which is an also added nice little like bow to the, to the, to the vacant unit that they just finished. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. You know, again, people, people, some, some folks are just being creative and thinking outside the box. And for me, it's a great learning experience. And just like he said, initially position, this is a pre-visit, you know, marketing tool turns out it also works for post visit. You know, you know, we were training the leasing, the leasing team to do the capture. Well, somebody thought like, Oh, I'm going to train my maintenance folks. And that worked out, you know, so, so it's evolving is, is I guess what I'm trying to say, you know, I think we use your product at two different of our properties. One's a lease up and one's a stabilized property. And it's been interesting for me to see how it's handled differently. One property decided to train their entire team, how to use it. So we all went out together and did some tours and made some jokes and it was fun, you know, we had a good time. And then the other property has designated one particular person for that to be their job. So I think that that's, you know, it might end up depending on like, we've seen that it kind of depends on the property and staff and capabilities and all the things. But it's been really cool to see the tours start to go up on our websites, the tours and the, and the photos, because I do believe that it's kind of the future. And it's interesting to like at optechapartments.com, for example, had a session about the future of the renter. I don't remember what it was called. But you know, one of the things they talked about was that renters now expect and appreciate unit level photos. So like it's quickly becoming almost a standard that we need to adopt to because renters for all of the reasons that we talked about previously, moving from out of state, being more savvy, having more information at their fingertips, doing more research ahead of time. I mean, it's becoming even more necessary. So I thought that was interesting to like, it's not just us as marketers saying like, this is important, but we're saying it's important because renters are telling us it's important. And obviously your case studies are, are showing that too. So that really stuck out to me. I was like, oh, it's here now. The renters are telling us. And that's really, you know, what's really driving a lot of this innovation, I feel like, right. So, you know, like you said, there's, there's been many shifts in consumer behavior, even, even I would say the last few years. Right. Yeah. We've all been through the COVID years. Right. Interesting time in our history. Right. Okay. And if you remember, we've all been there, all the properties shut down during COVID. Nobody, meaning nobody can visit the property. It's just impossible. Right. There's all these restrictions. But guess what happened? Virtual tours or, you know, became a must. It's no longer like, oh it's a nice to have, right. It became a must have because why when they can't visit, when prospects can't physically visit the property and they still need a home to move to, guess what they're going to do is they're going to go online. They're going to visit your website. They're going to visit, you know, the ILSs, whatever marketing channels they're visiting. And if they're not seeing this type of content there, then they're going to move on to the ones that will show them. Right. And that is a big, big, big consumer behavior shift that happened during COVID. Right. Because I, I remember, you know, pre COVID, you know, virtual tours are, oh, this it's a nice to have. Right. We'll get to it when we get to it. Right. And then all of a sudden nobody can visit the properties and everybody's scrambling to have virtual tours. Okay. Or really just high quality visual media in general. Right. Because that's really the only way they can lease apartments during COVID. Well, guess what? Post COVID, that consumer behavior never changed back. You know, consumers never said now, oh no, no, we can visit the property now. I'm not, I'm not going to, I'm no longer going to do my research online. I'm not going to do the walkthrough online. I'm just going to go visit. No, no, no. People now expect this prospect. Now expect that when I go to your, to your website, when I go to your listing, that I should be able to see this type of content. Right. That is the expectation that that's the expectation now. And I think that's critical for our industry. Right. Because like I said before, at best, you can probably stop at the floor plan level. Now, if you have unit level content, you're now taking them inside this unit. Again, pre-visit and then as a follow-up, you know, post this. Something else too, that's interesting. And, you know, we've been doing a lot to understand what AI search tools, ChatTBT, Claude, Gemini know about our properties. And we've been using that as a way to basically do AI search preparedness. Like what does AI know about our property at this moment? So we can go back, make sure we have a solid customer experience plan in place, brand experience, SEO plan in place. But something that I've seen surface, we have this prompt that's basically like, tell us what's known about the property. Tell us what people like. Tell us what the hesitations might be. And some of the hesitations that surface are specifically around unit level finishes, that there are reviews about inconsistent unit level finishes, for example. And so that's just, to me, another reason to start embracing this unit level photography and 3D tours. It's because we're now preparing for AI search where those inconsistencies, if they exist, are being surfaced. And that to me is just, I don't know, you know, everyone's so worried. And it's like, yeah, those things are already known about your property if it exists. So how do you combat that? You talk about it. You say, yes, all of our, I mean, there are easy things.