Published on October 24th, 2024
By Megan Eales Monroe
As training manager for 29th Street Communities and host of the Rooms with Ronald podcast, Ronald Harrington specializes in helping industry professionals level up their approach to marketing and leasing. But in 2023, when his property management company created a new “experience department,” he kicked off an ambitious project that would help him level up his own understanding of what truly makes or breaks the resident experience.
To do so, Ronald stepped into renters’ shoes by secret shopping more than 100 properties for his “Lease Across America” project. As Ronald explains, “What better way to see what other people are doing so we know what to do better?”
His biggest takeaway from visiting 100 properties across the United States? Creating stellar renter experiences is the key to standing out with prospects.
To dive deeper into his extensive hands-on leasing research and get his take on how to improve the renter experience, we invited him to join us on The Top Floor podcast. In addition, we discussed the latest findings from the 2024 AppFolio Property Manager Renter Preferences Report to see how key findings align with Ronald’s insights and experience.
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Meet Our Guest
Ronald Harrington
Ronald Harrington is a long-time veteran of the multifamily industry. He started in leasing in 2014 in Sacramento, CA, and worked his way up from Leasing Professional to Community Manager.
He is a 2019 graduate of Ball State University with a Master of Arts in Residential Property Management. Since 2019, he has worked in learning and development, specializing in leasing training.
He considers himself the “lease whisperer.” Currently, he is a Training Manager with 29th Street Communities.
Episode Transcript
Megan Eales Monroe:
Welcome to The Top Floor, the real estate management podcast that’s dedicated to keeping you one step ahead of industry trends with expert advice and actionable insights. I’m your host, Megan Eales Monroe. Together, we’ll dig deep with today’s property management leaders and industry change-makers to help you unlock new possibilities, transform your day-to-day operations, and grow your business. And, no matter the size or type of portfolio you manage, we’ve got you covered here on The Top Floor.
Last year, more than 580,000 new multifamily units came online. But the rental housing construction boom is far from over. In fact, based on the current pace of multifamily housing development, we could see nearly one million more new units come to market by the end of 2025.
That means renters will soon have more choices than ever before. And it also means an increasingly crowded landscape is set to become even more competitive. To stand out, property management teams will have to go further. This is especially true when competitors offer similar amenities and price points. Instead, property management teams will need to shift to a new strategy, which is taking time to truly understand renter preferences so they can also compete on experience.
To help you do just that, we’re chatting with Ronald Harrington on today’s episode. As Training Manager for 29th Street Communities, Ronald knows firsthand what it takes to create stellar resident experiences. And as Host of the Rooms with Ronald podcast, he regularly speaks with industry professionals to understand how they’re creating better renter experiences, too.
In our conversations today, we’ll help shed new light on what residents really want, with key findings and insights from the 2024 AppFolio Property Manager Renter Preferences report. That report is available to download appfolio.com/renter-preferences. In addition, we’ll also compare top findings from the Renter Preferences report with Ronald’s experiences from his “Leasing Across America” project, where he secret shopped more than 100 different properties across the United States.
Let’s dive in now to see why delivering on resident preferences is the key to standing out and staying competitive in 2025 and beyond.
Megan Eales Monroe:
Welcome, Ronald. We are so excited to have you on this episode of The Top Floor Podcast.
Ronald Harrington:
Yeah, so hey, thanks for having me on The Top Floor. I’m so excited to be on the podcast. My name is Ronald Harrington. I’m a training manager with 29th Street communities. We’re based out of Louisville, Kentucky. So if you like bourbon, Bourbon Country, that’s the place to be. I also am the host of the podcast Rooms with Ronald, where we talk about everything leasing and marketing. Yeah, what else do you want to know about me? I’m kind of boring.
Megan Eales Monroe:
I wouldn’t say so. Tell us a little bit about your Leasing Across America project that you did. I think that was something that I was really stoked to hear about when you shared about it at Apartmentalize and then also on Rooms with Ronald, but could you fill our listeners in?
Ronald Harrington:
Yeah, so in 2023, I had this crazy idea that was out of the world, is I wanted to shop a hundred different apartment communities across the United States because I really wanted to see what the experience was like post-COVID, right? So we knew we were status quo up until COVID and then COVID really shook the industry and turned it upside down and we were trying so many different things and I thought, “Well, 2023 we’re back to a normalization of some sorts,” and so I wanted to see what that experience was like. And with the company I was working for, we had created a new experience department that we were transitioning into where we’re, “How are we going to create these experiences?” and I was like, “Well, what better way to see what other people are doing so we know what to do better?”
So I set out across the country when I was traveling for pleasure, when I was going into workplaces, I went in early and I end up shopping 101 because I like to be an overachiever and I shopped 88 different property management companies in 28 different cities in 13 states. So I wanted to make sure I got a sample size of the whole country because there’s Lease Across America, what I didn’t want someone to say was, “Well, you only shopped in Indiana,” or, “You only shopped in Texas, I really wanted a wide variety,” so I made sure I shopped in markets like Miami, Las Vegas, New York City, and then on the flipside, I also did my hometown of Muncie, Indiana and I did like Columbus, Ohio and Cincinnati and Louisville, but there was also Dallas and San Diego. So just a really wide variety of properties across the country to really see in different sizes and different high rises and mid-rises and garden style really to examine that experience.
Megan Eales Monroe:
Were there any cities that stood out either in a good way or a bad way?
Ronald Harrington:
I think, overall, the experience was probably not what I was expecting. I was not really blown away at the experience. I found it to be impersonal and very, “Do this, do this, do this.” No one really got to know me. I think Las Vegas stood out to me probably the most, but not in a good way, like there was one property in particular that turned it for me, and literally, I walked in and the manager refused to tour me, so it was not a great experience. She proceeded to argue with me that I didn’t have an appointment and I’m like, “Well, I have confirmation,” “Nope, if you’re not on my calendar, it wasn’t anywhere.” That really stood out to me.
I remember going to New York City and, like, it was one of the properties I toured, one of the apartment homes I was shown overlooked The Gershwin Theatre. So I just imagined myself every morning waking up to see The Wicked sign. So I thought that was super cool, but my friend went and toured that with me and it was a hybrid in-person guided for the amenities and then a self-tour. And so when we’re touring the minis with the leasing professional, they added no value to it. My friend was like, “What she did could have been a QR code that you scanned with your camera, so she was really unsure.”
Then we saw another one that overlooked Penn Station that was very amenity-heavy. It was the first time I had ever heard of properties doing add-ons, right? For ancillary income, they were saying, “Here’s the gym and here’s the clubhouse. It’s not included in your rent. If you want it, you can add it on.” So it was like $130 if you wanted both or $80 if you want just the gym and $60 if you wanted the clubhouse. So that was the first time I had ever experienced that, and I thought, I was like, “Oh, that’s a really cool way to gauge what people’s interests are,” and those spaces were immaculate. They were so clean because the people are paying to use them, right? So there’s not the entitlement. So I thought those two cities to me were what really stood out.
Megan Eales Monroe:
Wow, that’s so interesting and it makes sense. Both of those cities have a big reputation, so it doesn’t surprise me. Well, it sounds like you’ve really been on both sides. You’ve seen things through the resident eyes, you’ve walked a day or two in their shoes, but also on the, you know, leasing team’s perspective, I think you’ve really lived that as well. So I’m excited to dive in and talk a little bit about resident experience today. As you know, that’s a topic that AppFolio recently did a big survey on. We reached out to renters across the country and asked them what they expect during the leasing journey and from their interactions with property managers. So I think you’ll have a great perspective to share with us on that. But before we jump in, I was wondering if you could share what your definition is for resident experience and why is it so important to prioritize it?
Ronald Harrington:
Yeah, so I think the resident experience is actually a twofold. For me, I think it should just be called the living experience because you have to really break it down into a couple things, right? Before they even get to become a resident, there’s the prospect experience and that prospect journey and what it is. And that’s going to set the tone for your whole gamut of the life cycle, right? So I think when people … There are companies that really focus really on the resident experience, but it’s not so much the prospect experience. There’s no tech. It’s status quo and I’m like, “Well, you don’t have the stage set for what the expectation is.”
So for me, that resident experience is all in companies from the moment I go to Google and I’m searching a property to the post-move out that I’m going to get when I get my final account state in my deposit, right? So that’s that whole experience and I want all the different touchpoints in there and I think it’s so important to really prioritize that because this is what renters are expecting now, right?
What’s important to prioritize though is that customer service is not experience, and I feel like a lot of companies they think that they’re providing excellent customer service or resident service or whatever that service piece is that that is the experience. I’m like, “No, they’re two different things, you know…but you have to keep that in mind.” So I think prioritizing both of that, “What is it that the renters looking for in your demographics to create that experience?” keeping in mind that you still have to provide that stellar customer service as well.
Megan Eales Monroe:
I love that you called out that those aren’t the same thing. In my mind, I think of customer service, that’s what happens when something goes wrong. You know, resident experience includes everything, hopefully all the things that are going right as well or the things that maybe you never hear about and for a good reason. So that’s a great point. So you have an interesting vantage point, because as a podcast host on Rooms with Ronald, you hear from property management and multifamily experts from around the country. So from your experience, how have you seen conversations about resident experience evolving or changing over the last few years?
Ronald Harrington:
Probably since 2022 on, we’ve started hearing about this experience. 2022 was that beginner year. We were testing the waters like, “What does the experience mean? What’s the journey?” 2023, we started to see more and more of these companies adapt to it. And what I really started noticing happening in 2023 was the tech-forward, those innovative companies, they started to change their leasing professionals title. So they weren’t calling them leasing specialists, they were calling them experience specialists.
And so I think we’re finally catching up to what other industries are doing and I’m hearing a lot of this, “How are we enhancing the resident experience for people that they want to live here as we adopt more technology?”
Megan Eales Monroe:
It’s interesting because technology is driving the change. It’s changing what people expect from every kind of experience that they have and their experience renting an apartment is just one facet of that. So that’s what we really tried to unearth in the renter preferences report that we did this year. We were able to gain a lot of insight into what prospects are looking for when they’re evaluating a new rental. So 88% of them told us that a property management company’s reputation on review sites is important. 95% of them said that clear and transparent listing information really matters. And then 76%, said they’re expecting to hear about a listing when they inquire within 24 hours of first contacting the owner property manager. And I bet that a subset of that 76% is expecting to hear back in 10 minutes or less.
Ronald Harrington:
So I found that statistic interesting of the 24 hours because I was expecting it to be within an hour or two. And actually, it’s like 83% of people expect a response in 20 minutes. So I found it interesting that they gave us a little leeway and my first thought was, “Were these renters maybe …” We do know a lot of renters look off hours, right? So they probably are 8:00, 9:00 at night. So that would understandably why they would say 24 hours, right? Because if I’m doing 8:00 or 9:00 at night, well, no one’s working. And so then I instantly went, “So if they’re looking for a response, are they looking for an AI response? Are they looking for a personalized response? What type of response?”
But I thought that was cool that they’re going to say, “Hey, here is … I’m going to give you a 24-hour leeway,” which is a lot nicer than I am. So I found that interesting. I thought the transparency one, that was a no-brainer to me. I knew that number was going to be high because that’s really what we’re looking for because we’re at a cross point in multifamily where it’s no longer consistent, right? So no longer can I go to a website and know what the price includes. 10 years ago, when I started in the industry in Sacramento, all of our pricing said on the website, “Call for details,” right? You knew you had to call the property.
2018 became … we started putting it out there, which was the base rent. And then now what’s happening is I can go to a website to Property A and they have a price and the price tells me everything gets broken out into. I go to Property B, it just tells me the price, I don’t know what that’s included because different PMS systems and how everyone’s doing things is not consistent anymore, right? Or what’s happening is I see the base rent price until I start the application. So I think there’s not the transparency in that manner, which it should be and I’m hoping, my hope is that in the next year we, as an industry, come together and find what that streamline looks for. And I think especially now with the news of legislation and junk fees and all of that, that we come together and say, “No, they’re not junk fees, but I can understand as a renter how they appear to be that way.”
Megan Eales Monroe:
Yeah. You know what I find interesting about the move towards greater transparency? When price is out there, it’s available for anybody who’s looking on a listing website to at least understand the base rent. That makes experience such a differentiator when renters are shopping for apartments because if they know, “These five apartments are all within my price range,” or they have a very similar price point. What they’re left to compare is on experience.
Ronald Harrington:
Yeah, I teach people all the time, “Renters that are coming to your property and they are going to your competitors, guess what? You all are about the same price point. That’s why they’re competitors, right? What they’re really coming to look at is you and the experience that you are providing to them, right?” And in my shops, there wasn’t a lot of differentiation between Property A and Property B. They all blur together. They all, for the most part, treated me like a number. No one got to know me, no one got to know the story and all of that. And so I found that very interesting. I’m like, “Well, how are renters deciding?” So I realized what they’re probably deciding is, “who responded to me first and I can go from there because I don’t remember Property A from Property B. I remember the bad ones because I knew I didn’t want to live there. I remember the gyms. They all kind of looked the same. The finishes all looked the same.”
Actually, I was just in Houston the other week and I shopped five properties in one day like a true prospect would do. And at the end of that day, I was exhausted. I was like, “Which property was that again?” And so I decided, “I remember, okay, this property had the valet parking because no one else did. Didn’t know how it worked as a prospect because no called, so that stood out to me. The second property became the property that had resort-style amenities, right?”
So I started finding these little things until I got to the last property and that experience of the last property was not perfect, but probably the best tour I had experienced in the last two years because she was personable. There was an experience behind it. She got to know me, she got to know what made me click. She tied things back into it. She found the instant connection of our love for coffee and Starbucks, right? And the fall drinks had just been rolled out and so we had, I’m like, “Oh my gosh, you have to try this drink. Here’s what I love about it,” and she tied it in and then she found out along that, she’s like, “Oh, one of my favorite things to do at Starbucks is to collect Starbucks mugs,” and instantly, I was like, “Oh my gosh, me too. I actually have 102. I had Curio collections that fit in.”
So when we went into the apartment, the first thing was, “Where are you going to put your Starbucks mugs, right?” because that was a big deal for me, the first time anyone had made that correlation and got to know me on that level.
Megan Eales Monroe:
I love that the thing that stood out the most wasn’t the fanciest technology or the best amenities, but it was a human being who cared about you and listened to you and focused on the relationship. And I think that it’s paradoxical. We’re here to talk about how technology affects the resident experience, but it’s not really about technology. It’s about, “Does that technology get out of the way and fade into the background so that the human side of things can come out?”
Ronald Harrington:
Right. And I think there’s opportunities for technology and AI. You put in show notes, right? Sooner than later and it’s probably already happening, AI is going to take those notes and it’s going to create a followup as if it were a human based off those notes. So in the followup, it can say, “I really enjoyed getting to learn more about your Starbucks collection, your 102 mugs. Remember in this apartment that we saw, you thought it could go on the wall where the TV’s going to be mounted and you would flip it, right?” Guess what? AI could do that. And a lot of times you’re not going to know the difference.
So I think, but getting down to it and not treating me a number was perfect. And let me tell you, she didn’t handle the objection. One of my objections was is I’m noticing all this smart home technology like digital keys. They had everything. They had built-in Bluetooth wireless speakers in their apartment home.
But then I look at the thermostat and it’s an old thermostat that’s not like a Nest or anything like that. It was just a regular analog normal thermostat and I was like, “So you’ve been bragging about how technology-forward you are, but yet, you don’t have Nest thermostats,” and she didn’t handle it well. She’s like, “Well, if you really want that, you can put that in yourself.” But I was willing to overlook that because of the relationship that we had built together.
Megan Eales Monroe:
That makes so much sense. I think that’s a real deciding factor. Humans make decisions based on that gut feeling and so that’s why that relationship matters. So shifting gears just a little bit, you train leasing teams. You help them improve and boost their performance.Leasing agents play such an important role in that prospect experience. What are some ways that they can help to meet some of these high renter expectations?
Ronald Harrington:
So I think it goes back to the foundation of leasing. I feel like, in the COVID world, we kind of hired a lot of bodies and these order takers and we didn’t give them the technology and the skillset to lease, right? So I think we have to teach them like, “We are going to have to go and really sell. Sell, sell, right?” So I think we go back to there. I think making them aware of what the expectations are in the unspoken because the prospect isn’t going to speak it anymore, right? They’re not going to go in and say, “Here’s my expectation. I expect you to respond within 24 hours. I expect you to treat me like a person. I expect it to be clean. I want …” They’re not going to say that, right?
So give them the tools and the surveys and encouraging people to go and learn on their own like, “Hey, here’s going on.” I’ve trained so many leasing agents in the last couple years. And I’ve been hearing, “I’ve been doing this two years,” “I’ve been doing this 10 years.” This was the first sales training I’ve ever went through that wasn’t computer-generated from an LM, a learning management system. So I think we’re getting those into understanding that and really letting them understand the psyche of what selling means and in that individualized sales process to that customer because how you sell to me is probably going to be different than how they sell to you, Megan, because we’re going to want different things and understanding that.
And what’s so unique now and why this is so important today versus five years ago is that I used to be able to tell you the clientele when I was in a market because everyone didn’t really move around, right? We didn’t move across the country. If we moved, a lot of times it was interstate. We would move from one city to another city, but now, you have people moving from California to Austin or you have people moving from New York City to Portland, right? Those expectations are different because they’re used to one way or another, right? They’re used to it.
I would venture to say Florida probably is the most equipped to lease to these types of people because they’ve always had the snowbirds coming down for the winter month, so they’ve experienced that and not a lot of other states in the country have. So I think it’s so important to really help them understand, “Each renter is going to have a different expectation and you need to find out what that expectation is,” because we haven’t experienced this in … We’re just now seeing the tip of the iceberg of people relocating across the country. I remember, when I moved to California 10 years ago, I did everything via email at the property I was going to work at and the onsite team was so frustrated that they had to lease over email like, “How do I get you the application? I had to print it out.” It was uncommon.
Now, you know, 50% of our prospects are probably moving from out of the state into new states. So these expectations are changing within the demographic that you’re used to.
Megan Eales Monroe:
That’s a good point. So you mentioned something a minute ago that I want to come back to. So you said that leasing is a sales role. I think that that might be a controversial thing. I agree with you for what it’s worth, but for folks who maybe haven’t thought of it that way before, why is leasing actually a sales role?
Ronald Harrington:
Because they drive the revenue and that’s the other thing, right? Customer service is also not sales, right? They’re two different buckets, right? Someone can provide great customer service and be horrible at sales. I see people interviewing, they’re like, “How would you handle this?” and we never asked them to sell me anything or we never talk about closing ratios. And I think this is where we start to see people start struggling, because again, you can be smiley and provide great customer service, but if you cannot ask for that sell, that’s where the trouble comes in. And I would venture to say, on my 101 shops, only 11 people ask me to apply for the apartment, which tells me we only have 11 people who are truly salespeople out of the 101 properties because a salesperson is going to ask you to apply for the apartment every single time.
And so I think, you’re right, it’s controversial. People say, “Oh, they’re not salespeople.” They’re salespeople. If you are telling them they need 10 move-ins in this month and you’re paying them a commission, they are salespeople. If there’s the word commission involved, they are salespeople.”
Megan Eales Monroe:
Absolutely. And when leasing agents understand it that way, they can understand better what actions they need to take to improve their performance, right? It’s not just, “Be nicer. Provide better service.” It’s now, “How are you affecting revenue? What is your contribution?” and getting them to think in those terms I think changes maybe the way that they interact with residents.
Ronald Harrington:
I think I was very fortunate when I entered into the industry 10 years ago to have a manager who made me take her on a mock tour. It was just thrown to me, right? We went through the normal process. She guided me through and then she says, “Okay, you’re going to take us on a mock tour. We will guide you to the apartment. Obviously, you don’t know where that is, but everything else is on you.”
And she said to me, “I’m not expecting you to know specifics like square footage. I can teach you that. I just need to see if you can sell in your personality.” Luckily for me, I did my homework. I knew that it had four pools on site and I knew it was like how many units. I did some homework that I could talk those talking points and I remember getting to the apartment and we were walking back to the office. So I said, “So what do you think? Are you ready to apply?” and she was like, “Well, we need to think about it,” and I verbatim quoted their special at that moment that they were offering.
And so we get back, she’s like, “How’d you know the special?” I said, “Well, while I was waiting, someone answered the phone and they told them over the phone, right?” So I took that like, “Hey, that was the first interview I’d ever did in multifamily, so I assumed that was standard practice, right? You do this. Every company does this.” So I took that away, right? So now anytime I interview a leasing agent on site, I make them take me on a mock tour. I think it’s her thing. Once they’re hired, the other thing that she did is she really made sure everyone in our office knew the financials, “Here’s how one apartment impacts revenue. Here’s how vacancy impacts revenue,” and we started talking about cap rates and all of that.
So really understanding, making sure your leasing team understands their impact on it is going to help drive revenue and that experience, right? Because I’m going to treat things differently now if I know, “Oh my gosh, we’re losing $3,000 a month on this apartment. I’m going to lease this because I don’t want to lose $3,000.”
Megan Eales Monroe:
That changes everything. So speaking of training leasing teams, I want to connect this back to what we were talking about with response time earlier. We know it’s important, residents want to hear back quickly, but what are some of the obstacles that leasing teams run into that prevent them from being able to give that quick response?
Ronald Harrington:
So I think our properties are inundated with lots of different things, right? And I feel like a lot of times what happens is, as people advance in their career, the further they get removed from the onsite position, they forget what it’s like. So now you have investors wanting this report, so now that falls into the property management. Now we’re seeing an uptick in leads, right? Because we need more leads because we’re not leasing. So now, instead of having 25 quality leads that I can really respond to, now I have 150 that I have to respond to. The resident expectation has changed, right? Now we’re not only property managers, we’re counselors and babysitters and problem solvers and all these. So residents are coming in and wanting to spend 10, 15, 20 minutes in the office with us, talking through things because guess what? They’re working from home more so now they have more time to kill and talk to the office.
So I think having that combination and just the day to day, right? We are seeing more maintenance problems, so those are taking priorities, answering that. We are seeing reporting isn’t being automated. We’re still old school on reporting in a lot of places. So that’s taking time and a property manager can only handle so much that then they start delegating to the assistant manager. Well, the assistant manager can also only hold so much. Now we’re going back to the model of now to the leasing agent from the onsite. So that’s part of the problem. The second part of the problem is we can’t hire people, so we’re always short-staffed. So sometimes you’ll see a leasing agent who’s now a maintenance person because they need to go fix the maintenance problem. So we’re dealing with short staff.
And as great as centralization is for the leasing world, I also think that that’s causing some barriers too because these people are still going to the site and they’re still dealing with the people. So we might have taken … Normally, we might’ve had two leasing people on this site and now we’ve removed one because we’ve centralized the endowed leads part to handle that, but the people are still coming in. So I think we’re still seeing some of that. It’s not a perfect world yet in this centralized model. We’re only talking about it for two to three years now.
So I think adding all those obstacles into just the basics etiquette of who we’re hiring and things like that is causing us to have a delay in response because we don’t know how to prioritize our day. We’re not teaching time management skills just yet.
Megan Eales Monroe:
I’m so glad you brought up centralization because I was going to ask about that next. I feel like that’s always offered as the solution to the problem of onsite teams being pulled in too many directions, like leasing agents being pulled into maintenance or whatever. It’s like, “Oh, centralization will fix all of that.” So I’m glad that you pointed out that it’s not really a silver bullet. do you still have an overall positive take on centralization or is it something that you’re more hesitant about?
Ronald Harrington:
No, I think there’s a place for centralization, and actually, I don’t like the word centralization. I think, for me, you hear the word centralization, site teams instantly freak out because, “Oh my gosh, my job’s in jeopardy,” right? That’s not the case. For me, I would much rather call it a specialization because you’re going to find the people that love to do the things that they do, right? I knew, when I was onsite, I worked my way up, right? I’m a people person. I love leasing, but at that time, the progression for me was, “You could do leasing. You go to assistant manager. You go to manager, right?” Well, I was a horrible assistant manager.
I was horrible. So horrible like they had to combine my roles assistant manager into a leasing manager into one and then we had an accounts manager because I remember telling a resident — and I do not condone this, so this is not what you should do, this is why I was a bad assistant manager — she came in and she said, “My grandmother died. I can’t pay my rent. It’s going to be late,” and this was the fifth that I’ve heard this same story from this resident. And I said, “Well, how many more grandparents can I expect to die because this is the fifth one, and where I come from, you usually only have four?” I was not very empathetic, because again, it was an excuse, right? Not the best way that I could have handled that, right? I learned I would never do that today. I’m actually mortified that that’s what I did, right?
But if you said to me, “You know what? You can advance your career, you can make more money. We’re going to give you a specialized role where all you do is you go around and you tour all the people and you get them to apply.” Because there are people who are really great at getting people in the door. Their phone etiquette and their email etiquette is so convincing that they can come into phone. They get you in front of them, they can’t handle that, right? They don’t want to be pushy and say, “Do you want to apply for this apartment? Are you ready to live with it?” They can’t handle that. But if I can just get you in the door, I could create that niche market for my company, that’s a specialized role.
And then I could have someone who is the closer that can come in, they can read the notes, pick up on the relationship, build that relationship, get you to apply, I can do that. And guess what? You have some people who are really good at conflict resolution and providing those kind of things, so they can be my complaint department, right? Resident services can go to them. They can handle those types of issues. They’re really good at. For me, that wasn’t my strong point. So I think there are those buckets that we can do it in. I think we’ve spent so much time thinking of centralization or specialization as the money saver and the problem, the solution to all of our problems that we didn’t stop to think about, “Well, people are going to move in and they’re still going to have issues that they want to talk to the office about. So what are we doing to ensure that the resident, once they move in, is taken care of, which is then inundating the teams?”
Megan Eales Monroe:
I love that shift, thinking of it as specialization because you’re right, that creates more of a trajectory for people to grow their careers within as they improve their craft and that’s one of the things that affects the difficulty I think hiring and retaining leasing teams because there’s not that perception of upward mobility, but with specialization, it creates all these opportunities.
Ronald Harrington:
I had a boss who I worked for and she came on board as the director and she had never worked as a manager, assistant manager because the company she worked for told her, “You would hate those jobs and you’ll be bad at those jobs. You are all about the experience.” So she worked for her previous company for a very long time and she had experience in her title like before it was cool to have experience in the title.
Megan Eales Monroe:
So going back to the question about response times, I feel like we have a much better understanding now of what are some of the things going on behind the scenes that makes it difficult to respond faster. I’m curious if there are any strategies that you’ve seen actually work to speed up response times?
Ronald Harrington:
Yes. So one way I always look at is I look for quality over quantity. “What is the data telling me?” right? One way to help response time is get rid of the leads that aren’t helping, that aren’t converting. I don’t need to be inundated, right? So that’s one way, right? So I would rather have those 25 from the source that is always … My ratio is 75%. If they come in from this source, they’re going to apply, right? I can focus on that. That’s the first way. The second way is to take off some of those mundane, so using the AI and those chatbots to help. I will tell you from experience, I will not go to a property and tour if I cannot book an appointment online. So making sure that I can book the appointment online because that’s going to take the back and forth out, “I’m going to be able to schedule.”
There’s nothing worse than getting email, “I see you want to book an appointment. When are you free?” “Okay, so you want to do Friday. Great. Does morning or evening work better for you?” “Okay. Oh, you want to do 2:00. I can’t do 2:00 now. Can you do 2:30?” So right there alone was five or six different emails, phone call, whatever the form of communication is. So having those self-scheduling or what I like to call self-service and I think, as an industry, I’m hoping, I’ve been saying this, 2025, 2026 is going to be the year of self-service and that’s going to speed up response times, right? Whether it’s a work order that I can put a work order in, I get an email back that says, “Do you want to try to fix this yourself?” “Of course.”
I get a video of how to reset my garbage disposal from the maintenance people onsite. I watch it. It works. I get a follow-up email that says, “Were you successful?” I say, “Yes, the work order closes out. We track it.” If I say, “No,” it then goes to the maintenance team and then they come and fix it, right? That speeds up the response then. Because here’s the thing, people are already doing this. I learned it on TikTok, was a huge trend for a very long time like, “Why not just track the data?” So I think that speeds up the response time as well and just making sure teams understand what’s the priority and understanding, “Okay, so your priority needs to be focused on leasing and handling the leads that are coming in. The assistant manager, your focus needs to be on the resident and the resident satisfaction and understanding delinquency.”
So people understanding what their job is and the overall [inaudible 00:41:50] will re-speed it up. But just taking these mundane tests, there are so many tools out there to make life easier and really using it and making sure that the teams are bought in.
Megan Eales Monroe:
That makes a lot of sense. It’s like technology can help there because people, like we said, they want those human interactions, but they don’t need them for everything. Sometimes you just want to get something done quickly.
Ronald Harrington:
Right.
Megan Eales Monroe:
So to round out our conversation today, I also wanted to talk a little bit about renter preferences and expectations when it comes to financial services. So for example, we’re talking about things like security deposit alternatives, flexible rent payment options, things like rent reporting. So in our research, we saw that even though these services are considered important by residents, they’re not really widely offered yet or available to most of them. So if you’re working at a property that does offer these services, that can be a really good way to stand out and possibly attract more renters, especially in competitive leasing market. So can you speak to a little bit from the perspective of a leasing team, how does the availability of these financial services factor and during the leasing journey and the interactions that you have with residents?
Ronald Harrington:
Yeah, so these are all great sources. I’m glad to see the shift towards alternative deposits and those kinds of things. From a leasing standpoint, for me, that’s what you want to talk about on the tour, right? Because again, there’s an expectation, there’s transparency. I can read it on the website, alternative deposit, but what does that mean? What’s the benefit of that? So bringing that into once they’re there because they’re there for a reason and you have to add value to their journey. Otherwise, it could be a QR code or a self-guided tour. So making sure you’re bringing those kinds of services up at the time of tour with them and you’re building that relationship.
So no one ever really talked about it. I was recently in Houston when I was shopping those properties. One of the properties offers a $0 deposit on approved credit always. That’s always the caveat and that’s for me why I don’t really like those kinds of things on the website because it’s always an asterisk and then it’s always at the bottom at the fine print. And then when they come in and then you tell them the requirements, and all of a sudden, now it’s not a $0 deposit because you were conditionally approved, right? Well, your website says this, so it breaks the trust.
I would rather be able to have the conversation say, “Yeah, we have different programs or you know what? We can report this to the credit bureau for you. How does that sound?” So I think having it involved in the process and really understanding that it’s a selling tool, it’s a technique for the site teams to sell and stand out among their competition because not everyone’s doing it.
Megan Eales Monroe:
That’s a great point. And I guess that as these services become a little bit more prevalent, it’s going to go from a differentiator to a baseline expectation. That’s the way these things go as they become more adopted.
Ronald Harrington:
And here’s the thing too that I always like to point out like financial reporting, things like that. For a lot of these companies, this is a source of revenue. It’s an ancillary income, right? And so if you’re offering it, you have to be sure that you equip your sales team with, “What’s the benefit for the resident, right? Why should they pay $5 a month, knowing that it probably cost the company a $1.99 or $2.50 or whatever to report it, that there is no manual work on the company because it’s going to pull from these systems, right?” So making sure that, if you’re offering it, that’s going to be the expectation. And I think in probably five years, that differentiator is going to be your baseline and they’re not going to want to pay for it.
They’re going to expect it like, “I’m already paying you $2,000 a month for rent. That’s why I had to go to a flex. I had to pay the flex, monthly rent flex payments because I can’t afford that all up front,” or even what I’m seeing a lot of companies do is they don’t want to take the partial payments, so you have to pay it in full and you have to find those alternatives. We’re going to start meeting the renter where it’s at. And I think it’s so important to do that because Gen Z is all about transparency. They grew up thinking that the American dream is out of reach. They’re not going to be able to pay, ever afford a home and they hear about credits and then they go to college and then they get the debt of student loans and so now they tank that, but I also think we’re doing a better job at freshmen and even in high school teaching financial literacy, “So I’m aware of what my credit score is because I know that’s everything.”
And I think before my generation, I’m a Millennial, my parents helped me out with my first car and all of that things, but with the way things are now, we’re not seeing a lot of that happen. So now I’m more self-aware of that and I have to do everything I can to build that because I also know that a lot of companies are doing credit checks when you apply. So if my credit isn’t satisfactory, it now affects me to get a job. It affects my ability to get a job. So I’m going to make sure I can do everything that I can to build on what I’m already doing.
Megan Eales Monroe:
And that was something we saw in our data was that Gen X, Millennial and Gen Z renters rated the importance of financial services offering significantly higher than Baby Boomers or Silent Generation. So that I think really backs up what you were saying and that’s some great context about why these services are so important. I think it also connects a little bit to something you mentioned before, just with the housing crunch that we’re seeing a lot of these renters want to build up their financial future so that someday they could buy a home, but for now, they have to rent.
Ronald Harrington:
Actually, see, I don’t know that they necessarily want to. I don’t think Gen Z is going to want to buy a home. I think I would say a majority of them, and this is what we’re seeing in the data, even some data’s that are coming out, 40-50% said that they will never own a home.
Ronald Harrington:
Because they don’t want to be tied down to the 30 or the 15-year mortgage. Whereas now I can rent, and then every two or three years, I can go somewhere else. I can try something new or I can go travel and not have to do the upkeep. So I think what we define as the American dream is definitely going to shift as more and more people become renters by choice versus renters by circumstance.
Megan Eales Monroe:
That’s a great point and I think that that echoes what we were talking about when folks have these expectations. When you’re a renter, you can have somebody come and fix any problem that happens in your home. You don’t have to pay for it. It gets done for you. You can have your packages delivered to a locker. You have all these amenities. There’s a lot of reasons that people might come to expect these things or to build their life around that and then not be able to see it any other way.
Ronald Harrington:
I agree 100%.
Megan Eales Monroe:
Let’s see. We are getting close to the end of our time together. Is there a question that we didn’t get to talk about that we can talk about now?
Ronald Harrington:
Yeah. So one thing, obviously, our site teams are inundated with technology and I don’t think that’s going to go anywhere, so how do we ensure that our site teams are brought into the process? Because as companies, a lot of companies, when they’re building technology, always think about the customer facing. So in multifamily, our optic is always from the user of the resident or the prospect. So for me, I really would like to see it more, “What’s the technology from the user standpoint of a leasing agent?” and getting them bought into that process and having it, think about it. Property management systems, all these different things, who uses these things the most, right? It’s the onsite staff, but it’s never taking in from the onsite staff position, right? It’s always from a C-suite. They’re the ones requesting these changes.
So I think we have to do better about thinking, “Who is actually using this technology and does it work for them?” because if it works for them, they can then provide a better experience for the resident because they’re not frustrated with the technology, they know how it works. There’s nothing worse than getting a phone call from an applicant who’s trying to finish the application, but there’s some hiccup, right? It’s not going through and you’re scrambling and you’re like, “Can you send me screenshots? Am I logged in, right?” because they don’t know the system.
And I think that if we can kind of shift that mindset and start generating technology that is geared towards them with that user in mind, then I think we’re going to be able to provide a better experience to our prospects and our residents.
Megan Eales Monroe:
I’m so glad you brought this up because they’re linked to each other. The experience that leasing agents have when they come in everyday to do their job directly affects the experience that they’re going to be able to provide to renters. And if the first one ain’t right, then there’s no way they’re going to be able to provide a great experience for residents.
Ronald Harrington:
Absolutely.
Megan Eales Monroe:
Well, fantastic. I think we are at the end of our hour together, but just want to remind our listeners that if you enjoyed this conversation with Ronald, he’s got his own podcast Rooms with Ronald. Go check it out. Is there anything else that you want to share with our listeners? Anywhere else that they can find you?
Ronald Harrington:
Yeah, so my podcast, Rooms with Ronald, on all streaming services. You can go to the multifamilymedianetwork.com. You can find me there. You can catch up on episodes, you can listen to other hosts. I’m also very active on LinkedIn, Ronald Harrington, so find me, have a chat with me. I’m always open and I love to connect.
Megan Eales Monroe:
Well, thank you so much, Ronald. This was a great conversation.
Ronald Harrington:
Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Megan Eales Monroe:
Although resident preferences have shifted rapidly over the last few years, it’s clear from our conversations with Ronald and the 2024 Renter Preferences report that there are several clear patterns and trends emerging, including:
- Prospects and renters wanting a personal touch from property management teams and not to be treated like another number
- The need for more flexible financial services offerings and options, especially when it comes to Gen X, Millennial, and Gen Z renters
- Adding solutions that help empower residents and make their lives easier, such as self-service tools and user-friendly technology
We’d like to thank Ronald Harrington for joining us today and for sharing his expert insights and advice. You can hear more about his “Rent Across America” project on his podcast, Rooms with Ronald. And don’t forget to download the 2024 Renter Preferences report at appfolio.com/renter-preferences for even more resident insights and information.
Thank you for joining us on this episode of The Top Floor, brought to you by AppFolio. If you enjoyed the conversation, let us know by leaving a review wherever you listen to this podcast — we’d love to hear your feedback. Also, make sure you’re subscribed to The Top Floor podcast to get notified as soon as our next episode goes live. Until then, we’ll continue the conversation around all things real estate and association management on the Industry Insights section of our website: appfolio.com/industry-insights. We’ll see you there.
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