Today’s renter wants control over the leasing process and access to information wherever, whenever, but today’s leasing team simply can’t keep up. We will explore Multifamily’s most adopted digital leasing solution providing renters the information they want 24/7/365 anywhere on the Internet.

Welcome in, how are you? Very good. Great to be with you today. I'm excited to spend some time. This has been a hot topic. Obviously our audience is really wanting to, you know, excited to have you show up for this, this conversation. And I thought I would take a moment to just kind of give the background on what you've been working on for all these years.

You've been impacting multifamily in so many great ways. I know you've apartment guide to rentals.com. I've got a, a long list or real estate.com rent, Wiki, live person. And now you're doing something really exciting with better Basel. So tell me what that journey's been like. Yeah. Wow. I, I feel old all of a sudden hearing it,

hearing all of that. And by the way, let me just give a quick shout out. I love your format. I love it. I love what you guys are doing. The content is great. I've known Dale for a long time, and I really enjoyed listening to your sessions today. It's been, it's been great. So, so, nice work.

Yeah. So I did a, I've done a lot of that over the years. I won't say exactly how many, you know, it's interesting though. I learned, I've learned a lot in doing this as over the last, you know, 20 years that what you start out doing is not often what you end up doing. You have kind of an initial game plan,

but it changes over time. And so you gotta be flexing, flexible and willing to change. As time goes on. As we have with our product, we started with NLP and current resident. Now we're kind of doing prospective resident guided conversation. So it has been a, it's been a journey and a learning experience for sure. Well, the great news is we recognize all those brands.

Now it's time to make sure all brands use the products you're talking about. So tell me what, what are you building? Who's it for? How's it helping people? Yeah, so really it's the, the best way I can put it as better as conversational leasing. We built it for the goal of getting rid of 80% of the repetitive, low value menial tasks that leasing teams are so often bogged down doing today.

That's the number one complaint that properties have and why we have such a high attrition rate in multifamily is because they feel overwhelmed with the property. So, so today we're the most adopted bought in multi-family. That's great, but we certainly, we don't want attendance stopping there. We we've launched Lisa bought a student housing, bought affordable housing that actually has wait lists and does pre-qualifications in addition to our conventional,

but you know, it's interesting, there's so much more you can do with bot technology. We intend to, and not just being on a property website, distributing it to other social channels, but even email, like responding to emails and, and missed calls and texts. So the bot technology, there's, there's a big tomorrow coming down the pipe with automation technologies.

Can we talk a little bit about that? I know maybe by the way that the viewers have learned about it, maybe it came from a marketing conversation, maybe a technical conversation, or, or maybe it's just a consumer that's renting and they're like, I can do all these things and these other industries very well. So what's, what's the w what's really different about what you guys are building versus maybe some of the other things that are available,

I guess. So, you know, let me put it this way. So the kind of maybe answered it a slightly different way. So four years ago, our intent was to be the absolute best chat bot property websites that we could build. What we, we didn't realize that the automated technology could be repurposed. As I, as I just mentioned,

we had some aha moments in 2020 after conducting about 4 million conversations, was that, you know, wow, this bot actually really, really does work after hours. It really does save property management time and facilitates. Lisa's. What was interesting after 4 million conversations last year, we realized that 60% of the conversation happening on the bot were happening after hours. So after a 6:00 PM and before 8:00 AM,

and it saves about an eight 80 hours of time for, at the property and facilitates an average of about four leases a month. So, so we had this thesis for what we believe the bot would do for people in the industry over time. But now we've got a lot of hard data to kind of, to back that up. Does that answer your question?

Yeah. Yeah. And I, I, I'm really curious about through that data there, there's always been conversations around, you know, how to show up and prove the leasing journey and you know, all of this like that, but what, what is it truly that a renter wants, discovered anything about it? Yeah. You know what I think,

and most anyone listening will agree. They want real time accurate conversations. They want information 24, seven, three 65, and they want control of the leasing process. I mean, if you think about it, you've got, so I can, I can book a flight, pick my seat. I can upgrade my hotel. I can have pretty much any food now ordered and sent to my house.

So we are, we're basically realizing we have control over so many processes and things today. It's really not that different with, with the leasing process. They want control and they want the information when they want it. Here's what the renters don't want. They don't want lead forms. I think, and look, I've built, some sites have lots of lead forms.

So I lived a diet on the lead form, but they don't want to do that nowadays. They just want a simple, easy access to information they want when they want it. They want it 24, seven, three 65. Yeah. And, and a lot of, I would imagine mobile is driving a lot of that, especially on the fly know the,

just the tapping versus, you know, completing the long forms. I know, I know when we even do our events and things, we'll get a bounced email because, you know, they typed in the information and accurately because, you know, they, they forgot they did a dot con instead of.com. You know, like there's some kind of a typo.

And so I imagine if you could take some of those elements away from the customer and make it easy on them, that end, except with better, better. Okay. Yeah, it went, okay. So it's funny we use the term tenderized. So our F if we think about it today, especially with mobile cars, so 65% of the people using it are actually using it on mobile.

And it's a great user experience. What people don't want to do on mobile is they want to have type stuff in, right. They want to touch and swipe, swipe left swipe. Right, right. But Tinder. So, so what we realized, and one of the reasons we ended up going over to guided conversations, because you could swipe and tap.

And that's just a great user experience, especially with the mobile. And you, you eliminate some of the complexities of trying to figure out what people are saying by doing the tenderized approach of touch and swipe. Yeah. So tell me about the conversations you're having with executives today. Obviously, you know, sometimes we're talking about leasing journey, it's, it's passed on to marketing departments,

or, you know, other business leaders within the business unit, but a CEO today, it has to think about how to design a business so that it's very easy for people to become customers. Right. That would be a great thing. If you can keep the revenue going, chances are, you could reinvest in the business. And so is this a conversation you're seeing that it's,

it's taken on more of a, a global, you know, executive role in terms of, of, of caring about how to build these, these things into our business? Well, certainly when you look at operational efficiencies, when you look at the fact that my folks are going home at, you know, six, six 30 at night, well,

who's mining the Ford and having a digital agent available to answer these questions after hours becomes very effective. When you realized that I'm hiring a group of people to really, and let's, let's talk about leasing professionals, they're, they're there to provide empathy. They're having conversations. They connect with humans, the bots never going to do that. It's just giving them information.

But what's happening is we're, we're kind of putting our leasing team in almost this scenario where they have to be bots reply to email, reply, to text reply, to, and rather than doing what they do best, which is conversations with people. So when you look at operational efficiencies, let 80% of the repetitive menial, low reward stuff, be automated,

let a bot and handle, let the humans then be freed up to do what humans do best and have conversations and the thighs with the renters and provide great customer support. So every CEO and operational person should absolutely be looking at it for those metrics. Yeah. I always, I would probably only ask you this question, but I'm curious, you know,

back, even in the early days of launching some of the earlier brands that you've worked on, there's always been that moment where we've got to sell the future or, or paint the picture of a bigger and better future using this new way. You know, are you seeing any parallels by going through those transitions? I remember back in the days when we had to sell people on,

you need a website, you know, so they're coming from different areas. Are you seeing any kind of parallels to, you know, adopting this type of technology? Am I seeing parallels relative to like in the early days clients? Oh yeah. So it's funny you say that. So I think of back when we started apartment guide.com in 1999, Hey,

put in your pricing because the people that want to put in their pricing, please call for pricing. What we noticed was consumers had skipped right past it, and they went to the properties that pricing. So if you have pricing, you got 10 times the results. And so finally people figured out, well, I probably should put pricing in here because it's,

it's helping my Results. And it's really the same thing that we're seeing now. I mean, when you look at some of the, you know, is the, it does really work. Just some of the questions we get asked is this thing really going to help me? What are the pushbacks? And, and that's what we get asked. It looks cool.

It looks kind of fun, but it isn't gonna make a difference. And the reality is that it absolutely does. Again, we talked about the after hours on day 30, when we launched them, bought for property and they distributed, we do a 30 take 32 day review. And that is where you really start to see the fun because they were thinking,

my gosh, this thing is really working. Like it's working after hours, it's setting up appointments. We just got two leases as Results of the conversations. And so you have the shiny toys and look, I've been part of that. And in 2002, I was speaking in San Antonio and a guy said to me, you know, the internet, when I was running apartment guy.com,

just like the CB radio, the seventies, it's just a passing fad. I always wonder where that guy is today. But clearly the ILS is, became very much an intrinsic part of the marketing outlook and bosses are going to be very much the same way and automation technology. Yeah. And, you know, historically real estate operators, we tend to want to build our own stuff.

Let's just, you know, and, and I'm seeing a, more of a trend in partnering with real experts. And in my opening remarks, I talked about where the automotive industry we talked about, you know, I, I grew up when you had cars that had really crappy radios and, and, and because the were trying to build them and,

and I don't know, we need a radio. Let's, let's just manufacture one. And finally, they, you know, Bose gets in there and JBL gets in, there were like, these guys do sound really, really, really well. Well, and they're like, Hey, you know, there's value in partnering and people that focus on one thing and make sure that it's continually evolving,

continually developing. Are you, are you seeing any trend like that? Is this something, anybody can build themselves? Oh, wow. Loaded question. Can they possibly, but you meant to build out your own bot. We've had people try and they come back and like, this is way harder than we thought. Right. Right. And so suddenly all the resources and we're like,

look, don't, don't worry about that. We're the experts in this. If you ever see the movie city slickers with Jack plants and Billy crystal. Yeah. I think I may be dating myself, but that can be like the late eighties and early nineties Jack in his, you know, ruffian cowboy says, if you figure out, just figure the secret to life is one thing.

If you figure out that one thing, just do that. And, and for us, we, aren't doing three other things. One of the 20 products, we're kind of an afterthought, you know, we focus entirely on nothing but just bots and bot technology. And that's why we're, we're kind of ahead of the other folks. But look, if you're a property management company,

you could hire a team of 15 people for a year and it'll, it'll take a half, a million dollars to go out and do this, go with somebody that specializes in multi-family technology. And look, we're not the only game in town. I get that there were other bot solutions as well, but let the people who are experts in that manage that for you.

It's a tough technology to build and build, right? Yeah, absolutely. And to get access to all those conversations, what is influencing these conversions to appointments? Is it the way that we're messaging them? Is it the ease of it? What's what's the, what moves the needle there? I guess It's it's so, okay. When we look at,

when people come in, sometimes people come in and they want to look at, find a home. They're looking at availability, maybe it's specials. The point being is you've got to give them the information they want, but the moment that they want it. So if I wonder what your specials and your amenities are, give it to them in a second.

And once you give that to them or want to look at a Matterport video. So I want to take a look at the tours and videos. Well, what we do is we put right below that schedule appointment. And so we know that where they're going to leak to likely from after looking at a video to schedule appointment, they're going to, they're going to do that.

So the, the magic sauce, if you will, is really just giving them the information that they're looking for, the moment they're looking for it and letting them kind of guide their own path down the search, when they're ready and they have the information, they will then schedule that appointment and come into the property. And so it's just having an information.

And honestly, it's a three o'clock in the morning. It's 11:00 PM. It's at 1:00 AM. And so you have to have that information readily available. Exactly what they're looking for when they're looking for it, wherever they're looking for, it could be on the Yelp. It could be on Google. My business could be on Facebook. So tell me a little bit about,

you know, once you have this in place, how does it, how does it get into my portfolio? What's that look like? The next steps onboarding? Or is this like months as a days? Is it, Well, it depends on the product. It could be months. So the typical I can speak for ourselves that the typical process is.

And that really is the question. It's funny. We we've toyed around with doing this commercial around the, Hey is your onboarding experience band. And then we have like a 50 tons of bricks just falling on someone's head. And that's what people feel like when they think, Oh my gosh, I got to launch this new product. Oh, I got to train everybody.

It's daunting. I get it. As some of these products are very intensive, great products with us. We basically say, Hey, look, it's very simple. Give us your property name and your hydro website address. We'll build it two days. We're going to send you a link, upload it with your website provider. You're live, literally. That's all you have to do.

And when they realize how easy it is and the process and the customer support that you provide, and then they see the data, it really becomes a bit of a no-brainer because they're like, wow, this is quite simple. I didn't have to do that much. I didn't really have to train my people because while the bot does everything, so let's start deploying more.

So that's typically the path we see when we, when we introduce the bot to somebody we'll test a few properties, they see the data, the ease of implementation, and then they kind of go down the path and yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And so I'm also curious, and maybe, you know, this off the, off the cuff is, you know,

testing the assumption. Sometimes people, you know, don't engage, they don't get on the call with you because they have a presupposition about, Oh, I don't have time for this or all those things. Was there anything that you've discovered or learned that a prospective client or client had about what, how things would go, but then after they became a client,

they're like, wow, that was just a lot easier. Or that just went a little smoother than I expected. I more like testing our assumptions. Sure. Yeah, absolutely. And the assumption is this is new technology. I mean, Boston new technology, it looks cool. Hey, look, I've been around 22 years in multifamily. I've seen some shiny,

totally has come and go. I get it. And some of them were just that shiny toys. They, they look cool. But at the end of the day, they just really did. Didn't do that much. So one of the big questions we always get us, what is it doing? Where, and how does it work? Is this just another shiny toy or is this actually going to have a significant impact on my business?

And so that's the question and it's a valid one that we're getting. And it's the same question. I'd be asking as an operator. And that's why I always say the proof's in the data. The proof is absolutely in the data. When you look at what it's doing, what it's setting up, how it's facilitating leases, how it's working after hours,

and you have hard data to support that you begin to realize, wow, I'm getting a few less emails. I'm getting more appointments. I'm getting a few less phone calls, but I'm getting great conversations through the bot. And this data supports the fact that this is a digital agent working 24 seven. It is affecting my bottom line. Yeah. And that,

that data continues to grow as you enroll and enroll more clients. I imagine just getting better at knowing what those compelling points are in, in, in the technology. Are you, do you see a roadmap for a future for this? Cause I, I imagine that bots, even though they've been around, they've come a long way and there's some excitement and you mentioned senior house,

there's other aspects of what you're doing at the wait lists and these types of things. What do you see the future for them? So that's interesting. So three years ago, four years ago, but really three years ago, we thought this'll be cool. A chat bot. What we did not see to be honest with you was, and what we've learned is there are so many other issues and other channels,

whether it be missed calls, whether it be text, email, current resident, all the places that consumers can find you in all the digital landscape. And so we realized that the bot and, or more importantly, more accurately stated automation technology can solve a lot of these issues. And again, give people time back the, the proliferation or the ability for consumers to find content in.

So many places is a good thing and a bad thing because now you have to be present and available and all of these channels that's impossible. And you can't do that 24 seven. So we're a technology has kind of created this problem of you can be everywhere 24, seven. You can't really be everywhere. So let's let technology solve the problem by using some automation technologies.

And that's where we're going to be going with with all sorts of other channels, as well as tracking sources. And look, this'll be fun this time. Next year, we'll be talking about the renter's journey and multitouch action. You should, the bot offers a three-dimensional view into where the renter has been. Did they engage if they did engage? How valuable was that engagement?

And so now you can start to track the value of your marketing sources, how, how valuable they were. Did it send you an email? Was it an engagement and conversation? And then you can really put the power back in the marketing team. Folks who say, I know where my traffic's coming from. I know who's engaging based on that traffic.

And they have a much better window into decision-making moving forward. Yeah. We've, we've got a question here from Paul. He's asking, you know, are there, can you tell us about who's using the product, maybe some leading clients. I'm not sure if you can share that or not, but I think I know which Paul you're talking about too.

So yeah, we have about 120 property management companies today that are using us. We, again, last year we did over 4 million conversations. We have all of the five top largest management companies that the big five, if you will, we have a number of companies that have partnered with us. So they're re they're actually building their bot solution on top of our bot.

And so many big companies in our industry, they realized we can't build this thing. This is just impossible to manage. So you guys have the only enterprise grade solution that is scalable, that we can build on top of. And so we have some partners that we have put in place that, that are also building on top of her bot. So,

so there you go. We've got about 120 management companies, but we're going very quickly. And quite frankly, we've only been actively selling for over two years. So it has taken off very quickly. Yeah. Actually I was at an innovation summit in Atlanta and I met, I think your, your partner there. So I was let go. Yeah,

yeah, yeah. So I'm the mouthpiece, but he's the brains behind it, all the toughest. I'm asking you all these, I'm asking you all these technology questions and, and it's, it's awesome to see a leader that understands all aspects of the business, you know, and, and you have a good understanding of what these clients need. I mean,

it's like, I, I think about like you got to build a great team, you know, you mentioned the technology and how it's evolving. I mean, you're talking about like software engineers, you know, just that, but you have to build something that the customer wants the client, but also you're creating a victory for their resident, which is the win for them.

And it's, you just need to be bring all those pieces together. So it's been fun actually seeing that journey. It has. And you know, it's funny, I'll tell people I I'm a mentor for startup businesses and companies over the years. And I always say, pick your partners very wisely. They will make or break you. And I was very lucky to meet slot,

go through a friend of a friend Z had the other side of the coin. So yes, I have the industry background and knowledge and I get technology, but he got this to a whole other level in his subject matter expertise made such a difference in the decision making. And I'll be really all air, some dirty laundry. I'll tell you, I,

I loved natural language processing. I thought it was cool. And this is what we need to do. And he just said, it's not there yet. It is not there yet. And I said, well, hold on. That's the wow factor. And he goes, it made me the wow factor, but it's not working. We have the largest multi multi-family proprietary NLP engine and all of multi-family.

And so he said, look, we got to move to guided conversation and I fought him on it, but he was right. And the, and the data proved out. So picking your partners is such an important thing. And he has made such a contribution to our technology. Yeah, that's, that's awesome. I think about, you know,

w our brand brings together, it's one thing to have information about products and services, but how do you take that and bring it into the business? Who is it that helps identify those things? And I know as, as the, the, the partner team that you guys have been getting a lot of momentum and, and you're sort of scaling and growing those S aspects.

So I think it's important that investors and operators know that too, that you're, you know, you're sort of in this for the long run, and it's something that people can count on. I think through the journey, you're not going to be forced to switch Great. We're going to do a fire sale tomorrow. Yes, we did actually get a,

we self-funded for awhile. We did some investment capital. We've got a wonderful partner and our investors and we've, and they've got a lot of background in, in our, in our industry. So no, we're not going anywhere anytime soon, we're doing quite well. And there's a lot of problems that we intend on solving over these next, over these next couple of years.

So we're not going anywhere. And we want to continue to expand our product offering and look partner with as many companies that we call it, the ubiquitous bot, because the bots in so many middle of so many conversations, we realized that we need to have this integrate with self guided tour companies, which is another big thing is coming in our industry. It needs to be integrated with content appointment types.

And so we've done a ton of integration so that we can actually have the bot work in any platform with anybody at any time and, and provide that the conversation from one point to another. So that's where I come into being able to understand what some of those relationships are Slack go in his team were fantastic at building out those integrations. That's great. And are you helping brands with that?

I mean, I know like Google my business and the move to even Google themselves, understand the power of the messaging component, even, you know, ranking other companies and brands higher in search results, because they have the ability to, it's a message. I mean, that's a component too. I don't know if brands are thinking about that or you're seeing anything there.

Well, well, they are, and I'll tell you right now, Google, my business is killing it GMB. So because our bot is able to launch onto, you know, we can put it on Google, my business, Facebook, Yelp, Instagram, Twitter. So you, your name ILS is so our bot doesn't just live on a property website.

It actually can go on all of these channels. So it actually sees how well these other channels are working. And let me tell you, GMB is absolutely killing it with, with conversations. So I always tell people, they say often get asked, well, where should we put it? Well, the first is run your property website. The next is Google my business because we're seeing so many people start a conversation on GMB.

The question we get asked sometimes is, well, why wouldn't I have it just come to the website? Well, the answer is because they're probably looking for a very specific set of information. And if you have a digital agent pop-up right off GMB, then they're going to go right to where they want versus a website, which is fine, and websites are good,

but you kind of begin the whole process. You know, a bot is a user interface that, that actually allows you to get exactly what you want within a second or two. And so I say, put it on GMB nexus, probably Facebook, then Yelp, then maybe Instagram and a few others. But those are where we're seeing a ton of pickup and Google my business being one of them.

Yeah. That's amazing fun stuff there. And I've got a question here from Josh. She's asking automation technology gives the front office time, their time back. Of course, that's, that's a great aspect. Would love to know how many property management companies are using automated technology. I think kind of addressed that a little bit, but is this in automation giving time back?

Well, so there are other kinds of automation technology. There's ours. Ours is really on the front end. So today it's very much in any it's on their property websites on the front end of the consumer funnel. You do have other automation, other automation technologies that actually can respond to your text messages and your emails that are post to guests card, maybe manage more of the consumer,

the perspective, excuse me, the current resident. And so look, here's the, I think a friend of mine Jennifer's to joke is I've known for many years, said at NAA last year, or whenever the last Nia, we look automation, AI bot technology are coming and they're staying. So they're not going anywhere. Pick your technologies and the ones that solving your biggest pain points today and start engaging them and optimizing.

So, so yes, there's other automation technologies. I think we're probably at about 40% of the active marketplace and adopting this. So we've got a long ways to go there, different kinds of technologies you can deploy. That's great. And are, do you see an aspect, like at what point does it interact with the leasing agent? Is there any human takeover aspect or a,

to really that conversation, I guess, that you focused on? Yeah. So before I came here, I was at a company was the largest tech company in the world. And so my job is to deploy chat worldwide. Like it was kind of a big footprint. What I realized going into multifamily here in the U S is that chat was there's challenged because in multi-family the people,

as we said are so busy, they really don't have the ability to sit there and wait for a chat. So getting someone on the other end to answer was actually very difficult. You can deploy that to a chat center or a call center and, and there's some good ones out there. They're never going to entirely know the property as well is that property agents is going to know that.

So, so what we learned is chat was difficult. There is a tech, there is a concept where, Hey, if the bot gets in trouble, then let's put a hot transfer to human, which sounds great. That sounds like, Oh, well, that makes sense. The problem is the, the it's very clunky. It's not easy to do.

You're waiting for a human people, get frustrated. Then the human has to review all of the contents, see what the conversation was. And they just went from a one-second response and a bot to now a 38 seconds up to 45 second response. So what we call human transfer of bot to human transfer sounds cool, but it actually really does not work that well in practice,

the C-SAT scores or customer satisfaction scores for that are below 35%. That's not a good customer satisfaction score. So we actually take a different tactic. We encapsulate the conversation, get that off via an email or into the lead center. And we put what the conversation is, but the property can see, wow, this is a really interesting conversation. They have a lot of great questions.

Okay. Here's what I need to do and they can respond. So that's how we handle it on our side. And I would just be very careful of the, what we call it, the hot transfer to human. It doesn't always work so well. Yeah. I mean, it feels like we're always trying to get new traffic, new leads, new rentals.

And it sounds like even on the website aspect, I mean, there's found money here just in capturing people that, you know, they don't want to do a contact us. They don't want to submit an application or even a form, as you said, but right there you're, you're capture them in that conversation. It's pretty interesting. Yeah. We actually saw about a 20% what we call lead or appointment lift because so many people do come to property websites.

They don't want to pick up the phone and they really don't want to fill out a lead form, but they do see this little widget down here and they click on it. Oh. And so what happens is it becomes a third point of contact. So when you add a bot to a typical property website, you actually see 20, as much as 40% incremental lead and appointment lift when adding it.

So it doesn't really, and the value of what you're getting as much higher because it's a conversation, not just a whip. So we do see some lead lift coming in from bots being added to websites. And you guys are taking more of that, that conversational approach anyway. Right. I think I saw that in your messaging, in terms of, it's not really,

even about leads, it's really about having that effective. So I have a, I think our industry has what we call lead fatigue. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm partially responsible. So I built out some ILSs and our goal was to drive as many leads as we possibly can. And to the point now where properties feel overwhelmed, they're like, we just can't handle all these leads.

And so what we have is this, again, the lead fatigue, our goal is to not drive more leads, though. We do see incremental lift at times is to drive more conversations. It's a very different thing. When you say, Hey, what do you see? Standards, something come through and it's you see it? 55 times in a web lead is very different than when a property and a leasing team says a hundred tire conversation.

And all they really want to know now is, do you have any covered parking spots left? Well, that's a high value conversation. They know what they've been looking for. They've narrowed it down. They just have one question that maybe the bot just can't answer because the bot doesn't know, now you have a much higher value conversation, which has a much higher proclivity becoming an appointment.

And ultimately at least, Yeah, you get all those other things out of the way. I mean, that's a buying signal right there. I mean, they're already thinking about where they're going to be parking that's Right. That's a good point. I didn't think about the, a great, yeah. You know, back in, you know, you want them thinking about where's the furniture going when they're inside the unit.

But if there are parking has been that, that challenge that a lot of communities have struggled with and who knows maybe the customer's coming from another scenario. And so that leasing agent, now isn't dealing with all that other thing, you know, capturing the leads and all that stuff, they then can be effective in a more relationship way. And this, this journey that people are on,

do you find that the more, the more conversations that we have, the more rapport that's being built, the more emotional connection that's happening, even though it's a chat conversation. Oh. So if I'm being really honest and that's what I was saying in the beginning, bots are not good at empathy. They are not good. They're never going to connect with you on my sister had something happen.

And so therefore I'm this bot doesn't care. It's there to give you information. And if you're just looking for gracious, wonderful. That would be like that. You know, that they've already had an engagement on a website, a little chat, little question, or a response, I guess, to the, to the, to the tool, the technology,

and then they're invested in this sort of process, or they have confidence. I can come back. I only had an hour at lunch. I'm just, I'm here. I need quickly information. Do you find that when they come back and revisit the site that there's more stickiness, I guess is probably my rephrase my question as to the conversion. Yeah.

So the bot knows if you come back, what's interesting. I think the best way to answer that question is if I call a property and the property is having a kind of, so what are you looking forward to bedroom? What are you looking to move to? Right? It's almost become very automated. The leasing team. What if the leasing team actually had all of that information knew exactly when they're moving new,

the floor plans knew the, the budget got all their information and all they wanted to know is that they had a parking spot. So now the properties proactively calling the consumer, Hey John, great. Hey, just want to let you know. Yes, we do have that covered parking spot. We'd love to have you come on in what fantastic consumer experience that was,

that they've run through all this. So I'm not going through a checklist. I'm actually having a conversation and they have the answer. That to me is a fantastic customer. Yeah. So here's an example of a technology that's changing the way we may lease, but it's activating and empowering the leasing agent that's in place to do to be more effective and maybe more money in their pocket if they're,

if they're committed. Right. Right. Well, so we've noticed what we call w w w we've been calling the Pavlovian effect. You get leads, come through leads, come through PR leasing teams. Seeing this a thousand times, I have a 100,000 chance of this actually becoming a lease. Then you see a conversational note come through and you can see the whole conversation and exactly what they're interested in.

Exactly what it was, what we started to notice as those leads are responded to so much faster, because the person knows that that's most likely going to convert to appointment into a lease. And a, and so it's changing a little bit of the behavior on the property side. All of this can be summarized on both sides of the equation by expediting and speeding up the leasing cycle because the property is getting information specific that they can answer.

And now the residents getting what they want. And so rather than all starting from mountain here, they're starting right here. And so it is speeding up the leasing cycle and that's what conversational leasing is really benefiting. Wow. That's great. Would you share any sort of do's and don'ts that you may think would be valuable, I guess, for, for the viewers?

Yeah. I could get in trouble on this one, but I'm gonna go ahead and do it maybe subs in general. So we'll start with the dues. I may have a couple of don'ts, but yeah, if you're out, if you're looking at bot technology, automation technology, the first thing I'd say is personalize, whatever that is, customize it,

let it be your brand, build your brand. So make sure that whatever that widget is on your site, wherever it is, it's reflecting new brand, put your bot everywhere, make sure that you can put it on Facebook and Google my business and all of these channels, 24 seven, not just your property website. So that's a very important thing.

And then make sure you have all of your appointment types scheduled. So if you have in-person self-guided because since COVID, it used to be everyone who would show up at a certain appointment time in person, but now it's self guided live video phone, and all of that. So make sure that you have all of your appointment types engaged and, and made it made available to your,

to your prospective manner. Some of the don'ts I have a challenge when people say, Hey, we'll help you train the bot. That's, that's hard. That's very hard to, it's very labor intensive and it's not very scalable. So if someone says you can help us train the bot, or we can help you train the bot that that's, that's a red flag,

but do not put endless widgets on your website. It's turning into Las Vegas. Some of our websites, you've got nudge camp, you've got this, you've got that coming in. And so our sites are looking like Las Vegas. And the last thing I'll say is, look, I can't wait to have natural language processing, be where it needs to be and handle 95% of the conversations with only 5% breakage.

That is because we have the largest NLP engine in all multifamily. The problem is it's just not there yet. The average natural language processing bot breaks 35% of the time. So that may not sound a lot, but that means three and a half times, or having a bad experience. So NLP is not ready for prime time. Hopefully it will be in a year or two and we'll be ready for that.

But it's not quite there yet. Yeah. Listen, this has been awesome. I just think about some of the time we could share. We could spend all day talking about This, but I, I, I really appreciate you showing up for our audience. I know these are some things that they have questions about. Tell us a little bit about where they can get information from you,

and then we can probably even link it in the comments below, but again, just being a thought leader for this topic, appreciate what you're doing and thank you for showing up. Absolutely. Yeah. And they're welcome to go to a better bot.com. They can reach me@robertandbetterabout.com and happy to answer any questions as you, as you mentioned, I could talk about this all day,

so I'm happy to answer any questions they have. And we've got a fantastic team of people who provide outstanding customer support and service. So any one of them can help anytime too. So, yeah. Thank you for having me on. I really enjoyed this. Yeah, that's awesome. And we'll be tracking your success. So we'll see you in the next show.

Sounds like a plan. Appreciate it. Thank you, Robert. Appreciate it.