600 Secret Shops Revealed: Fixing the Fractured Prospect Journey with Eden Chai

In this episode Eden Chai, co-founder and CMO of Flair shares critical findings from their new secret shop tool which, after gathering data from over 600 shops allowed Eden to draw one conclusion: the prospect journey is fractured (or dare we say, broken).

https://www.getflair.io/resources/free-secret-shopping-tool

This episode dives into why the prospects journey often contains unnecessary hurdles including conflicting automations, outdated technologies, and outdated contact information.  Additionally, he reveals the leasing offices best friend (and worst enemy) the phone.

After you listen to the episode make sure you try Flair's new tool.  We promise you will have several "ah-ha" moments after experiencing your leasing experience through a prospects eyes.

Transcript

Hi everyone and welcome to the apartment department, the podcast for multifamily marketers by multifamily marketers. We are really lucky because today we have another repeat guest who um the last time we had him on the show just kind of blew our minds with data and new concepts. And so he's here again, Eden Chai from Flare. And he is going to talk to us today about this really interesting concept of the prospect journey. being broken. And uh the way he came to this conclusion was through doing over 600 secret shops um starting last year. And basically the conclusion he came to uh from all those secret shops again is that um you know the renter journey is broken and uh as marketers it's really our responsibility to figure out how to fix it. So with that Edin I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to you.

Thanks so much for having me an able to present and and the the data queen with some actionable data that that we can learn from and kind of chop through together. So, I'm super excited to show you what what we've got going on today. You know, back in September, we started running Secret Shops with some internal software that we built because we came out with a new call automation product that helps listing agents call leads very fast and make them very phone first. So, our thought process was great, let's run these secret shops and we'll have a very tailored sales approach to show you exactly where we're going to fit in and exactly how we can move the needle, right? If you run 10 secret shops and there are no call follows being made across the board, there's probably massive increases in the lead to tour conversion that we can assist you with with making your leasing agents faster or phone first, etc. Now, what we found was actually a lot more interesting than that. We thought great, let's fix speed to lead. But what we found was a combination of questions being unanswered, tech stacks not working, and over 50% of the 600 properties that we shopped did not use the phone at all to follow up. So th those were the really surprising things that we found and it really spearheaded a secret shop tool that we launched here. But I'd like to kick it off with a little bit of data. We can run through the the highle stuff and then let's let's talk about what sounds interesting. So right off the bat over 50% didn't use the phone. Less than 10% used the phone within 24 hours. So what we kept seeing time and time again and I talked to Janet Rose about this. I said, "A lot of these calls are happening 30 days later. Like, what in the world is happening that they decided to use the phone 30 days later?" And Janet goes, "Oh, I know exactly what's happening. The regional came down and said, "Hey, something's not working here. You better call all the last 100 leads, you know, would that happen within the last 30 days?" And that and I really saw that happen time and time again. And that really seems like an industry-wide thing because I was just scratching my head like if you're going to use the phone, use it within the first week at least. Why are you using it 30 days later where that person has probably move forward with someone else at this point or at least doesn't really have the energy to give you anymore. They're they're kind of gone cold. So, those were the two big pieces of data. Less than 50% use text, uh, which, you know, not entirely surprising. It's becoming more popular, easier to integrate into existing CRM, all that kind of stuff. But that was the gist. I'm curious if any of that surprised you.

I don't Chris, you go ahead because you're you're really focused on, you know, Edin taught me this, by the way, um, multi- channel. Um, and so you're really big on having uh leasing teams uh do multiple followups, but you only count it as a follow-up if it's a different channel. So, I don't know. What do you think? Are you surprised by the data?

No, I'm not surprised. I'll tell you why. Teams, for whatever reason, follow-up is something that you have to ingrain in them and give them a reason to do it. And so, at the last couple firms I've been at to to achieve this, we've made it part of their KPI. So, it's part of their bonus structure, whatever. you know, works or whatever their compensation package is. What I don't understand is why it's so hard for them to follow up because followup, as I tell them, and I've told them my whole career, is how you make money. And we're in this business. When you're a leasing consultant, your your whole life depends on getting leases. And so, if it were me there, I would be calling everybody a hundred times until they tell me to leave them alone, uh, or they moved on. And that's where I get confused of why doesn't it happen just now? Well, let's let's take a step back. By the way, Ann, I gave you the wrong info. I apologize. It's not multi- channelannel. It's called omni channel.

I was like, "Oh, I I got the wrong the wrong marketing term." Whatever.

No, that's okay. Um, I told basically everyone that it was called multi-threading, so it's kind of all the same at this point.

Yeah, whatever. Basically, just channel we I think I think we get the point. But pretty much from a leasing agent's perspective, the reason it's so important And and I think Chris, that's an amazing best practice. The follow-up doesn't count if you didn't switch the channel. And so many of these secret shops, we saw five emails that are basically just promotional marketing emails going through and no other follow-ups made. And they weren't even made in a good cadence. And the reason that's so bad, not just, okay, it's great to use multiple channels, but let's talk about Gmail and Outlook's promote, like promotion filters. Right now, their job is to make it as easy as possible to filter out emails you don't want to see. How do they calc ate that. Yeah, some AI. But if it sounds promotional, if it's got too many images, if it's got too many links, they're going to go, "Oh, let's shoot this right out of the main inbox directly into the promotions tab." So, I need to burst the marketer bubble here. But our fancy email might never get opened. And when you're just hammering those email follow-ups, what is the value? The value is to get in front of the prospect and to get visibility to move them forward into your leasing process. And if you're getting filtered out, you're sending another image of two months free, then the the follow-up just has zero value. And that's kind of a bummer because leasing agents are working hard in many cases to make those follow-up. But when you don't switch the channel, there's actually from the prospect side, it's just radio silence to to no fault of their own. And so if the prospect doesn't see the follow-up, then it just shouldn't count. And that's why I think Chris is an amazing best practices because our goal is to get in front of them, not waste your effort, not do five emails, they're never going to go anywhere. And one thing that I love about layering in the phone is that it's the only place that the conversation starts and finishes. And when a conversation finishes, which is the key point here, that's when we know if this is a hot lead or someone we should move on from. But with email and text, we're constantly guessing. It's a constant like, oh, let's wait for them to respond. Oh, has any of I mean, you're you're both marketers. Have your leasing agents ever told you like, these leads don't respond to me, Chris. These leads don't respond to me. We've got 300 people in our queue and we've got this ongoing conversation that just never seems to end until we just decide to close it out. But on a phone, when you connect with someone, someone that never happens. It either ends and you go, "Great, I'm sending them an application. I'm sending them a tour link or this is not a good fit because they're not moving for the next 6 months and they were just, you know, looking into something too early, so we're just going to follow back out." Or, you know, they don't meet our move in requirements right off the bat and this is not going to this is not going to work. And like you you have that clarity to focus on the 20% of leads that are actually going to make the property money versus guessing and casting a super wide net of saying, "Let's just try to blast all 300 of these people and we have an ongoing in conversation with all of them and that's what's happening at most properties today based on what we looked at.

You make a great point about switching the channel. I tell the teams call because nobody else is to your point.

You're right.

You're calling and you're making that effort and you're leaving a voicemail. You are already a step ahead of the competition. And as everybody knows who listens to this podcast regularly, all I try to do is be the niche that's different. That's all I ever try to do. I don't like to compete with everybody else. Um there are things that I do that everybody else does, but when I talk to the teams, that's my pitch because when I secret shop in person, I never get a phone call back. I barely get an email back in person shop. So, at the end of the day, I mean, I take baby steps with the teams. I'm happy if they email. I'm certainly happy if they do email and phone. And then if we have an optin to the text, of course, you want the text. as well until the lead is dead. But uh to me, it's just you get such more such a good value when you spend the time doing it. And our goal really at our company is three follow-ups per prospect. And to get those three follow-ups, you have to do it on three different channels. So, uh that's how I look at it. But it's really a step up to the competition in my opinion. I don't know how you guys feel about it, but that's that's how I look at it.

Well, I'll one thing that we found which will strengthen your point that much more is it's no secret that all the ILS's are going crazy over leads, right? They want their reports to show as many leads as possible because it's easy if you're a supplier to the industry to say, "Oh, well, no one knows attribution, right? Like, yeah, we we don't know. It's kind of like this big question mark, so we don't really need to report on that. Let's just report on some other fancy stuff that looks good to you so that you keep paying us, right? It's just the quiet part out loud here." So, when it comes to So, what we saw is it's so easy for ILS's to just show you another propert and go, do you want to just also like reach out to this property? Do you want us to send your information to similar properties? And they want to make that as easy as possible on the prospect side to opt in so that they can show both of you a report that has a lead that isn't interested in either of your properties. And it works and we're allowing it to work. But that just strengthens what Chris is saying that much more, which is they're sending it to all these people. You want to be the best option. It's very easy for you to be the best option giving. You can assume those people are not going to call within 24 hours. In our secret shops, there were 600. Less than 60 of them called within the first 24 hours. And it's funny because the gap was crazy wide. Like those top 60. One of them there was like eight calls over the course of a month. I was like, "This person will just not relent." Like no answer, nothing. And they're just going for it, leaving a voicemail. Hey, I still here didn't hear back from you. I saw you were interested in scheduling a tour. I'd love to help you do that. And the gap is ridiculous. It doesn't have to be so big, but u and I think if you're a marketer, selling your pitch to leasing agents is just as important just like se it is selling upstream to management of why they should implement your marketing plan. You want to implement to leasing why they should implement your best practices that it actually works. And that's the the kind of push and pull that marketers have to play is I need to sell my ideas to so many people with different interests in the organization. And one thing that has really worked for us in selling leases is uh this is how I would approach the conversation. I would say, "Hey Chris, I know you have a really hard job. You're juggling a lot of different things. It's It's difficult, right? Yes, it's very difficult. How often do prospects ghost you? Oh my god, Chris, I was just telling you this this to you yesterday. They're ghosting me all the time. This is so frustrating. It seems like they're interested. And in multif family, we don't get cold leads, right? I'm not calling random people. They inquired with me. So, so this is so frustrating. And you go, would you like it if I could help you with that? Great. Is it I want to make sure that every follow-up you make has the maximum impact on getting you that tour cuz I No one wants to just be that person like the lease agent I mentioned that called eight times no response. I don't want you to be that person. That's a waste of our time. Here's what I want to do. Why don't we focus on the follow-ups that have the highest marginal utility and let's maximize our utility here to get you the highest response rate. So that's a perfect segue on this rant into two different pieces of data that I'm going to share with you. One is are you familiar with Gong either of you? Gong is a sales intelligence platform

big in B2B. What they basically do is they plug into your phone and email system and they help train your reps. So, it's a sales enablement platform. They help you tell your reps what to do better to close more deals. They help you forecast and all that kind of stuff. They ran a study on the power of cold calling. Now, this is a little bit different than multif family because it's B2B, but also because they're cold calling cold leads. So, you get a lead list, you're sending them emails. What happens if you go from just sending that lead list emails to also cold calling and leaving a voicemail at every single one without any of them responding to you. So what is just the absolute impact of a cold call with a voicemail layered on top of an email? The email response rate shot up 115%. Because of the visibility that we've been talking about on this podcast pretty much. And so that is a study that you can reference directly with your leasing agents. It's like what if instead of sending five emails, you could send one with just adding that call with the voicemail and then you get a response and it moves forward and you're not having a conversation that never seems to end until you pull the plug. That's the pitch that as marketers I think we need need to be making to lease agent is to buy into Chris's three-pronged approach pretty much.

Ed and I feel like you have a microphone in my office. We had a manager meeting today and I joined it obviously and the first thing I said to them was thank you without you in the room I don't have a job and we know how difficult it is so thank you for helping us. And really what I was doing is talking about last month's contest, the reviews, which was insane, and just telling them how great that was. But at the end of the day, I take that approach every single time. We know how hard this is. We are sending you leads. I'm trying to help you make money and maximize. So, I I completely agree with your approach. Marketing has to and this goes and everything that we talk about with being um in the same without not having the silos with operations and and the operations team allowing us to go in there and have real conversations. It has to work that way. And you're right, if they call and they the reason why we do this is to get people in the door and it works. I just don't think my thing is I think that some of the people that we have coming in these days don't want to get on the phone. They would rather look down than talk to somebody.

I mean, especially given that leasing consultants tend to be at the beginning of their career, that's a younger generation that is more resistant to getting on the phone. That entire generation, I mean, it's my sister's generation. I know like if They they like to just text and DM. That's what that's what they do all day. So texting is amazing to them. But here's the thing. Just because you're call those might be your prospects as well doesn't mean they won't answer. Especially if you leave a voicemail, you'll find them calling you back as well. So they won't initiate, but they'll participate. And that's what was so interesting about these shops is as resistant as this entire generation might be to the phone, it's still the most effective communication channel that we have if you connect. And even if you don't connect and you leave that voicemail, referencing these studies where you're seeing it's making all the other channels that you already have really dialed in like email and text. A lot of properties really have both these channels working very well for them. It just it just supports them that much more and it's important to sell that your leasing agents on that because they're going to be frustrated. You call 10 people maybe two what two of them are going to answer.

That's frustrating. I don't want to just hear the phone ring and hit the voicemail all the time. That's very annoying. I want to I want to make money like Chris is saying. So yeah,

I'm really fascinated about this. Oh, what you said about email being like the conversation that never ends, right? I mean, that is just a really because then you're kind of like, well, I have 20 prospects that I'm working or whatever. But really, if you talk to someone and you figure out that they're not interested, then that just reduces noise as well. And then it almost gives you like a clearer sense of what you're actually working with from kind of prospect lead standpoint. Um, I'm just fascinated. And I think too, I've noticed I think kind of going back to your point about marketing sources making it easier for prospects to send in leads. It's almost like it's not as serious anymore. And I don't know if I'm explaining that well, but I even feel like now on some of the marketing channels, it's really easy for people to schedule a tour, for example. But like we've noticed that our the number of people that show up for a tour is that have scheduled a tour is reducing. And I think it's because it's just really easy to kind of like it's kind of like Open Table with reservations, right? Like it's really easy to make a bunch of reservations at restaurants and then like you don't always have to show up or maybe you forget or whatever. And so I don't know, I kind of I I like this idea then of almost utilizing um different channels to to qualify um what seeming could be an increase in leads but a decrease in real interest.

So this is where data becomes an interesting point of the conversation because let's take a ILSA. I'm not going to call them out. ILSA uh there's a bunch of you know data scientists in a room that said when we remove this step in the form doors shoots up 22%.

So let's do that and our clients are going to be thrilled. But you're sitting here and you're like my leasing agents were complaining that these people don't even show up and then when we call them they have no idea who we are and so it's it's this interesting my favorite line in the world of business just you have to give data context and that's exactly it yes tours might shoot up 20% 22% revenue does not and that is the difference there is is it worthwhile to do to invest in these leading metrics that shoot up if they don't you know string all the way to the end result which is something that's very hard to do in our industry with data silos and all that kind of stuff And that's why often times, you know, we see people doing that is like, oh, like our leads shot up, our tour shot up, etc., but I can't string it exactly down to here. And we see that with a lot of different channels, like Google Ads being a great example of that. It's very easy to print 200 leads on Google Ads. Very hard to print 20 leases. And and so, you know, making that decision to say, you know what, we're going to scale it back from 20 leads to 200 leads to 80 because we think the 80 is going to make us more money, but I can't entirely prove it to you. That's difficult for you to get buy in from the whole organization to do that. So, I I think we will see the death of inflated reports because we're in it. You know, the the economy is not doing as well. Properties are in foreclosure. I mean, Chris, you're in Texas. There's a ridiculous amount of supply in Texas. Every client I speak to in Texas is like, whoa. Like, there's so much supply. Our our concessions are not doing enough, etc. And I think that will force the pressure on a lot of these, you know, suppliers or marketing sources to try to try and translate and do the work to translate their work into business results and not just a report that says you got 200 leads but these tours didn't show up. You know,

there needs to be enough marketers like us in the room or people that think about marketing going back to them and telling them and I'll take ILSB. They came and said we're increasing X and it was a large amount and I brought them the data and said no, I'm not going to pay that. So either you keep me flat or I'm out. U and they agreed because at the end of the day if you're track your data like we do on this call, you have the upper hand. They cannot argue when I show them how many leases we actually got and how much our cost per lease was. They can't argue because I use tracking. And no, it's not perfect. We all know that. But it's it's close enough to be able to give you a broad picture. Yeah, we might have a few more leases here, a few less leases there, but I mean, it's it's giving you a broad enough approach. One thing I can tell you is like impressions, that's died, right? Nobody talks about impressions these days. My boss jokes with me. If I go into his office and talk about impressions, I'm out the door.

I agree.

Chris, you know I'm going back to impressions, right? I'm adding it back. I'm adding it as a measurement of the very top of the funnel.

The very top. I'm talking

the very top. Not

I'm talking impressions is like we got so many impressions, so we're doing well. It's kind of like the leads.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, of course you need impressions at the top of the funnel. That's not what I'm saying. Just I'm always focused on cost per lease.

Yeah.

What am I at the end of the day and what's actually working

and has some great tools that I don't have access to anymore that helped her with that too. Um, marketing IQ, I'll plug it a little bit. It's great. Um, but just at the end of the day, it's tough and I think we have to have the upper hand. We have to use this data smartly um to be able to to to run our own course and pick our marketing program.

Yeah. I mean, you have to be like dangerous as I call it, right? Okay, like the ILS's, they love doing this kind of performance-based. This is why we're increasing pricing. They love doing that. But then when you come with the real numbers, this is not such a fun conversation anymore. Just like Chris mentioned, it's like, great, I'm glad you invested another 20 million in your advertising and you're top ofunnel. And if you notice, the reports always show very top offunnel stuff. It's like, oh, like we got this many more impressions, that's why we're raising your pricing. And you're like, I just don't exactly understand how that translates. But, um, one thing that I want to bring up here because we're talking about the whole, you know, reporting, attribution, lead quality thing is the lead distribution. So, when a property gets leads, I'm curious to hear actually from you, you two, what percentage of leads are like phone calls versus contact forms versus actual booked tours? Like, do you have like a kind of a ballpark of what percentages you get at your properties?

Yeah. So, about 10% of our overall leads are phone calls.

10%. It's low. Wow.

Yeah, it's very low. Um, and of course that varies, I'm sure, by property, but overall, yeah, only about 10% of our leads are phone calls. So, um which is interesting to me. I don't that's that's all I can say about it is that

What about you?

Interesting. Um but um

about the same. I don't exact number off top of mind. I'd have to go pull it. Um but it's definitely more it's definitely less phone calls and more other channels for sure.

And and of the remaining 90% what what percent do you think are like directly booked tours? Like that they didn't talk to anybody, they just booked it. is like how low is it? Like it's not going to be 50. It's not gonna be 50% but low.

I don't I don't get I don't think we get a ton of just book tours. Um most of our stuff is being communicated, but I have a lot of smaller properties and so that's probably why um is my guess. We don't get a lot We do get some people that apply that haven't been to property either which and in my other firms that happen all the time, but with our product type it just doesn't happen as much. People know about us.

Okay, so I have it. Bear with me. I have an angle with this. Why do you think and and this is this is based on the AI leasing results. So we saw a lot of really interesting stuff based on how AI leasing responds to inquiries and how it nurtures nurtures prospects. Why do you think if so many properties have a direct schedule a tour link where you can do everything yourself? Why do you think so many people are not using it? Because I don't think that most of the people don't know how to use it. Most people are technically savvy these these days especially given the property and and the demographic. So Why do you think that such a vast majority of leads aren't using these fancy direct tour schedulers that we're all pushing pushing everyone to use?

So, if you're looking at the leasing funnel, you know, you're aware of a property, you have a product in mind, and you're going to try to narrow it down to the properties that you actually want to invest time and energy in. Property websites and ILS's have a lot of good information. When it comes to making a 30 plus thousand a year buying decision, you probably have additional questions and additional reservations. So my my simple answer is they're simply not ready. That's that's my simple answer is like they didn't book a tour because they're not ready to book a tour. That's a stage in the leasing process, you know, lead tour, application, move in. So if they didn't book a tour, I'm just assuming they're still in this lead inquiry stage and they need more questions answered. Now what we saw with this these 600 shops is they were very bad at answering specific questions on average. On average, if I asked, you know, there were some really egregious cases where It was like, I'm looking for a move a one-bedroom March 15th move in under 1,600. Can you send me pricing and availability? And it said, here's a link to our availability. And shot me back to the website where that's I was just on the website and that's how I converted. So why would you send me back? It's kind of like, hey, just like just look again. That's just a poor prospect experience. So what we noticed is that AI leasing seems in most cases seems to be built just to push people towards a tour. My issue with that This is where the prospect journey comes into play is I think that we're trying to mold the prospect into the journey that we want, which is great. You became a lead turn to a tour now where the prospect goes, hey, I need x amount of information to figure out if a tour is relevant to me or not or if I should move on. And I don't think that based on the shops that we ran, this is completely misaligned. We're just trying to force them into our funnel versus prospects going through the natural buying process of this property looks like it could be a good fit. I just need a little bit more before I actually want to invest some more time and energy, actually go check it out.

So, are we missing by not making that information available to them? Like, why are we making them ask us for more information? Shouldn't it just be available?

I mean, Chris, you're you're you know, on us.

But I I think there's there's two buckets that these people fall into. One is what do you want to get out of the conversation? Do you want to get security? Do you want to feel like there's someone who's very knowledgeable, who's going to make you comfortable with the process, who's going to walk you through it, and do you know all the approvals and the co-signers all this kind of stuff like do you want to feel comfortable which is is a big part of it the other piece is I genuinely just like I'm too ADHD to look at the information right and a lot of these questions that we see asked yes the information was on the website but our attention spans get shorter by the month these days with the adoption of you know with with how fast technology is evolving and so we're not going to scroll through all these pages no matter what the format is FAQ chatbot website p page video. Like it could be there and we still have to do the best job ever to get this in front of people, but there's still going to be a large percentage of people who just ask anyway. Like if you've ever run support for any sort of company, like all the questions are already answered somewhere else and you're just answering them anyway, right? It's kind of like when people call it and they're like, "Did you turn off and turn it back on? That's probably going to solve your problem." And so I see it as those two buckets is some people really just want the security of talking to a human who's going to help them through a the biggest buying decision they're ever going to make this year. And the other the other, you know, piece is people who just aren't going to take the time to actually look and answer the question themselves, and they just it's just easier to just ask somebody.

Eden, I'm going to ask you an off-the cuff question. Um, because you said something else that interested me. So, you mentioned something about like a $30,000 a year investment, right? And that kind of struck me that there aren't really many other purchases that we make in general. eneral that are large like that, maybe buying a home, buying a car, leasing a car. Are there are there lessons that maybe we could take from looking at, you know, purchase paths, purchase cycles from other industries that have kind of large purchase prices?

Yeah. Well, if we let's take the the car industry for a second. I know it's got a bad rap for extremely aggressive and pushy sales practices that prospects hate, for sure. That being said, put a car salesperson in the multif family leasing agency and see how easily they adopt Chris's three-prongs approach without any sort of problem.

Yeah.

You know, uh they stay after hours, they make follow-ups at night, they do they do everything and they do a much better job at nurturing people with a sales first approach. Their adoption of AI from the limited knowledge that I have is way more peeled back. Like there's still very people first. I've seen they'll use AI to to fill in gaps which are very hard for humans to fill like oh in two weeks to nurture someone again. Like I'm already I I got a whole new set of leads that in that second week I'm not going to remember to ping that person that didn't respond to me two weeks ago and I've been nurturing and like I found that in the automotive industry just from just from leasing a car that I leased not too long ago. Yeah.

I've seen that that they're using AI in a it's it's taking a more of a backseat as opposed to being the star of the show. And They're much more peopleheavy. But as far as the phone, like they leaned all the way like, you know, you you get call calls for car sales people all the time. Like they're looking they require you to put that phone number in like very specifically. They want to make sure they get that phone number.

I just got a text today because my lease is ending in a couple months and they text me today. Let's go. The guy who I worked with a year ago, you know, or three years ago, I revised my numbers. I'm actually like 25% gets calls and then uh the rest are form and email. most mostly stuff

25% call and then the rest were formed email. That's super interesting. Wow. And it's kind of crazy that the overall lead volume is so low. So 25 and 10% respectively here, but the most common complaint is the phone rings too much and we can't keep up with it. And it's like still a pretty small percentage of the overall leads that you get where. So here's here's a second thing and this is something we could probably learn from the car industry. There's different kinds of leads that you can get in the car industry. You could request a quote, which please never do this if you're listening to this, like never request a quote. It's like a nightmare. You're going to get a hundred people calling you in a matter of five seconds. You know, you could use their little chatbot, send a request, get an email back, see what's going on. But they have different steps to qualify you based on how interested you are. So, they try to do a really good job of that of like how interested are you? Are you going to go through and build an actual car and then request a quote or are you just going to talk to me or just going to call me? Now, when it comes to multif family, another big issue that we discovered with these secret shops is lead prioritization. It's no secret that let's say 10 less than 20% less than 10% of our leads are actually going to make us any money at all. They're ever going to sign a lease. Now, how do we help leasing? They're so overwhelmed. You get 300 leads. They're so overwhelmed. How do you help them focus on the leads that are actually the most likely to convert? Right now, my biggest problem with AI leasing is there's zero lead prioritization. They're saying, "Great. You see this nurture flow? We're gonna do this across the board." Sound good? No, that doesn't sound good to me. Because if somebody goes on apartments.com and requests a tour, I do not want you to treat that person the same as somebody that just sends a message with some random generic request. I I want you to treat them completely differently. The one who requests a tour, I want you to call them three times in a row. Like I want you to like that person is as hot of a lead as you can get. They moved themselves from the lead stage to the tour stage without your help. Think about how much farther you can get them into how much easier you can get them into the application stage. Yeah. And that was a really big thing that we saw is I don't see any real solutions for helping our leasing agents with lead prioritization. The easiest way we can help them stop feeling overwhelmed is tell them, hey, I know you have 200 leads, but let's be real. Focus your main attention to these 40. Like focus on these mostly. And and I don't see that in our industry really right now.

I think that's interesting too. It's like that qualification and we talked a little bit about the concept of like sales marketing. qualified leads, sales qualified leads, like in kind of other industries, there's this kind of funnel that leads go to to become prospects to become like an actual qualified lead. But anyway, uh that's kind of an interesting point. It's like if you could almost see what what prospects have done prior to getting in touch with you. Have they watched a 3D tour? Have they um you know, registered for an account and looked at a unit? Have they Those are all I can think of right now, but kind of these like other qualifying steps.

The apartments like the apartments.com example is the easiest example I can find because when we got the email from apartments.com it looks exactly the same. There's just a second small little part that says tour requested info March 16th 8:00. Like there's a tiny little additional part at the end. And I was like these should really like intentionally from a user experience perspective like these should look very different. Like put the fire emoji like hot hot hot like something here like this should not look the same because if I'm getting these two people I'm calling that person first like the person who requested the tour so

right because they've clearly indicated like a time a date like they've obviously looked at a calendar and like made life decisions to request them particular time so

we made a commitment

I think I think and I don't mean to just throw out company names throw out but real page does have a product that helps you prioritize leads within knock if you have all of their marketing talking along with the pricing tool because they've like integrated some of their data and you do get a little fiery and it helps you. So I think it's got to be coming with the rest to help us. But right now you're right, it's not there. It's not readily available. You have to pay for it and you have to have a bunch of products all kind of working together. But we do need to do that and we do need to get better about it.

I think we do have the data. We do know where they went and we can see that. Um but it's hard to drill in on every prospect to figure that out.

That's what I'm saying. Like we know kind of on a property or portfoliowwide level like on average people do these things but yeah when you're trying to figure out well how do I you know the we're talking about personalization right and we're talking about multi-channel but I think my brain's kind of going even further than that like once you're personalizing the followup by using a phone or a text like then how do you customize that based on what you already know about the prospect? effect and um you know what information or data sets or data points could we have to kind of create a narrative um that was really customized instead of just acting like you know I think instead of acting like every lead is the same and they're starting from like the same base set of information. So um I don't know I I think I think this is I didn't you're so great cuz you brought us like so much data and of course now my mind's all like twisted thinking about a bunch of different things like Chris is laughing like yeah shocking. Oh

well it's funny and the audience probably doesn't know this but Ann and I talk about this stuff even not on the pod and so she comes she does she goes home and thinks about it and then comes up these great ideas um when he goes well but I mean she loves this stuff she she really has a passion for it it's fun that's why we love doing this

yeah so and of course I had one other like brilliant thing to say and I can't remember but I'm sure I'm sure it'll come any other like huge like mind-blowing data points that came out of these uh 600 secret shops.

Yeah. So, not specific data points, but I mean we've talked a lot about what we can do to set up leasing for success, right? But there is really the third or like another external piece which a lot of times we don't realize is actually derailing these efforts and prospects don't tell us about them because they just get annoyed and leave and that's really how the tech stack works together. So, I want to I want to pull up a list of I think like I like like five to 10 of the most common issues that we saw negatively impacting the prospecting experience. And like I just want to say this so for anyone listening you should look into all these to make sure they're not influencing you right uh because these are things that you're kind of they're working against your leasing team and against your marketing efforts and prospects don't reach out and say hey Ann like the text opt-in didn't work and you asked me again like they're not going to say these things but they eat away at your conversion rates compounding competent happens on every single prospect and you're wondering like why is it not working and it's just a shame to have these things work against you. So I'm just going to pull up the list here and let's let's go through it. So the first one which actually wasn't so common was old software still being active. So one of one of the secret shops that the client said this this is a CRM we we turned off in 2023 but the integration was just still live and marketing automation emails that we set up back then are still going out like on on automatic. So that was one thing like if you turn something off troubleshoot and make sure that it's actually off. like you've got text automation, whatever it might be. Just make sure that your text is actually what you think it is. The the second one is that broken text optin that I just mentioned. We if you're getting the text optin, do not ask that person again. They've already given you permission to get into one of the highest visibility channels that exists. People don't often not read text. I think the the open rates for text are like 90 plus where email they're like sub 20. So, you know, I saw that it's like you I opted in. I gave you full permission to, you know, sell me versus text. Like, I just don't understand. Why are you Why are you asking me again? That's just an unnecessary waste of a follow-up. And we saw that all the time, actually. That was super common, specifically with, you know, when you don't use a website that's part of your PMS. I don't know if there's some integration issue there, but that seemed to be a common trend. Now, uh, this is not a tech stack thing, but more so just something that leasing agents were doing, which was really just kind of a shame, is not leaving voicemails. A ridiculous ously high percentage. I didn't calculate this percentage, but such a high percentage of these calls never had a voicemail. And you know, Chris, you should amend your three-pronged approach. You can call, but if you don't leave a voicemail, still doesn't count because

that that's zero that's zero visibility from the prospect side. Nobody talked to me. If you sent me five emails, they went to the promotions tab and never opened them, never saw them, and you called me. I don't know the number, and you didn't leave a voicemail. I have not heard from the property from the prospect side. We can we can argue all we want. The prospect does not think you followed up with them. because they didn't see. So, that happened at an alarmingly high rate and I really don't know why. Like, you took all the effort, you made the call, you called the person, and just you just guaranteed you're not going to get called back and and that was such a shame.

Um, sorry. So, I actually had that happen the other day. Um, a manager was calling me and the number that was showing up from their like desk phone and the number that was showing up was like unrecognized, something like that. And so, I didn't answer and they didn't leave a voice message. And then finally, they emailed me and They were like, "Hey, like do you have a call?" And I looked at the number and I was like, "Oh my gosh, they've been calling me." So, you know, whatever. Um, and so, yeah, that's real. That can happen.

And and see, and that's why when you leave a voicemail, a lot of people won't call you. Some people will call you back. A lot of people won't. And then they'll just go and answer you on a different channel like call like email or text. And that's the case study. That's where the gong case study comes into play where they're like, "Yeah, like maybe they're not answering the calls, but it's making them respond via other channels." And that's amazing.

The the other one was out updated info. So, we had a property that in the signature used the former the un like the the property name from before they rebranded with the value ad program. They changed the name. They changed everything. It still said the old name from two years ago and they were like, "Where is this email signature pulling from? We have no idea." And they finally got that sorted, but it was really confusing for for the prospects. The most common one was AI leasing and CRM automations doing the same thing. So, let's say you've have a CRM that automatic text people who submit a lead. AI leasing was doing the same thing and it comes from two different numbers comes from two different emails and we had a lot of different cases where you you submit a lead. You get two emails from two different emails and three texts from two different numbers within four minutes. And it's because you expect your tech to integrate, but you have to still check that. And that was probably the number one most common thing here is AI leasing tools and CRM doing the same exact thing. And prospects are not going to tell you about that stuff. You have to really go and find it. it. The the last two things, one of them was just massive blocks of text and emails, which nobody reads. So, my tip is just if you have emails, send them to your phone and see how it looks on an iPhone or on your Android because that's how most prospects are going to see it. And if it's blocks of text, it looks 10 times longer on your phone. Like on your computer, it might look okay. You send it to your phone and you're like, "This isn't who's going to read this?" Like, nobody's reading this.

So, don't make me read.

That was the big one. And then one of the most underrated ones I would say is no specificity in the responses. So per, you know, what we were just talking about, which is why didn't people who uh submit a contact form or call you, why didn't they just go straight and book the tour? Because they're lacking a piece of information that will make them ready to make that decision. So specificity in the response is one of the most important things to me because they're asking you like, do you accept people who got an eviction seven plus years ago? They're asking you like core questions that are going to determine if they move to the next step or not. And most of these just did not have specific enough information that I think would would make people confident to move to that next step by on their own, which is what we're all begging them to do is move to the tour stage on your own. And we're not giving them specific enough information to answer those questions. So like we would ask specific, you know, unit pricing and availability questions they can't answer. You know, pet policy questions and they're sending us a link to the pet policy page. Like all these things where the specificity is what's going to allow me to tell you yes, I will tour or you no I won't tour. And that was probably one of the biggest offenders in this whole thing was that we're pushing them towards a tour but not giving them the information to actually for them to actually make that decision. So those were like the most common things that came up.

That's really Yeah, that's very interesting. I mean those friction points are just and you're right. It's like on the one hand they're pretty obvious like that list when you went through it I was like oh yeah that makes sense. That makes sense. But it's like but they exist because they're not being checked or they're not being thought about or or not. It's like I don't know. It's just it's a very interesting. We found something like that. We we did we found an old name in an email the other day and it's like we're like how did we even let this happen? Like so embarrassing.

Happens. We're not perfect. We have a lot of properties and you know sometimes like these CRM you just they're in like weird spots that you don't think about.

I know. But still it's

when it's audits which my team is doing now. We're like some of those they've sent me I'm like oh my god oh we should have you know ah but we'll get it fixed now.

Well listen as a marketer you're dealing with so many things when you onboard a piece of technology it's like specific to the tech things that I mentioned here you expect technology to work like when we have when you use technology we all expect it to work and you really just want to onboard it and move on to the next thing because you're dealing you're juggling so many things at once that it's totally understandable that you expected your AI leasing to integrate with your CRM properly the way that they said in the pitch. right? Like of course I expect that to happen, but it's just it's just very difficult to actually have the time and be proactive in checking these things. So, you know, if you're listening to this and you're curious about whether you're experiencing any of these, I highly recommend you check it using our free secret shop tool and Chris, you you I'm sure you'll link it in the comments. It's free to sign up, no pay wall, and makes it super easy to just check these things. That's how we discovered that's how we ran all of our shops and and discovered all these things. So, I would definitely check for tech overlap, like these broken text opt-ins, just the overall experience from the prospect side. Like we also saw somebody got like an application prompt in this in still like the lead stage where they hadn't even booked the tour yet and they got like oh sub an application and that just felt like kind of tonedeaf given the stage in the process and and that was also one of those things that oh like yeah we need to fix that. This is a conditional email that just shouldn't go out at this stage. It makes no sense like they haven't gotten any answers from us yet. So uh definitely one of those things you don't want working against you and each individual thing here can definitely make the argument that it's not so impactful, but when you add them all up, it can really work against you in a pretty significant way, and you should hope that you're not experiencing all of them at once. But yeah,

but luckily your uh tool will help us um figure it out pretty quickly if it is happening. So, thank you. Thank you for um making that available to everyone because um like we were just talking about, we're all really busy and so to have a tool that will allow us to to figure that out pretty quickly is great. Eden, I can't Thank you enough. I've learned so much. I know Chris has learned so much. I know our audience has learned so much. Um, and what I love about talking to you is that you always, you know, the core of what you talk about is always the same. Um, but you're always learning something new and you're always teaching the industry something new and for that we can't thank you enough. So, um, with that, I think we're going to go ahead and call it an episode. Um, but again, we will link Edin's tool um, when we post this episode. because it is amazing. And I want to go ahead and thank Eden, thank Chris, thank Carlos, thank all of you for listening to the apartment department. And until next time, thank you.