Smart Strategies to Protect Multifamily Revenue When Leasing Slows Down

Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today. I know some people may still be, dialing in, so just wanna encourage you to put your name and where you're calling in from in the chat if you would like to. But just before we get started, as people are still logging in, I wanna go through a couple of housekeeping items. This webinar is being recorded, and it will be shared with everyone, all attendees, later this week. I know there's only one more day left in this week, so potentially Monday, but you will have it. As an attendee, you are in listen only mode. This will help us with any outside noises, any disruptions so that everybody can hear without interruption. If you have questions, please use the q and a box located on your screen. Use the the chat box for conversations, but if you put your questions in the q and a, that's better. Sometimes if there's a lot of conversation, we will lose track of the questions. So that helps us. And it's also a way if you talk in the chat to engage with your peers and exchange great ideas. If you have any technical issues or you need assistance, message the virtual classroom, and my colleague, Stephanie Anderson, who is helping us behind the scenes, will be happy to help you. So without further ado, let's get started by introducing my two wonderful panelists today. First, we have Clover Sharp, who is the VP of people and brand excellence at Zocalo Community Development in Denver, Colorado. She works there at the intersection of people, process, and technology to help turn organizational strategy into meaningful, executable change. With more than twenty years in the Multifamily, her experience stands on-site operations, learning and leadership development, organizational change, tech adoption, brand strategy, and employee and resident experience. She is currently leading learning and development, brand and marketing, and technology enablement. So she's got a lot on her plate. She is passionate about connecting people to the why behind business initiatives and building the processes, tools, and learning experience that help change really stick. She is an active industry educator, speaker, and advocate, and serves on our Grace Hill National Training Advisory Board. She also holds leadership roles at the Apartment Association of Metro Denver and was recognized as AAMD 2025 person of the year. So welcome, Clover. Thank you. Next is Charlotte. She is a Multifamily Housing Professional speaker and trainer with more than twenty five years of industry experience. Her career has spanned on-site and corporate leadership roles, including community manager, regional manager, marketing director, and vice president. This diverse experience gives Charlotte a practical real world perspective that resonates with audiences at every level. She holds the CALP, CAM, and CAS credentials. She also serves as NAAEI faculty and is certified in creative training techniques, bringing energy and expertise to every program. Welcome, Charlotte. Thank you, Krisann. So let's talk today. Oh, sorry. I forgot to advance the screen. So look at these fabulous pictures. I love your headshots, ladies. I am Krisann Gaiko. I am the senior VP of learning and enablement here at Grace Hill, and my passion is helping people in the industry know how to do their jobs better, feeling comfortable in their roles, and growing them to be wonderful future leaders in the multifamily housing industry. So we all know slow season is around us. It happens usually November through February. Leasing slows down. It's a normal thing, but your revenue really doesn't have to. So we're gonna talk about six pillars today that you can walk away with to help you prepare for a strong, slow season. And those six are knowing your market, training your teams, and really understanding what closing means, understanding and handling fee transparency properly and and with compliance, the importance of digital marketing in your leasing process, the resident journey, which is always important, and we're gonna talk about AI searchability. So the core message here is that truly research shows that renewal decisions are really driven more by the team's performance and the resident care rather than price. So when we talk about it's slow, we need concessions, we wanna be able to give you some tech... Techniques and things that you can do, some new ideas for instead of just calling up your supervisor or as a supervisor saying, we just have to add more concessions. I know I'm in a concession heavy market, so I understand this. Okay. So let's talk about the first one, which is market intelligence. Ladies, help us understand how we can best read the market, and how has collecting reliable market data changed over the years? Yeah. Hi, Krisann. Happy to step in here and kinda share a little bit about my organization's process. I don't know about you guys, but I know years ago, we were at the helm of always calling every single week and doing market surveys. We were learning about our competitors, you know, all their leases that they got that week, their their, you know, concessions in the market. But now more and more, we're getting away from those, like, calls every single week, and our leasing team isn't interacting with their competition in that way to learn. For our organization, we've adopted HelloData, and it's been a game changer to learn, you know, real stats, real numbers, what's happening in the marketplace. But for our teams, I've learned our managers have access to that. And whether or not our managers are gatekeeping that information and sharing it with their leasing teams, I just simply don't know. Some of the best managers I know are having those conversations in their one on ones or in their team meetings and sharing comp data. But I'm really gonna, challenge the leasing group here is that if you wanna know what truly exists out there, you know, going back to the basics, you know, asking your manager, can I look at this data? Knowing the square footage is in pricing and not just the concessions in the market, but the amenities. But going back to individual shopping, secret shopping, and going to your competitors, We do this on the onboarding process. So every new hire here starts out with their first week going and shopping those comps because data can tell us one thing, and that's wonderful. But we don't know what that experience is like until they get into the office. You know, how are they treated? What is the tour like? Are they able to identify their needs? So I really encourage if you're looking to close the deal, to understand, you know, your product best and understand why your prospect wants to lease there, knowing your competitors and that real world in person experience is critical. So if you're not shopping your comps on the phone or in person, definitely do so. But if there's data out there that your team is holding, ask your manager about it. Learn every single week the market trends. You were talking about having access to the HelloData information. If you are a HelloData customer, that's a Grace Hill product. It's a great product. I actually just use it myself so I can understand what's going on in the market that I live in. But we do surface that that data on the market on the widget. So if you are a HelloData customer and you're not seeing that, it's a setting. So it's up to when they when they set up the the product, your, who... Your leaders, whoever's setting that up. And if you don't have it, you can reach out and ask. The best practice is definitely to surface that information to everyone, not just the managers. Charlotte, why don't you talk a little bit about your angle on shopping comps and understanding the market? Yes. Absolutely. I I a 100% agree with you, Clover. I think it is so important to shop our competitors. And and more so where I where I really look at it when I'm working with my clients is what the experience looks like. You know, we're so we're so focused on making sure that we get them all the information that they need, but we're not necessarily really reflecting back on the experience and what that looks like. So, you know, as we're going out, we're shopping our competitors. Are we asking ourselves, you know, what did they do to impress me? What did they do that was different? You know, how did the experience fall short? Did the did the leasing person stand up to greet you? You know, did they shake your hand or or give some sort of nice gesture along that line? And how can you use what you learned to better communicate the value of your own community? Because in... With slow markets, knowing your competitor is offering six weeks free is not enough. Your team needs to understand why a prospect might choose that community over yours and how to communicate your own value without automatically reaching for concessions, because we all hate that c word, don't we? And so, you know, doing that on onboarding... And I believe, Clover, you mentioned that you you really encourage it on onboarding around, you know, at the very beginning and then six to twelve months. Obviously, once once your person... Once your employee has been in the market for a while, it makes it a little harder to shop. But, you know, really reflecting back on that resident... Or that prospect experience. For sure. When they're brand new, that's the time to do it. And they'll come back with a lot of really valuable information. We talked a little bit. You were... Clover, you had mentioned people not really doing the call around. I don't hear very many companies that are doing that now, and the primary reason is because they don't want to be... Have any chance that they would be violating antitrust laws. So when you are collecting market data, it's really important to remember that you are using public information. And that's why we've seen such a a surge in HelloData. We've had a tremendous growth growth with that product because it's really providing the industry something that they really need in order to run their business. And so... And it's all public information. It's not based on anything private. Also, we are very soon, we'll be releasing a new course called antitrust and multifamily. You can assign this to your teams to help them understand why we have these laws in place and why it's important that we comply. So if you don't have our training product, drop a note, drop something in in the chat so you can get that course for your teams. Also, if you... If you're not using HelloData, let me tell you, it's gonna save your teams a lot of time, and you're gonna get a lot of really valuable information with that. So drop a note in the chat so you can be prepared. We'll have someone reach out to you. So let's go ahead and move on to the second pillar, which is training. Near and dear to my heart is training. So let's talk about this just a little bit. Talk to me about the importance of training. Why is teaching about the leasing process and especially closing skills so important in a slow market? Well, Krisann, I'm with you. That is the passion where I lie is learning and development, coaching, and, training. And so I think we have a lot of wonderful tools with Grace Hill, but there's nothing like being in person with your team member. And so for me, identifying closing ratio is really critical for every leasing professional. Any seasoned leasing professional probably knows their closing ratio, and I know that every company has their own, you know, quote or stat that they wanna really achieve, but it all varies. You know, for us, it's not just closing the lease, but where are we missing the prospects, and why didn't they lease? Are we going back to the the reasons why, and are we identifying why someone didn't lease, not just get excited about the lease and the close we have? I think during our call here, Charlotte, you had mentioned something about a Facebook post and a thread identifying application links as a closing technique and being counted as a true close. I don't know. Maybe I'm a little old school, but the application link is certainly a great follow-up tool. It's an action item, but it's not closing the lease. The lease is I've applied, and I've moved in. And now I'm enjoying my my experience here and the promise you made when you took me on tour. And so I wanna tell everyone here in the audience, like, I think it's wonderful to send those application links, and it's just another action item we hope that maybe our prospect, does during our follow-up attempts. But measuring, you know, why somebody didn't lease is really critical. And sitting down maybe with your supervisor and identifying, hey. What happened here on this tour, and what is it that I'm missing that I didn't find them the right home? So I think it takes lots of work, self evaluation, but also looking at the closes that we're not capturing. Because right now, we're looking at every lead as just this precious important jewel because we're in that slow season, so every lead counts. So identifying the why behind not leasing is just as critical as why those do lease. Know, love what you said, Clover, about, you know, self evaluation because we don't always do that. Right? It's... We fall into the habit of just showing apartments, and we do our Vanna Whites, and we think we're doing the right job. But, you know, we're we're missing so many opportunities with our prospects when we don't sit down and and spend the time on discovery and really getting to know them and building that relationship. You know? Are are we using trial closes? You know? Can you see yourself sitting on this balcony and enjoying a nice cup of coffee in the morning listening to the birds? You know? How would you set up your furniture? All of those trial closes just help them picture themselves living in that community and enjoying that space. And as they as they become more emotionally connected, the momentum builds. And when we send them an an link to apply, we lose that that momentum, especially on the emotional side of everything. And people buy based on emotion. So if we can capture that and get better at that, we'll make a huge difference in our closing ratios. For sure. You know, I live in an apartment. So I leased an apartment for the first time in probably twenty five years earlier this year, and it was the... I loved loved the place where I live, loved the leasing people, but, you know, they said, oh, you you apply online. And it was late in the afternoon, and so I went ahead and left. And I really, really wanted the apartment, and I didn't want any other apartment, just the one that I looked at. And I was so worried that somebody else was gonna... Like, I was worried somebody was leasing it while I was looking at it. And so I wanted to get right back and get that thing completed, and I had tech trouble. And if I had not wanted that apartment so badly and was so... And and also needed it, I I probably would have given up because the tech trouble was really rough. So that's another reason to say, sit down here. You've got two things. You've got an urgency close right there by saying, I've shown this apartment already three times today. Someone could lease this right out from underneath you. It's not leased right at this moment. Why don't you sit down and do it here? And then that also gives you the opportunity to help them through any sort of tech problems that they're having. So it's it's a it's a great opportunity that we didn't have twenty five years ago. So Yeah. I think... Oh, go ahead. Sorry. You know what? It's okay. I was gonna say, you know, it's... It it changes the experience from sending a link, which is very transactional, to let me sit down and help you. You know, that that shows the hospitality side. And I think that, again, it goes back to creating that experience because I would rather have... I would rather lease from somebody who spends the time and the commitment to my experience. I would rather lease from them than somebody who says, here you go. Here's the link. Do it on your own. So Yeah. I I think technology is a wonderful tool. Hopefully, it makes it a streamlined, simple process, but technology can also be clunky. It can be... Create distrust with our prospects. And in today's world, when I think about all the AI that's happening, the bot interaction, there's a lot of information on our websites, and cons... Consumers are just having a hard time telling what's real and what's not real. So spending that time calling or inviting them in person, sitting with them even at a computer is really critical. I thought this was really interesting. I a Deloitte study not long ago, and the study, I'm gonna quote here, was called Connected Consumer Survey, earning trust as gen... Gen AI takes hold. And so what I mean by that is just two years ago, they surveyed, you know, people who use the Internet and just different shopping experiences. And they learned that 70% of what consumers see, they believe in online. However, a year ago, another survey was conducted, and they asked again, what does consumer trust what they see online? And only 30% of us believe what we see online. So I think of that as going back to our prospect experience. Like, our websites can really be showy and wonderful, and marketing can be, like, splashy, But they often wanna come inside and know, is this real? Can I see that apartment? Can I touch it? I don't really know what I see online is trustworthy. So getting a phone call and, going on tours are more critical than ever, that human connection and building trust. I So just wanna put it out there that it's wonderful that we have all this technology and tools, but consumers are trusting less and less what they see online. So your relationship building and your in person connection to that prospect is more critical than ever. Absolutely. That's a big drop too. And I and I love how... Is that a real thing? Is it... Is the next generation gonna be Gen AI? That's interesting. I just caught that for the first time here on the webinar, but interesting. Charlotte, you wanna talk about evaluating readiness and and value? Yeah. Absolutely. And and, please, when when you say readiness, Krisann, team me up here. Yeah. Like, the judge, you know, mystery shops in person digital experience. Absolutely. All the all the things. Like, how how are you looking through that readiness in your team? Yes. And Chloe touched on it. You know, what it... What does the experience look like? And when we... When we're talking about experience, you know, we wanna look at the entire sales funnel from each touch point. And as you add in AI and as you add in bots, and as you add in automated messages, it can get overwhelming for a prospect. And not only overwhelming, but it be... It can become clunky. If those things are not seamless, all of a sudden, going back to the trust, the... You lose the trust of the consumer When you're getting different messages from different places. Right? If something's coming in to your email about a special and then your bot's telling you something else. So it's so important that not only do we shop our our teams on-site, but that we shop the actual experience that we're creating for our prospects. And and speaking of of shopping our on-site teams, you know, that is really meant to be, and I I wanna say this to everyone on this webinar. Shops are not meant to be a we caught you doing something wrong. They are meant to be a training opportunity. We want to see how you're performing and how we can enhance your performance to make it that much better. So making sure that we really understand the entire life cycle of that prospect and every touch point becomes very important. Absolutely. And that is absolutely the truth. I've been in training roles for years, and it was never my intention for me... Mystery shops to be punitive. They are helpful. You have to think of mystery shops kind of like professional teams watching game film. I mean, that's just what you do. So through Grace Hill, you can have the ability to assign meaningful training through mystery shopping assessment as well as targeted upscale microlearning courses. So we've got a lot of micro learning out there now that's super targeted. So if your if your greeting was off, you can watch a one to two minute video to upscale that. So, also, Realync Live Video Intelligence gives insights that reduce vacancy loss by between five... Sorry, five to eleven days. So I did the math on that. And even on very low end, if you were using a nationwide average of $1,500 for a one bedroom, which that's super low for some areas, that's still an average of $400 per unit. So doing... Using those technologies will really help during that slow period because you could do... Reduce by your vacancy loss between five to eleven days on every single turn that you have, that would be just a huge cost savings and just such a benefit to your bottom line. So, but now while we're on the topic of leasing, closing, training, let's talk about the transparency. So if you have been attending conferences, you know, watching legislative and regulatory environment, you will know that the transparency is a huge topic of discussion right now. So as of today, up to 19 states have enacted laws related to the disclosure and or prohibition of certain fees. I actually have one that I'm monitoring because there's supposed to be a vote on some more housing legislation in the city of Chicago. I think they voted yesterday, and I haven't even had time to look that up. So it's just everywhere you look. So how can we help our on-site teams navigate this? Well, this is an area that I've completely nerded out on. This came fast and furious for us here in Colorado. Our law, we were told mid twenty twenty five that this fee transparency would take place, and we really had to get to work on what that looked like, what what that meant. The law itself was a little obtuse. We felt that we were offering, you know, clear pricing. You know? If you went on tour with us, there was a spreadsheet, and it said, here's your app fees, admin fees, deposits, but it's broader than that. And so we, you know, had a quick six months to get to work, and our laws went into, in fact, January 1. And when we started mapping out all pricing connections with our prospects, we saw that there were over 13 points in the journey that prospects interacted with our pricing one way or the other. And we've learned that it doesn't matter if that, you know, one area and one connection isn't feeding properly. If the fee is wrong, even though it's right in 12 other locations, we've then lost trust. And we've said... You know, the customer's kind of been like, something's fishy. Something's going off. They're not thinking, oh, their technology didn't sync that day or something didn't apply. So it's really critical for here that we've created something very mainstream that one one fee is changed or updated, it triggers, you know, these 13 spots. Everything from the touring self quotes to quotes to now I'm applying to now I'm completing my lease agreement. Now I'm signing my lease agreement. And this doesn't even include our advertising, our websites to ILSs. So, really, when you look and examine your prices, I encourage everyone if this isn't in place for you right now, looking at the entire journey through the prospect lens. And you don't have to have a law to make this, like, critical. Customers are expecting clarity more than ever, and so it's good customer service just to be clear about all of this. But it's really important that your teams are are in sync, that we're not accidentally, you know, sharing one fee. And then when they get their lease agreement, it shows up some... Something completely different. And so, it's also... We've noticed we're, what, ten months into the year. This has evolved two different phases here at Colorado. So phase one was just showing our app fees and admin fees, what it is to apply. Then we started learning the customer really wanted to see, well, now that I live here, what else are my fees for the lease agreement? Now they're asking other questions that there are beyond the move in cost. There's optional fees, you know, the pet fee, the storage, the parking. But now we have contingency fees that people wanna know upfront before they make that business choice. They wanna know what it costs to break their lease. They wanna know what it costs to transfer. They wanna know what my late fees are. You know? And so we are constantly shifting based on what the customer wants, not just relying on the law telling us what to do. So it's just good customer service. It also helps us close at the end of the day. The more clear we are, we build that trust, and then there's no surprises when they move in and become a resident with us. So, Clover, how how did you train your leasing people when it came to when it came to the new fee transparency laws? Yeah. This is a great question. You know, we have Grace Hill, and I was able to conduct many webinars for our teams. We looked at their websites first, and I helped them use the tools their prospect were were using. And so we used the website. We used the guest card experience, the the self quoting, and the quoting from our CRMs. We showed them behind the scenes what it looked like from the tech stack so that they could understand the levels and layers and the whys. But really using the website helped our teams understand how a prospect sees it, and then we looked at their advertising sources, the apartments.com, the Zillows, so that they actually, can monitor that as well, and they have dashboard access. So we started giving them more access, more controllability, more being in the driver in the seat here. And so there were lots of webinars, and then we just talk about it, we check-in. So every quarter, we have a call, and we ask them what the prospect is saying and where they're confused. We've been able to embed, calculators on our websites to make it really easy for the consumer to to self quote and understand all of the pricing. But we also have trained our teams to train the prospect because there's sometimes... If you don't click that I have a parking spot I need or a pet, it's not gonna add up all of the fees or total and price. And so there's some, trainability of the teams to train those prospect as well. And it gives, helps them build that relationship, but we have a lot of, touch points, and we check-in quite a bit together. Makes sense. When when we're talking about fees too, I think it's important as leaders to first, when you are assigning fees, to make sure that you feel good about those fees. So if there's a fee that you can't really defend, you should probably take a second look at that. And then once you do feel good about your fees, it's extremely important for you to have written down and trained your on-site teams to explain what those fees are. So during my hunt for an apartment, what was it, ten months ago, one of the really common fees that is out there now is because of resident services fee. That can be anywhere from 100 to $150 a month. Well, that's a vague... I mean, I understand that they wrap in a lot of things, and it's okay to call it a resident services fee, but your leasing teams need to be able to explain what's that... What is that for? And I asked, and it made sense to me. It was... You know, involved my Internet, trash. Well, of course, I love having someone come come pick my trash up. I'm happy to pay that fee. I'm not arguing against having the fee. I just want to as a consumer. I wanna know what I'm paying for. So that... That's what makes it important. Charlotte, what's going on in Michigan? We have a... Probably about six laws currently that are... And they're not laws. I'm sorry. We have bills introduced about six or seven on the transparency. So we know it's coming. I... We have not really started conversations yet. I mean, there's conversations within companies and how they're going to handle it a little more. But as far as legislatively, we're keeping an eye on it and doing our best to fight what we need to fight. But, you know, I think to your point, both of your points, it it does help build that trust with the consumer, and it it goes back to having that right relationship with your consumer from the beginning. So, you know, I I do think that it it is important, and it does help our prospects just feel more educated and more convinced that they're making the right decision. Absolutely. So this is all great information. I'd like to go ahead and switch to another topic now. We're gonna talk a little bit about digital marketing and helping understand how our teams can optimize their advertising to combat the slow season. So during our prep, we talked about the importance of timing and advertising. So you can't just turn on an ad spend and expect to have a lease in a couple of days. Clover, do you wanna talk a little bit about this? You talked about how you do your ad campaigns. Yeah. You know, I love talking about marketing and branding, and what's really important is that a lot of us have different resources at our companies. Some have big marketing teams that are doing things behind the scenes, and our on-site teams just don't know what's happening. They know that there's ads out there, but maybe they've never seen them. So I really encourage you if you guys aren't, drafting or crafting these digital, you know, designs yourself, getting involved and asking marketing what your advertising looks like goes a long way. For my team, you know, creating creatives is really, ideal. But a lot of us are looking at today, and we're reactionary. We're going, ugh. My occupancy is 92%, but I need 95 marketing. I need leads. I need leads. But we're not talking about today's leads. We're actually thinking about January and December right now. Our advertising funnel, you know, targeting people to move in in October happened ninety days ago. So I really wanna encourage the teams here that marketing doesn't work just overnight where you toss another thousand dollars at a campaign, and then tomorrow, I get two more leases, but really thinking strategically. And today, I'm not looking at my occupancy. I'm looking at my occupancy trends, you know, for December and January, and my marketing campaigns are targeted for closing the loop there and creating move ins that are happening, you know, in the future. So for our digital campaigns, they typically convert between the sixty day mark and the ninety day mark. And most people interact with our digital campaigns three, four, and upwards of nine times before that digital campaign inspires them to say, let me go to the website. Let me take a tour. Let me now apply online. So really thinking strategically about your occupancy isn't today's number. It's sixty and ninety days in advance. Yeah. Absolutely. And, you know, the cost of generating that traffic. Right? We don't necessarily take that into consideration when we're doing our budgets and knowing that our slow season is gonna hit, and are we increasing our spend at the appropriate times. So, you know, when leasing traffic slows, we naturally start asking whether we need to spend more money on advertising, and sometimes we do. But before we increase our marketing budget, I think we have to ask a different question. What are we doing with the leads that we're already paying for? Right? You know, though that's money that's already been invested. So because generating more leads doesn't solve the conversion problem. Right. If we're spending money to bring prospects to our website, but they're not receiving timely follow-up, and not only timely follow-up, but personalized follow-up, we may be losing revenue before they even step through our door. Yeah. So, you know, I I think that that's so important to look at. And one other thing I might add, personalization matters, if you didn't catch that when I emphasize that personalization. Yeah. If a prospect tells us that they're relocating with two dogs, then we need to be talking about that. Right? Tell me your pet's names. What is bringing you to the area? What is making you relocate? And and really taking the time to invest in that relationship because that... I mean, that relationship ultimately ends up being a 50,000, $60,000 price tag for a year. Your average resident stays two and a half years. You're you're talking a lot of money. So it it is. It's important. And and taking the time to personalize and invest in that is also important. Yeah. Agreed on that. You know, you you kinda gave me a a great segue to personalization, which what better way to personalize a follow-up, or even a resident interaction but with video. And you can do that with Realync, and it will make a difference. I will tell you during my apartment search, I did not have anyone communicating with me with video. And and I know for me, it would have made a difference because it feels personable and warm. And, you know, that being said, before you get to that point, you've spent a lot of advertising dollars. And even before the the the new prospect comes your way and hits your site and really inquires, you've gotta think about your reputation and your your reviews because I look at reviews for everything. Restaurants, hotels, apartments, you name And so responding to every review is really important. So you can respond to those reviews, bring in your leads, and and respond to them and follow-up with them with video using Realync and Grace Hill's reputation management. So, so let's talk... And we're talking about an authentic human experience. Let's dive into, talking about the resident experience and just how important this is. Well, I'd like to say there's a lot of different ways we can measure the resident experience. Surveys is certainly critical for us at our organization. We can look at ratings and reviews as well. I think what's really critical is that we're not just looking at the score of the survey. We all want a four star or five star or looking at our surveys, we have a certain benchmark that we wanna make. But are we reading the comments for every single one? Our residents took the time to voice their, you know, feedback and concerns or excitement and enthusiasm. Did we take that into account? Did we discuss it as a team? Did we talk about it so that we can elevate that experience more and more? And then address the things that maybe cause friction for the move in or the resident living there. But for us, we actually do tie back our survey scores to a bonus potential for our on-site teams, and it's not just for our leasing teams who go on tour and move people in. Our maintenance teams are highly involved in the resident experience. They look at these surveys too, and they get bonus on their experience, you know, the make ready and the turn and the responsiveness on, work orders and things like that. It's the entire journey. So we do bonus our teams to keep the highest level of service, and and understand the the resident journey. But I also wanna talk about... We talk a lot about getting the lease, getting the lease, hoping for a new move in. But are we thinking about the residents that live there that we're missing out that when I move somebody in, I'm already thinking retention and renewal prospects. And will they stay? It's not just simply getting the lease, but I'm hoping that our retention efforts matter. And so when I look at those comments, that goes a long way to make sure that we deliver on the promise during the sales tour so that they experience what we promised living there at our community. So I think going above and beyond and digging into the feedback is just as critical instead of just simply getting your top scores and and think that you guys are, you know, giving a great experience but knowing you are. That's a great segue for me again to say no longer... If if you use Grace Hill resident surveys powered by Kingsley Index, you do not have to... Because we have Intelligence Plus. Right? You do not have to read the comments and dig for them anymore. Intelligence Plus is... Allows you to... It just surfaces the comments. It will bring them forward to you, read it up for you, serve it up in insight cards with industry preconfigured preconfigured action plans. So we actually went and pulled industry subject matter experts to say, what should I do when this surfaces as a problem with residents? These are based on business rules that have been written into the system, so there's no better way to stay on top of resident sentiment than with resident surveys and Intelligence Plus. So I wanna talk a little bit about centralization. That's been big, really kinda started in the pandemic because we had to, but what we learned is there's some... There were some good business practices there. I wanna talk about how centralization impacts the resident experience and whether or not you ladies think it helps it or hurts it. So I guess I will go first on this one. I have mixed feelings when it comes to centralization. You know? I'm... I... My biggest passion is the the prospect and resident experience. And I think that with that, you you do need to have that personal relationship. You know? It does go very far. It it... People renew based on the maintenance tech who takes care of their home or the leasing person who answers the phone when they have a service request. So I I have mixed feelings about centralization. I understand the importance of it and how it can help support our team. And where I do support it is when we're taking those items off off our team members' responsibility and allowing them more time to focus on their prospect and the resident experience. So I am a 100% for it when that is our change of focus and when we can continue to keep the relationships as much as possible on-site. Yeah. I can't agree more. We're we're not actively on centralization from a self guided tour at our organization. We certainly have our bot experience. People can get information around the clock, but it's really critical that our teams are reading, you know, those comments so they can customize it when they do reach back out to that prospect and they know what they're looking for. And they're not saying, oh, wait. You know, starting over from scratch as if they've never interacted with us. I think that's really critical. People often are like, wait. I already talked to somebody, and our teams are like, I don't know who you talked to. That must have been the AI agent. But really being familiar with the conversations they're having so that we can get more of that humanized experience. But I know that for you, Charlotte, you talk a lot about hospitality, and that's how we dial in is customizing it. We use these tools to leverage our experience for our prospect, but not, you know, just let them do the job for us. Right. Absolutely. Yeah. You know, I'm kinda with y'all. I I think taking... I think centralization is good when you take away the the responsibilities from the on-site teams that are not focused on people. So rent collection, reporting, you know, all of that. I think that is a is a wise wise move. I think it gives the people on-site more time to focus on the relationship piece of it. But, yeah, you're right. And the human touch can be impacted when you're leveraging some kind of AI, which most companies now have at least some form of AI in their operations. So I wanna move on to our next topic is how does AI fit across all of this? When we were in our prep, these two wonderful ladies surfaced some fascinating information that I'm not not ever being a marketer in my life was just astounded by. So tell me a little bit about our our discussion a couple of weeks ago. Yeah. When I think about it, AI isn't just maybe the AI agent that we're offering at our properties, and they're having a conversation with the prospect. It comes from the searchability. You know, for so long, we've spent so many years thinking about how people search for us, spending a lot of money on our SEO campaigns, the right searched words so that we bubble up to the top of Google. And while SEO is still very important for searching for our communities, we've learned that there's a whole other AI model when you think about the ChatGPT's or Clouds of the world, how they're pulling and sourcing information so that you become part of the conversation when a prospect is asking conversational questions, not googling, I just want an apartment, two bedroom that allows dogs. But now they're having real conversations saying, you know me, chat GPT. You know I'm a foodie. You know that I like to bike. You know that I have my dog, it means the world to me. Find me a place that has a sense of community that I desire based on my personality. And you wanna know if you're gonna be searchable there because ChatGPT's and the other AI's are a bit biased. We have learned that we're not using just SEO, but we're having to leverage our website. And on the back end, design it in a way that is communicating to LLMs or large language models. And what that means is the large language models are communicating with the AI searchability. No longer is it the flashy photos and just some keywords on our on our website or our marketing campaigns. It now wants to know what it's like to live there. And it's relying a lot on reviews as well because it wants to know people's sentiment, not what I put out about my community in a marketing way, but they wanna know real humans' experience at your community. If your reviews aren't a focus right now, which we always know that people do look at our reviews, but now it's not people just looking at our reviews. It's literally those reviews talking to the large language models for AI to make you searchable. So really spending a lot of time on understanding now AEO and GEO. People haven't landed on the right term, but that just means AI searchability. So we're spending money on SEO and AEO, GEO, and doing a lot of cleanup work, on the website design on the back end so it communicates with with the, LLMs out there. So I know that something marketing usually plays a big part. So if you and your team wanna know more, reach out to your marketing departments and your people so you can learn on the back end and start searching for yourself using the ChatGPT's of the world and see if you're coming up. And it's really fascinating. And in our digital marketing, analysis, we can start to now tie back how people find us. It's not just through apartments.com or Zillow. We're literally seeing chat cheap tea show up, and we get all really excited that we know our prospects are using that tool to find us. And you bring up a really good point, Clover. It's... The way that people search in AI is much different because it's not just show me the two bedroom, two baths in, you know, Oakland, California. It's it's much more, as you said, based on the user on the other side of the screen. It's based on the person who's doing the search and what their lifestyle looks at... Like and and all of that. So how are we changing our websites, or are we changing our websites to to include that same feeling and that same, I'll say nostalgia because I can't think of a better word, that our our prospects are looking for to align with what AI is producing. That's a great question. I know it can feel really daunting. Like, what is this new world? How do we become searchable through AEO and GEO? One of the fastest ways a community can feel assured that information is getting out there is actually creating an f and q page, facts and questions page. And so my team is actually designing those right now. We're launching them in January. And those FNQ pages, while we think that they're great for the prospect to look at, they're there to communicate with the large language models and the AI searchability. But it can be helpful from a consumer to read the FNQs. But if it's something you don't have on your website right now, you know, getting, in touch with your marketing team and and and inquiring how you can get an FNQ page designed on your website will be one of the better ways that you know you'll be highly searched through AEO and GEO. Wow. Good stuff. It's crazy how one piece of technology can just change our whole world. Fascinating to me. It's making my brain hurt a little bit over on some of that. A little bit. So I wanna make sure that we have plenty of time for q and a. So we'll start to wrap this thing up. I just kinda wanna recap what we've talked about, you know, the pillars. So market intelligence, knowing your market, using a publicly sourced data like HelloData to pull that in, having a great training program put in place that includes elearning, in person learning, mystery shopping, evaluation of the teams, and knowing what your fees are, feeling good about them, being able to explain them, and staying in compliance with any state and local laws. Digital marketing, plan, plan, plan, prep ahead, don't wait till the last minute. The resident journey is always so important to all of us and just making sure that the resident journey does start really actually the first time they click on your website or inquire about your property. And then AI searchability, which will I'm sure continue to evolve. The good news is Grace Hill and PerformanceHQ is the connected platform that will tie it all together for you, will make things easier for you. You will be able to know what matters, act on it, and then see what changed. So if you have not checked it out, please drop us a note. We'll have someone reach out to you. Do not leave yet. I wanna give a quick commercial about this webinar that we have coming up on October 21. For years, the most valuable people on your team were the ones who knew where the answers lived, which report, which system, which spreadsheet, and that's all training as... Changing as we talked. AI connects property data across platforms. Answers are getting easier to reach. The harder part is knowing what to ask and trusting the data behind the answer. We hear this all the time. This will be held by our very own Julia Crawford, the SVP of product manage along with Arash Rashidi. He is the principal product manager, a guest Eddie Mamdal, head of data and analytics at Harbor Group so that you can learn what connected data means for real estate operators and how Harbor Group is putting it to work and what your organization needs in place for 2027. Scan that QR code today to register because it's gonna be a great, great, webinar. So let's open up for Q and A now. I think Stephanie was monitoring that for us. Let's see. I'm going straight to it. Okay. Here's one from Darren. Thank you, Darren, for your question. Can we hear more about maximizing ILS presence? What is the modern consumer relying on most in an Internet search? Did we cover that when we're talking about Maybe not in Yeah. Other than just, like, you know, your keywords. Understanding your demographic is really critical. If you're advertising, you know, to a totally different group that never moves in your community, then we're way off base. Right? So understanding your resident, personality and behaviors when you do your marketing is really critical for my teams anyway. But it it... You know, on the back end, we have learned that catering to location matters, not just we have a two bedroom, two bath, dog friendly or pet friendly, but rather the location, transportation, park systems, restaurants. People don't look at just the community any longer. They're looking at the neighborhood and the personality of the neighborhood. So it's infusing the personality of your neighborhood in your community website rather than just pointing out all of your amenities and just features. Now you're telling a story about where your community exists and, the conveniences they have in the surrounding neighborhood. Excellent. Thank you. And we just gotta get a a question that says, is HelloData and Grace Hill the same product? So Grace Grace Hill is the company, and HelloData is the product that lives inside of PerformanceHQ that pulls in that publicly available market data, and then Intelligence Plus helps us to serve that up to you in a very meaningful way. It is... I cannot stress how great this product is. If I were ever to go back to the other side, which I was on for a while, I don't think I could run my property without this technology. So thank you for that question. Here's another one. How do we balance making marketing that appeals to AI searches with the increasing distrust in online material that you mentioned the average consumer is expecting as a result of artificially manipulated content? Oh. That's good good one. I can speak from personal experience here that relying on AI to design your content can be a misstep. And the reason is is that in our digital marketing experience, we can serve up a photo of our community. It could be the pool area or the fitness center, And some of our digital partners will use AI imagery to splash it up or make it look a little fancier, which is all, like, consumers can tell the difference between an AI image versus your real photograph image. And before long, we didn't realize our digital partners were using AI to alter our images. So having control on your images, is really critical so you know that the truth is out there. And what they see online on your website and what they see on your digital, you know, marketing campaigns when you look on your cell phone matches. In one funny scenario, but also kinda critical and and hurt our campaign was we took over a new property, had this beautiful pool, and it had this view of kind of the pool and then the city in the background. Well, we're in Denver, Colorado. We have a downtown skyline, and we have the mountains. And all of a sudden, I pull up, you know, an advertising that I see on my cell phone through, you know, my Instagram page, and I see our pool. And in the background, it looks like we're in Miami. It's got palm trees. It's got the beach in the background. And I went, oh my gosh. So consumers right away are going, what am I looking at? Did I did I look at the wrong state or city? And so, wow, what damage that is on our marketing campaigns that we relied on AI so much that we didn't even proof our our our digital campaigns. And so maybe where I go with that is consumers can tell the difference between fake and real. So, you know, making sure that your images match your website is really critical and not getting lazy and letting these AI tools just take over. Wow. That's interesting. What about... Here's another one that came in, and we did... We talked about reviews and posts, but... And I get I get pulled to Reddit a lot now with... That I didn't used to for all kinds of things. And I think this is this whole AI factor in it. Right? This question says any insight or ideas on how to control or monitor Reddit posts. Now monitoring is, you know, your ability to respond to reviews. And so I think that's really important, and Grace Hill can help you with that because we do have a product. But talk a little bit more about how you respond and how you kinda control that. Charlotte, I don't know if if if you're having experience with this at this moment, but for our teams monitoring every review... And reviews just aren't on Yelp anymore. They're massively on Google, but they're on apartments.com, believe it or not. So our ILS providers are now pushing their own, review pages, to encourage engagement so that people can learn the consumer experience. Where I go with the Reddit, I think that's really critical because, one, we can't control it, and we don't wanna control it. Right? That's that's someone's personal experience. What we can control is review their feedback and tighten up what they're dissatisfied with. If, you know, they feel that our promptness isn't there or our customer service is lacking. Well, we have control over that. We don't have control in their comments. But I'll say that, you know, Reddit is also another, you know, critical, feeding model to the LLMs because that's a true experience. And so they're going off truth, not marketing words that I'm putting on my website, that the consumer is expressing their their one on one experience with us. So the the the the controllables are how we show up every day, the level of service we provide, the level of detail our properties are cared for, our responsiveness, our bright smiley personalities and smiles go a long way. And, you know, and so that's maybe where I can go with what we can control or not. But monitoring is really critical, and we have different tools that can pull that. I use a tool now that isn't connected to Reddit right now, and we're working with them to say, this is really important for us to be connected because we're now going to Reddit every day searching all of our properties manually. So if you could find a product out there that can sync it, really critical. But there's not a way to respond to my knowledge on Reddit. It's just more monitoring and understanding the sentiment and the experience our residents are having. I don't I don't think you need the public response as much as you it... It's still important to reach out if there's grievances and have those conversations. And, hopefully, you know, we can encourage them to update their Reddit posts and and share how it was resolved. You know? But I... It's it's it's real. It's out there, and it's just one more thing we get to deal with. Yeah. I love that that you say we monitor, but we don't worry about or can try to control what people are posting. What we are focusing on is the overall experience that we're delivering and how can we position ourselves and our team to do that in the most effective way possible because then the reviews will largely improve. And you can expect in every business to have problems. The... People are are going to have problems. So if they see you responding, on those reviews that you're attending to them and you're promptly responding and and helping people, and then they see people coming back in and saying they took care of this. You know, that's really important too because we all know that problems will happen in in any business situation. Situation. So Bring up a good point, Krisann, is that the responsiveness isn't as critical as the authenticity with the response. For our teams, you know, a lot of tools we have that monitor our reviews can do auto responses, and they can be great to a certain degree, but we never want them to auto respond on a negative experience. We truly wanna take that in house, understand what truly happened, and create an authentic response and take ownership. Consumers want us to know, hey. We're human. We make mistakes sometimes, but what are we doing about it? And that builds trust and then why they wanna live at our communities. Not that we're perfect every day, and it's so streamlined, but how we take responsibility and take ownership. But they can tell the difference between a bot auto response and a true human behind the scenes. So that's been our winning success that our teams and our managers are responding to this. This isn't a corporate office. We guide. We coach. We we help craft, but it's our managers at the helm that are saying, hey. I'm taking ownership of this, and this response is is here. And then we reach out to them individually or encourage them to reach out to us as well. But that is mattering more. People can tell the difference between an auto response and a and and a human response. It's it's all about personalization. You know, you've gotta make it personal. Alright. Well, we're two minutes away from ending, and I do see that people are dropping. They've gotta get back to their busy offices. Don't forget to link in with us, and don't forget to come to the next webinar. Thank you for joining us today. Hope everybody has a great day and a wonderful weekend. Thank you. Thank you, guys. Have a great day. Bye.