Will AI Recommend Your Apartment Community?

Sara GrahamWe've been optimizing to be found. And now I think we're optimizing to be understood and ultimately recommended. There are a lot of moving pieces that can underpin what looks like underperformance. The answer is not always to increase spend.

Jonas BordoThat was Sara Graham, and I'm Jonas Bordo, host of NetEffective. Thanks so much for joining us again this week. I'm incredibly excited to have Sara on the show. She and I have known each other for a lot of years. Sara, I don't know if you know, but back when I was just getting started in the industry, you were incredibly generous with your time and your knowledge. And I've always been grateful to you for that because you know so much about how this industry works, particularly the marketing side of it. I'm just thrilled to have this conversation. Sara, why don't you introduce yourself to our audience?

Sara GrahamYeah, absolutely. I am very excited for this conversation as well. And you're right, we go back a long way. Multifamily is one of those industries that I feel like people cross paths multiple times. And that's incredibly common. It's one of the things I love most about multifamily. But I'm Sara Graham. I am the founder and CEO of a boutique consultancy called Six Dots. And I am a fractional chief marketing officer for hire, essentially. So I work on the operator side, which is where I'd spent many, many years leading marketing and customer experience, but I also consult on the supplier side of our business, working with companies as early as emerging from stealth, all the way to groups that have been in the business for 20 plus years and everything in between. So it's been a great way to continue doing work that I love, but in a different way than I was doing it for decades prior. And so I'm incredibly excited to be continuing to be part of the industry and to get to be sitting at really the intersection of marketing technology and operations and the forefront of what's next.

Jonas BordoYeah. Well, that's fantastic. Congratulations to you on building this next chapter. Thank you. Really excited. And I know you've had a ton of success with it. So that's wonderful. I would love to jump in and just start talking about, you know, how the marketing function has been transformed by AI. You know, I've talked to a bunch of marketers, but you're going to be much closer to it than I am. Where should we start? How has it changed as a result of the advent of all the AI tools that we're all now using?

Sara GrahamYeah, I think one of the biggest pieces of all of this, Jonas, is AI has changed how we spend as multifamily marketers and how we think about search. And so I think about that conversation largely in those two buckets, although there were a million different directions that we could go with that. But I think with spend, a big piece of this is multifamily marketers were able to lean on AI a whole lot more than ever before and really think about how and where should we be spending more? AI helps us make smarter decisions. It helps us make those decisions more quickly. And I think from a dynamic spend standpoint, there's a huge opportunity there for us to really level up. We've relied heavily on a lot of really solid reporting platforms for a long time. You know, when I was in house, that was the sort of how do you think about cost for lead and cost for lease? Those were always my goal metrics. But I think AI is helping us do a lot more dynamic shifts in how we set up campaigns, how we optimize those campaigns, how we, you know, in some cases test different campaigns. So that's a really interesting opportunity. The other piece of this, I think, is, and it's directly tied to how we think about spend is renter preferences and renter search preferences. That's obviously changed a lot too. And I think there's so much opportunity. The ILSs clearly are changing up how they are architected to allow for some of this. But I think there's a lot of multifamily marketers outside of their partnerships with ILSs are really thinking about this differently too. And I think there's this shift from we've been optimizing to be found. And now I think we're optimizing to be understood and ultimately recommended. And search, obviously, again, the spend piece is directly connected with the search piece, but there's a huge piece outside of spend too, from an organic standpoint, and how we actually are building out property websites or portfolio or corporate level websites, depending on who we're talking about, that really need to be able to answer questions and a lot more questions a lot more quickly and sooner in the renter journey. And so I think that's where in my mind a lot of my operator clients are certainly thinking about that. But I I know industry peers, it's a hot topic. Um, when we think about optimizing for those things. So again, you're not just optimizing for, you know, to be found, but really to be recommended. And those are two very different things.

Jonas BordoThose are very, very different things. Uh, to be part of the conversation in that way is very different than just to be a destination that you're never talked about again.

Sara GrahamExactly. And providing resources for renters as they are thinking about where to move next. And that gets down to some really granular assets in some cases. But a lot of the building blocks and things that multifamily marketers have been focused on for years, the online reputation, all of the different pieces around that, building blocks of SEO, those things still are incredibly important. But we're again sort of thinking differently about why and how those matter in order to be served up when someone goes to Chat GPT or Gemini or Claude or whatever their LLM of choice is.

Jonas BordoYeah.

Sara GrahamThey're searching for, you know, no one's searching just apartments in Boston anymore. You know, this whole very long tail search, and it's a personalized results that they're looking for when it comes back.

Jonas BordoYeah. No, that's a very, very big change for the marketers in the in the industry. So I'm curious, a lot of different directions we can go in from that. It covered a lot of ground with that answer. Where I want to take it is let's think about the roles. You know, how has AI changed the role of whatever title, CMO, VP of marketing, you know, the person who's heading it up? What about, you know, somebody who's responsible for getting leads? You know, what about some of the other key roles? You know, how has AI changed what those folks are doing on a day-to-day basis at the role level?

Sara GrahamYeah, it's a great question. And I think when I was in house, there was a lot of pressure to always do more with less and to try and run as lean as we could so that we could really put our energy and attention into focusing on driving traffic to the properties, but not be overly stuffed. Overhead is a something all companies think about in all departments at every level. Um that's not new news for marketers, certainly. But I think with AI, we actually do have the ability to almost clone ourselves or to be able to automate some of the things that used to take a lot of time and we're heavy lifts. And so when I think about um what marketing teams look like, you can do a whole lot from an analysis standpoint that people used to have to stare at Excel spreadsheets for hours, if not days, trying to pick up patterns and AI makes that a lot easier for us now. And I think we're able to see trends faster. And so when you think about what the marketing department of today and maybe even tomorrow looks like, I think there's a lot of uh potential for AI-empowered teams where again, some of that data analysis or some of the more manual work can be done a lot more quickly and allow for people to, I think, spend more time on the strategic and creative aspects of marketing and showing that the foundation, the data is solid. And that's not to say that you can rely 100% on everything that AI tells you, of course, but it can do a lot of the heavy lifting for you and get you 85% of the way there, then that frees up some of your team's time to spend more time on the strategic parts of marketing or the human piece of marketing and really make sure that we are positioning ourselves and our teams and our leasing teams for success. I think there's a lot of focus on tech and tech optimization on the lease side of that equation. And I think that's an incredible leap forward from where we were even just two years ago or five years ago. But it's also for me highlighted opportunities where sometimes we let the take tech take over and we're relying too much on automation workflows, and there's a a chance to dial things back and really make sure that our humans are where the humans need to be. And I think that um there have been some interesting conversations on social. Lisa Trezine did a whole kind of I don't want to call it an expose, but uh that's just where she really um evaluated a lot of AI leasing responses, a whole bunch of mystery shops, and I don't remember the exact numbers, but she said she shopped a dozen properties-ish, and that most of those came back with the exact same mirror responses. And so it was an opportunity for us to improve. And I think, you know, that's more on the leasing side, the marketing side, but I think marketers can help reinforce or strengthen the tools that our leasing teams have, and that's a really critical piece.

Jonas BordoYeah. That series that Lisa did was unbelievably striking. I feel like it blew a huge problem wide open. One of the challenges that we've been addressing on a recurring basis with other guests as well is how review of work has changed and how challenging that can be. Yes. You know, it's one thing when you've directly created the work and been involved in its creation, you do a very different type of review than if you haven't. And it just seemingly, you know, is created out of whole cloth from nowhere, and then all of a sudden it exists, and it's easy just to assume it's good, but that's often not the case.

Sara GrahamYeah, agreed. And I would say too, just back to your question about what does the marketing team look like. I think one thing that I have been seeing a lot of is a lot of teams are outsourcing copywriting at some level, website copy, social ad copy, et cetera, to AI. And I think that's a great thing where we get gray or where again, there's an opportunity to strengthen, is when everything starts to sound the same, we lose something in translation. And so I think there's again another opportunity for the human to be back in the loop on that and outsource the heavy lifting by all means. Um, it helps us do more faster. But if your copy, if you could swap your property's name out and swap in your competitor across the street, sounds like it would work in either case. You know, you've got some more work to do. So I think there's a baseline. Um, that writer's block is real. Uh, and I think we all struggle with it from time to time, but there has to be that strategic and human piece to it where we really make sure that we are optimizing for our property, our company, our portfolio, whatever it is that we're you know, really focused on at that moment in time and not outsource entirely. So I think that's another piece that I've seen come up in conversations with clients and with other folks in the industry that there's that over-reliance on AI can be when you're moving really fast, it can be challenging to say, oh, yes, that's good. And that it is good. The copy is good, but if it's not like everybody else's, then it's not right. Um, and so I think making sure that we're not losing sight of that is incredibly important.

Jonas BordoYeah, it's so quick to build generic copy. One of the things that I've been really excited about that we've seen on the marketplace, the Dwellsy marketplace, is that increasingly multifamily folks are using AI as a leverage point to be able to describe the individual unit, which we've always seen from the mom and pops and we've always seen from the SFR players, but we've never before seen at scale from the multifamily players. And I think that's 100% AI, but it does create the opportunity for it just for every apartment to sound like every other apartment in your city. You know, it does.

Sara GrahamYes. Everyone has gleaming granite countertops and a sparkling swimming pool. And you know, there are words that we all use a lot.

Jonas BordoYeah. Yeah.

Sara GrahamSo trying to find different ways to talk about things so that we're really able to showcase the uniqueness of that unit, that community, you know, the regional portfolio, et cetera, et cetera, is um, there's a a leverage point there. And you're right. I mean, we have more opportunities for differentiation, but only if we really lean into that. And that's a learning curve. And I think we're still working on that collectively. Although, again, I think we've made huge strides just in the last couple of years alone.

Jonas BordoSo if you're in a head of marketing seat, how has your day changed based on AI? What do you wake up in the morning and do that you didn't do before because of AI?

Sara GrahamYeah, I think the reporting piece is a big one where I think you've got access to more data than ever. The question is, of course, how do you actually make the data actionable? We have mountains of data, we all know it. But I think AI is helping us make data more actionable than ever before. I've looked at some really interesting platforms recently where you can easily chat with your data and say, okay, based on what I'm looking at in this dashboard, which are the top five properties I should be focused on right now? Or where should my leasing team be focusing their time and attention to up-level their skills even more? Or on a reputation management standpoint, help me understand and discern what trends are happening in this regional manager's portfolio right now. We have so much data, but I think AI is really helping us cross the chasm to make it something that we can act on. And I know in my time when I was physically in-house leading marketing, that was a huge exercise that took us a lot of time to do manually. And now that we have AI, we don't need to do that work manually. And so for me, I think that's a really natural place to start the day and say, okay, you know, here's what's happening in the portfolio right now, and here's what we can do about it. Marketing in my mind has always been this collaborative partner to other teams within an org. Most of my career personally was spent at the intersection of marketing technology and operations. And so that for me was sort of the three-legged stool to say, okay, you know, how does that all really create the foundation for performance? And so anything that ties to that is typically where I spend, you know, a lot of my time now, even as a fractional. And for my clients that have in-house marketing teams kind of providing some of that strategic support to say, here's how we can think about this, and here's really where the roadmap can evolve from there.

Jonas BordoIt's a huge change, a C change, but pretty exciting. Like I feel like the time to confidence can get much reduced. You still have to test everything. You still have to make sure the information you're getting from the AI is right, but to be able to gather it so much more quickly, analyze it so much more quickly, that's fantastic. I am really curious to get your thoughts on how the channel is changing. Like, how do we reach renters? I feel like there's a foundational change that's happening right now, driven by AI in how people search for apartments. And you mentioned a little bit earlier in the conversation with talking about, you know, not only the ILS is testing out new functionality and approaches, but also the search to be part of the discussion, not just found. But I'm curious, I'm used to a world in which the renter starts at Google, does their search, ends up going really deep because the initial results they find aren't great. And then they reach out to a wide variety of different folks, apartments that look interesting, and process goes from there. But how is that changing? How is that top line discovery changing? How is the next step of actually getting the lead, turning the lead into a lease changing?

Sara GrahamYeah, it's a really important question. And I think it's going to continue to evolve. I think we are just seeing the tip of the iceberg on this one, where there's been a massive change, as you just said, where I think I too would typically go to Google for that type of thing and say, I'm looking for an apartment in Boston. I think we are at the point where AI is quickly becoming the first stop for many, many people with a lot of different things, and apartment structuring being one of them, particularly where there's AI voice capability now, where you can talk to Claude or you can talk to Chat GT. And because of that, people are almost talking with AI the same way they would talk to a friend in many cases, where it's not just I'm looking for an apartment in Boston, but it is I am looking for an apartment in Boston within walking distance to the common that is near a Pilates studio and also near my favorite coffee shop, or you know, like that level of detail. I want to be in this neighborhood, not that neighborhood. I'd like to be able to walk to the tea. I mean, it is it is just so super granular, and it is almost this extreme of consciousness because you can talk, you don't have to type, and you're not thinking about does my sentence make grammatical sense? It doesn't matter. It does not matter. And because of that, people are just sort of braindumping. And then lo and behold, your AI friend of choice is serving up all of these really interesting, different responses that are personalized. And I think we've talked a lot about personalization and multifamily marketing for a very long time. This is the next gen of personalization. And I think where, you know, I said a couple of minutes ago, the goal is not just to be optimizing for search, but optimizing to be recommended. And so for multifamily marketers, you know, in response to this brain dump of information that people are giving AI, in order to be served up as a result, there are things that matter, like the unit level asset build-out that you mentioned, where there is specific information on a specific unit, everything from details on what might be apartment features or are there photos of things? And again, this is stuff that we've been working on for a long time, but it's become increasingly important. And reviews are still incredibly important. You know, to be leveled up as or served up as, you know, best of anything, your reviews still matter and your online reputation still matters. And so again, the building blocks and the foundational pieces of SEO, I think that we've long been focused on still matter, but I think the idea of making our websites even more rich in content do give AI a bigger opportunity, more things to crawl. I know that there are AI agents that are searching on behalf of people. And so it's another piece of this or another sort of layer deeper where we think about how we position ourselves to be not just again found, but recommended. Um, and that's a really big piece, but I think the more content that we are able to put out, and not just content for content's sake, but meaningful content and useful content, that will really help position multifamily marketers for this next iteration of search.

Jonas BordoThere's been so much content produced to have it be really actually very good content can be a huge challenge. Because what's the next thing to talk about? That's always a challenge in these environments with limited capacity, limited resources. How do you generate something that really is differentiated and is going to be a hook for that AI agent? I think I've talked to probably the last couple of weeks, maybe a dozen renters who are have used AI agents to conduct their search and do their research on their behalf. Um, so that's a very different surfacing process.

Sara GrahamIt is. And we are now at the stage where it can be AI agent talking to AI agent. And, you know, we just talked about keeping the human in the loop a minute ago. That's sort of the opposite. But it does again warrant the question to say, where is the human oversight to make sure that whatever the seeking AI agent is finding is actually meaningful to the person who's eventually reading it on the other side. So I think there's this outsourcing, so to speak, from agent to agent. But again, it goes back to a human eventually. It starts with a human and it ends with a human, and the AI agents are really in the middle, brokering that exchange of information. So it does just emphasize the point where humans have to be involved and to say, no, you know, this AI copy that I just drafted, it doesn't say enough about the specific neighborhood. It doesn't talk about that we are walking distance to the T, or maybe it does, but it got some of this wrong. And, you know, you have to layer that knowledge back in. So again, the exchange on the other side becomes meaningful and not just something that sounds like everybody else's.

Jonas BordoYeah, absolutely. You know, as I think about the search, I know there's a couple of different models, and I always keep two in my mind simultaneously. One is the deep searcher, the person who is researching thoroughly what they're looking for. I love those folks. They're they're fantastic. But then on the opposite end of the spectrum, I have talked to lots of renters who, you know, we asked them, why are you living there? Well, my my buddy lives there, and I went in and they had a place available, so now I live here. I'm wondering, like, how close are we to that person's agent signing a lease on their behalf with the apartment community's agent and all of that happening? Is that in the near future, do you think?

Sara GrahamI think it is. I don't think we're going to get there universally tomorrow. I think there's still a lot of refinement to happen on the tech stack side that we are working towards. But I know there's a lot of consolidation that's happening. And, you know, we're still figuring out some tech for that to actually be able to be seamless. I think the ultimate goal for any operator is really to provide as low friction of an experience as possible. And if we can't do that with the tech stacks that we have today, then you know, we're kind of jumping ahead maybe a little bit too much if we're saying, let's let's let the agents have at it. Because the last thing anyone wants is for an experience to go sideways. We're trying to get somewhere too quickly. But I do think what you just raised is a really important point, and we it is where we're headed. So I think the future thinking to say, how do we get to that place where An agent could autonomously be able to sign a lease for the renter that's moving in. It's an important thing to think about and to say, do we have the right partners in place that will help us think through what that experience and workflow really looks like for both the renter and for the onsite teams? When I work with clients, that's usually one of the things we're hyper focused on is just think about that renter experience in those two parallel tracks to say, you know, there are really two customers. It's the renters, of course, but the on-site teams have to buy in two and they have to feel really confident with that workflow because if they don't, things can get very hairy very quickly.

Jonas BordoYeah, no, it goes sideways real fast if the on-site team is not on board and not deeply committed to it. You know, I think so much of back to the the work that Lisa did around surfacing problems in the leasing process. I feel like so much of that is a breakdown between the marketing team and the site team, and the site team figuring, well, the marketing team has it, and the marketing team figuring, well, the site team has it. And the reality is nobody's configured the machine. So it's just giving a generic response and looping back against itself, and even worse in some situations.

Sara GrahamSo yeah, that's right. And when something's broken, you know, sometimes the first instinct is to say, well, we need more traffic. You know, when the traffic's down, we need more traffic. And traffic is not always down, and the answer is not always let's up the spend. There are a lot of moving pieces that can underpin what looks like underperformance. And it's not always, you know, the answer is not always to increase spend. It's it's often valuable to look at that, certainly. But I think there's a lot of pieces underneath that to say, you know, does the tech stack work the way that we all think it does? Are the leads actually reaching the team? Do they have the right product to show? Are they having the right conversations on site where they're actually able to connect the renter's needs with what's available on the market that day? And there's so many pieces to that that I think we're often too quick to point the finger at marketing and say, this campaign's underperforming when often that's not the case at all.

Jonas BordoWell, a couple of quick questions for you. One, any favorite tools, AI tools that you'd recommend to others in your line of work?

Sara GrahamSo I think that there's a really interesting sort of concept out there with AI leasing coaching. And there are a couple of companies that are out in that space. Some are built for multifamily, some have a multifamily vertical. But I think we've had this sort of black box where we've had mystery shops to understand, you know, sort of one-off what the experience looks and feels like. And then we have lots of data, again, sort of speaking historically, where we can see what happens after somebody signs the lease and moves in. But for a long time, there has been just a lack of knowledge around what actually happens when somebody is touring. And again, we've gotten some of that through mystery shops, but it was a single person getting a mystery shop once a month. And so I think these high sales and leasing coaching tools really open up a door for us to gather a whole bunch of information where we've never had access to and really understanding what's happening on site for both our leasing teams and for our prospective renters. And so I'm really excited about that, um, kind of as a class of tech for marketers to glean more information about what's working, what isn't. Um, when I was in-house, much of my role also focused on leasing training, or part of that, you know, to have that oversight and really make sure that the teams had the tools they needed to succeed. And so I am very excited about that as a tool for marketers and for our leasing teams alike.

Jonas BordoYeah, that's fascinating. I honestly didn't even know that category was out there. I think that's spectacular. I've seen that in the sales world with tools like Gong and other things that, you know, in real time provide feedback on how a sales call went to that salesperson. But that's a fantastic application for that.

Sara GrahamIt is.

Jonas BordoReally useful.

Sara GrahamI've worked with some prop tech companies who have Gong or Avoma or, you know, other tools like that. So very simple, you know, it's it's taking that concept, that sort of traditional B2B SaaS and applying it in a real-time way for sales conversations that happen face to face. So it's uh a really interesting concept. And I think, again, a great tool for us to be able to get some insight into an area that uh we just we're relying on these uh periodic shops and hitting a lot of performance metrics and training needs and other things on what was lighter source of data, um, an important source of data, no question. But just this is a much deeper and and more, I think, diverse data set for us to be able to lean on and really learn from.

Jonas BordoYeah, fantastic. Okay, next. What's your current favorite, uh, anthropic or open AI?

Sara GrahamI use both. Actually, I I have paid accounts on both Claude and Chat GDT, and I use them for different things. I am a big fan of both. And I think as a marketer, to me, it's important to be able to be well versed in how you can do different things with different models. So I, if I, you know, if you say chocolate or vanilla, I'm gonna say twist.

Jonas BordoWell played. Well played. Um, how about your personal life? How are you using AI in your personal life?

Sara GrahamOh, I use it a lot there too. I have a daughter who is about to be a senior in high school. And so she is in the weeds on all things college search. Um, and so this spring we actually used AI to map out a route for us to go visit some schools and figure out everything from okay, there's this tour available on this day and that tour available on that day, and help me figure out point A to point E, how do we drive without having to go back and forth 17 times? To where should we be staying for hotels, to what's some things for us to visit while we're in town in each of these places. So it's been fantastic for that. And I think I have family members that use AI for a whole slew of um travel recommendations, you know, to think about itineraries for other personal vacations. And I know some people who have actually used AI to write stories for their kids, which is really interesting.

Jonas BordoOh, that's so cool. Oh, it's wonderful. Yeah, very neat. Well, Sara, it's been such a pleasure. Thank you so much for being on the show. Uh, I've really enjoyed the conversation. I think it's been incredibly educational for me and uh, I'm sure for our listeners as well. Everybody out there, this has been NetEffective. I'm Jonas Bordo. Please, whatever podcast platform you're listening to this on, please like and subscribe. And thank you again for joining us. Sara, I really appreciate you joining the podcast today.

Sara GrahamThanks for having me.