Join us as we dive into the world of marketing mastery with our special guests from the TWLX for Broker Owners event.
Hosted by Pablo Gonzalez, the Founder/CEO of Be The Stage, this panel discussion features industry experts Lisa Wise, Owner + Founder of Flock, and Chuck Hattemer, Co-founder & CMO of Poplar Homes. Discover strategies for identifying key pain points, standing out in property management, investing in relationships, leveraging strategic partnerships, unlocking word-of-mouth marketing, implementing omnichannel strategies, and building your brand through free opportunities. Don't miss this episode packed with actionable insights to elevate your marketing game and achieve remarkable results.
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Hosted by Laura Mac
Featuring Pablo Gonzalez, lisa wise, Chuck Hattemer
Produced by Andrew Smallwood, Laura Mac, and Carol Housel
Edited by Isaac Balachandran
Transcript:
Laura Mac
Hello and thanks for tuning in to the Triple Win Property Management podcast. I'm your co-host, Laura Mac, and thrilled to bring you this very special episode recorded live at the TWLX Online Conference exclusively for broker-owners. Today's panel discussion is all about marketing mastery, and we got rave reviews for this incredible line up of industry experts. First up we have Pablo Gonzales. Pablo is the founder and CEO of Be The Stage. He is a master of human connection and community. Next up is Chuck Hattemer. Chuck is the co-founder and CMO of Poplar Homes. Chuck co-founded Poplar Homes in 2014, and has since grown it to one of the largest tech-enabled property management companies with over 17,000 doors under management. Finally, you'll hear from lisa wise. lisa is the owner and founder of Flock DC. lisa oversees billions of dollars of homes under management and she is deeply engaged in her community serving on various boards and foundations all while advocating for Housing justice. This panel has a diverse range of experiences to bring to the table. We hope you enjoy this episode of the Triple Win Property Management podcast.
lisa wise
We’ll give folks a quick background on who we are and how we found ourselves here today. I’ve been managing properies for about 25 years, which is strange. I don’t look over 25, right? But I came to this world in this industry after a childhood of a lot of housing and security. And I understood that at some point, if I could own a home, it would solve quite a few problems for me, and it would create further financial freedom and security for me. If I could invest in real estate that others lived in and I did just that, I started on a little side hustle where I managed properties for other folks while I was working in a nonprofit environment. And then I eventually decided to do my property management full-time in 2008, which was perfectly timed and aligned with the recession. And as it as it turned out, that was a great time to start a business when nobody could sell their condos in Washington, D.C. They all hired me to do it for them. And so I took on all of these sorts of sloppy leftovers that people had in terms of their individual condos. And we kind of put together a little buffet of great things. And fast forward to today, and I have a family of real estate management companies called Flock DC, and we manage about $2.5 billion in residential real estate in Washington, D.C. I’m also the co-founder of a hybrid proptech maintenance company called Birdwatch. And we service homeowners with property management. So that is a new venture for me, about 18 months into that. And I am also, most proudly, the founder of Burn Seed, which is a housing justice foundation that offers first-time no strings attached down payment grants to bipoc homebuyers. It’s the first and only program of its kind right now. And so that’s a little bit about me. I’m going to pass it to Chuck, and then Pablo will pass it back over to you to keep us going.
Chuck Hattemer
So I’m Chuck Hattemer, co-founder and chief marketing officer for Poplar Homes. I am newer to the industry than Lisa. I’ve been in the business for about nine years. We started our company as undergrad students at a college in Northern California. We came out of a personal housing experience where a property manager put up a lease that we had signed, said, “No, actually you can’t rent this house.” And we heard similar stories from a lot of our friends and classmates at the time, and we figured this was something people are talking about. It’s important to people. It’s the place where they live and ultimately end up being their largest investment. And we got started. We started as an online leasing platform in student off-campus housing, and that lasted about a year. And then we realized, well, all of your revenue comes in at one month and then it goes quiet. And we found that there was a lot more interest from independent investors and small, small property owners for a full-service experience. So we expanded beyond the technology platform into full-service property management and launched into the general market in 2015. And today we manage about a little over 14,000 doors across 24 markets in the US coast to coast, and we’ve got our own sort of owner-facing and resident-facing platform and really excited about everything Second Nature has done to bring awareness to the resident experience. That’s like I said, that’s kind of where we got our start with the resident experience and we offer the benefits to residents who have a pathway to homeownership program called Street Cred, so residents can earn their street cred and buy a home in the future. And yeah, we’ve got local teams of boots on the ground in all markets and growing quickly. Where I’m actually out here in Bend, Oregon, we’re at a company offsite, so we’ve got the largest gathering in the last couple of years of our team here. So I apologize if there’s anyone walking behind me in the background. I told them all to stay over there, but really great to be here and I’ll pass it off to you, Pablo.
Pablo Gonzalez
Thanks, Chuck. Thanks, Lisa. I’m Pablo Gonzalez. I am not a property manager. I have a marketing company that has been pioneering this idea of community creation for business development now for four years, and I’ve just been chasing that for about nine. And the reason why I’m here is because my biggest client and my big case study of hitting a home run out of the ballpark, whatever you call it, is called JWB Real Estate Capital. They’re a vertically integrated turnkey rental property investment company out of Jacksonville, Florida. And as you probably understand, in order to vertically integrate into selling rental properties as an investment, you have to become a really good property manager. And they have recently passed 5,100 homes under management, all in Jacksonville, Florida. And what we did in order to launch a community, in order to kind of grow this business, to grow the rental property business from the property management side and from the turnkey sale side is create this show called the Not True Average Investor Show. That is what I like to call an Internet talk show that has grown to be a top-rated real estate podcast. But how we do it is we do these weekly every Tuesday and Thursday calls where we have this really vibrant community that’s been showing up more and more, and that’s become the thing that has propelled the growth and trust in what they do in being able to like, really differentiate themselves and their asset class. And the city of Jacksonville as a market to invest in. So I believe that Laura and the Second Nature team invited me on here for a couple of reasons. One is because I have moderated over 500 Zoom calls because I do live shows all the time, and second, because I’ve gotten this really inside view into their operation, specifically their marketing. I’ve become essentially their chief evangelist and messaging and marketing strategist. And as I understand that this is all about how you grow a successful property management company from a marketing and sales and go-to-market standpoint. So I have a little bit of imposter syndrome to share the stage here with Lisa and Chuck, who are both really good entrepreneurs and operators. And while I’m more of like a hype guy, I think that we can really distill some lessons here of what’s worked for them, what’s worked for JWB, and I’m happy to be here and happy to be part of this panel. So I would love to, I would love to start right off the bat with something that we talked about in our warm-up call, which is this idea that when I look at Chuck, and I look at Lisa, I don’t see I don’t see them talking about, well, we’re a property management company that does this or that. Their offer seems to be extremely differentiated, right? This is not the average property management kind of strategy or offer, and I would love to I’ll start with you, Chuck. You kind of you’ve built this started off in the student housing a in in a market and a problem that you really, really understood and you’ve really expanded as a software plus a service and these kinds of things. If you’re talking to a property management company that is trying to scale, trying to grow, what are your thoughts around the success of what you’ve been able to accomplish based on being completely different than the average property management conversation?
Chuck Hattemer
Yeah, sure. So, you know, we you know, I didn’t have necessarily a wealth of experience to draw on and sort of playbooks to come into this space. And my partners, Greg and Rico and I as students, we had a lot of data coming into the business and many ways that was positive. It also led to obvious challenges. But I think what we the way we approached it at first was really just thinking about, okay, what like if you could distill those key pain points of, well, for us it started with the resident and then ultimately turning focus to the investor side, which we spent a lot of time thinking about that. And one of the first things that we did that to kind of come out to the offering to come into the development of our product and offering is we just sat down with a blank slate and thought about, okay, what, what do retail investors, what is the primary thing they care about? And getting paid on time was the kind of hallmark message that came up in conversations with our retail investors. And you know, we didn’t want to just come into the space kind of offering what we didn’t know, what was just standard property management. We’re like, okay, what is this thing? Property management? And we knew, you know, you had to find someone to live there to maintain the property. But we’re kind of piecing together pieces of the business and they’re getting paid on time with so critical that that’s when we kind of launched the Rent Guarantee program. This is before there were entire companies and operations now offering rent guarantee programs, and that was essentially the idea of, okay, if we qualify in place a tenant in a property, why don’t we put our, you know, our money where our mouth is and essentially back these tenants and guarantee them in the sense that we will pay out our owners on time every month so that they could make their mortgage payments. So that’s like an example of sort of thinking, you know, just sitting down with the investors, hearing what their pain points were and then crafting pieces of the product, offering to kind of align with that. And it’s always been essential to our business since the very beginning to build in more transparency for investors, because that’s sort of where we came from, right? We are like our first experience was, you know, a property manager ripping up a lease that we had, we had signed together. And part of the issue with that was that it wasn’t very transparent what was happening and students weren’t, you know, given a fair opportunity. And renting property is really a secret bidding war that was happening behind the scenes. And we thought, well, you know, why can’t that like, sure, we could appeal to sort of the supply and demand nature of the market, but why can’t it be more transparent at lease and give people more confidence that there was a fair opportunity for them so that was a key component. And the rent guarantee offering was sort of the first example of what we went after to kind of differentiate the product. And then, you know, that that sort of might eventually to the pathway to homeownership program for residents. We really you know, that was obviously a growing pressure for renters was how to convert from renting ownership. And it sounds like Lisa is doing incredible stuff in this space, too. It’s I’d like to hear from her on that point. But I think it’s the same kind of token we’re thinking, okay, what is the pain point of our customers and our residents? How can you align a product offering to that? And that’s also reflecting the technology you’ve got, you know, giving, giving, giving owners the ability to have, you know, full real-time access to everything that’s happening to their property, automatic updates. And sometimes it goes too far in one direction where we were so behind this idea of transparency and giving back control of the investor that we almost gave too much control to the investor at first where they, you know, we’re involved in every decision. But then we realized that there is some, you know, advantage to actually using data and the technology to give transparency into what we were doing, but not necessarily involve them in the decisions. And that’s been a recent shift in the last few years that’s really helped grow the business a lot and kind of find the right customer that we want to work with now.
Pablo Gonzalez
Thanks for that chuckle. You know what I’m hearing there that I really love and it’s something I really believe in is this idea of knowing the problem because you’re deeply intimate with your super consumer and you understand you see the world from their eyes and then that is what gives you the insight to move into like a new product offering as opposed to what? What can we create and what was being a thing we are really proud of? Lisa, you who has created all these different brands and all these service offerings, can you give us a little insight into how you have approached differentiation and the effect of your decision-making based on, you know, based on a different offer?
lisa wise
That’s a great question. I believe that differentiation is one of the easiest things to achieve and one of the most effective in business. And there’s very little differentiation in our field, which is great because it’s low-hanging fruit. You can really eclipse competition quickly by finding a creative, more engaged and more meaningful way of differentiating our company. And for us, three things define what we’re doing as a company. They become our North Star, which is to care for residents in their homes. First and foremost. It’s an honor and a privilege to be able to take care of people where they take care of themselves and their families. Number two is to care for the community that’s hosting us and supporting us As we do our work, we are partnered with that community to do our best work and take care of the larger picture, not just that individual unit, but how people respond to and participate in community. And number three, and perhaps most importantly, as we put our talent first, we don’t have an elegant service unless we have people willing to deliver that. We decided to have in-house maintenance quickly, and that was one of the things that was a game changer for us, because I believe that good property management comes down to your ability to respond to a maintenance need, particularly an emergency. And if you’re calling people to do favors all day long, you’re never going to be able to offer a smooth experience for your residents, and especially not as you began to grow. That was a differentiator for us. Just in terms of apples to apples, how are you comparing one management company to another? So that addresses our competition and how we wanted to define ourselves. But most importantly, we came out of the gate as a lifestyle company, not as a property management company. We take care of homes, which is part of people’s identity. It’s their personal brand. It’s how they’re relating to the environment around them. We went all in on a really beautiful website and professional photos, highlighting our staff being really engaging and human with those clients. We’re interested in residents having the best quality experience and a high quality customer service experience. We frame management as a hospital of the opportunity versus more of a utility opportunity. I understand and appreciate the recurring revenue, the opportunities when there’s passive revenue, but we decided to invest in relationships and strong relationships with community and residents and that resonated really quickly. And people really like who we are. But we also didn’t have any marketing money when we started, but we had our hands so we would partner with other organizations and nonprofits that we were aligned with and we would paint their buildings or put in a garden or go do anything that we could do as a team with our t-shirts on with our hands. And we would do that. And, you know how much brand loyalty you get when you work with your hands on buildings and then you posted to social and it becomes part of the fabric of who you are. That grew my business much faster than any other traditional marketing investment that I could have made. And it also really brought our team together. We get a lot of choices about how we operate our companies, especially as the founders and owners, and that’s a really exciting, exciting opportunity to really carve out and design something that, you know, is both oriented to profit people and place.
Pablo Gonzalez
That’s an incredible story. Lisa, Like when I hear what you’re saying, I think of you have unlocked word-of-mouth marketing in a modern version of it, right? Like you are. You’re mixing this idea of sponsoring a nonprofit slash getting really deeply involved and networking with them and marrying it to the scalable impact of social media and how you can get digital word of mouth to kind of like spread beyond that. Am I hearing that correctly? Is there more strategy to it or like how do you sleep at night knowing that that’s the thing, right? Like, how can you predict growth or kind of I guess, how do you sleep at night when that’s when that’s the tactic? Is there anything that you can put around that you were able to then convince yourself that you have this like stable client acquisition method or am I getting that wrong?
lisa wise
I mean, there’s client retention is the most important thing and the acquisition will come. So word of mouth building, we’re building a reputation in a community. I think, you know, popular homes is a little bit different because you don’t have the hyper-local advantage if you do use it. We’re your neighbor. We say that all the time. There will always be a pipeline and you should be working on omni channel approach to that. It should be in real life, it should be networking, it should be shaking hands, it should be setting up, zooms with people from affiliated industries. It should be taking your staff to lunch because they all rent to for the most part, these are all opportunities for us to get up and out in front of people. Same with that. We get a lot of press because we have a lot of visibility and political conversations and otherwise. These are all free opportunities to build your brand and visibility and to engage your staff. I understand tactic, but I’m a big-picture thinker and I think big about how we’re going to be present in our community and we work backwards from there. And if we’re impacting people favorably and the planet favorably, profits will come.
Pablo Gonzalez
I love that. I love that. That reminds me a lot of kind of like what our big picture when we started this thing with JWB was the idea that there is no better way to convince somebody to do business with you than to have somebody who’s wondering whether they want to do business with you or overhear a conversation with two people that love doing business with you. Right. And how we can and how we can create these, like collisions between super consumers and prospects and the team. And the things that we do is really at the center of the flywheel of our client acquisition strategy on the JWB side. And I feel like there’s, there’s a lot very similar another thing that I’m hearing very similar in both of y’all, and I think Mark brought this up is this idea that you both invest really, really heavily in culture and I would love to, you know, you said it yourself, right? Client retention is a great way to create lifetime value and acquire other clients. Right. Like they’re all the there’s all these words. I’m like B-to-B, SAS marketer, LinkedIn, that’s like retention is the new acquisition, right? Like and people are talking about that. I would love to I would love to understand your decision-making process, Chuck. When you are when you are investing in something that is about culture building, how do you justify the ROI of it on the back end when it comes to when it comes to business growth? Do you think about it that way or do you think about it a different way?
Chuck Hattemer
Yeah, absolutely. So I think, you know, the investing in culture for us has been, there’s a couple different ways I would look at it. One is, you know, our business, we’ve always had the ambition to build a national brand and but understanding the importance of local knowledge and expertise and teams and always keeping that core to how we operate as a company. So it’s a it’s a and it’s a tricky thing to kind of balance both, right? Because for nearly all time, you know, property management has operated in sort of this hyper-local space. And there’s a lot of benefits to that because you get that local knowledge expert expertise. But there’s also this kind of fragmented experience, you know, that you might if if if you put yourself in a customer’s shoes, if you’re an investor and you want to invest in multiple different geographies, you know, you have different experience in different places. So we’ve invested a lot in the central, like the first speaking to kind of a centralized operation. You know, part of our business, we do have a centralized operation. And like many of you, we do have an offshore component, but we don’t refer we don’t refer to that offshore component as virtual assistants or, you know, it’s it’s very much an HQ, too, for us in the Philippines. And we’ve best aligned to the culture there and actually helping our team in the Philippines upskill and have career development opportunities. You know, we’re doing a big return to office right now and we’ve got onsite daycare staff, we’ve got shuttles driving around the Philippines, pick up employees, bring them to the office. We’ve got food on onsite, you know, two meals a day for people. We’ve got leadership workshops and skill development university programs. That was a big investment. The culture we always talk about sort of the three pillars and that matters a lot in that particular culture. And I think for a lot of us, which is family, education and health. And so we tried to really align a lot of our investments in the team around those three areas and offering whether it be monetary things. We, you know, we offer our own health insurance plan on top of the government-provided health insurance plan. So you as you gain tenure in the company, you get access to added benefits around those three pillars, family, education and health care. So I think that’s a really valuable thing to look at invest in, because oftentimes we think about these folks that are helping us run our business. As you know, they’re an arm’s length away and I think really involving them into actually defining how you operate their your company is critical. You know, a lot of the folks that first started with us seven years ago when we opened up that office are now the ones defining how our product and technologies, I would say about 60% of our product managers, they got their start doing booking tours for residents and doing showing and booking showing. So and now they’re actually architecting how the platform works out. What are our workflows for our operating plans? And I think that has been a really valuable investment from a culture-building side. We’ve got a basketball team in the Philippines and a volleyball team.
Pablo Gonzalez
I have to interupt you. I’m sure you can go on forever about like all the. Yeah. So off the panel is called Marketing Mastery. How do you market that stuff? Like how does that how does that tell you how you market yourself?
Chuck Hattemer
So I think that creates an environment where the interactions that our customers and residents have with that team are much richer, right? People get to know our customers, residents get to know our team, and they’re there for years. And it’s a little bit different from a virtual assistant setup where there might be kind of a revolving door there. So I think investing in that in the offshore component and maybe I’m speaking a lot to that because that’s just what we know the best. And then that also allows the local operators to spend more time on kind of the richer client experiences that lead to that word-of-mouth marketing and the client retention. So I would say that is is sort of the ROI there that you get from that investment.
Pablo Gonzalez
Love it, love it. And it sounds a lot like, you know, what I’m really hearing is this idea of like rethinking what marketing can be, what investing in marketing can be, right? Like maybe people here showed up for marketing Mastery. They’re expecting to hear like, what are the Google AdWords that I need a bit on? But what we’re really hearing is very different tactics that are much more sustainable, like Lisette talking about having a great team, that interaction, community service with your consumer. Lisa, You mentioned something about PR and I have a feeling that you are probably really savvy about thinking things to get involved in that are going to give you extraordinary exposure. I might be wrong on that one, but, I would love to just think of how I would love to pick your brain, of how you think of what are these, like low-cost, no-cost opportunities to gain like a headline gain some exposure when a political affiliation, something like that, that can really move the business.
lisa wise
So I don’t choose things for publicity. I choose to make the things I do attractive to people. And then if there’s room or opportunity for publicity, that will come. So again, if you continue to follow your North Star and you’re doing something with your business to contribute to what’s going on around you, eventually somebody will pay attention and get curious about that. Housing justice is a huge issue. I write a lot of op-eds for my community. Blog posts are something you can do. People will pick up on that. I’ve had Inc magazine feature me, I’ve had Forbes feature me, I’ve had the Post feature me, and these are all great wins, but it’s because we’re doing something impactful with our business that other people aren’t. And it’s really not hard to do, frankly. There’s so little being done honestly in our industry to give back to community that it’s really easy to stand out just by showing up and saying the word community and not community when it comes to profit, the community when it comes to your neighbors. And we don’t spend enough time thinking about how to just be good neighbors for the sake of it. And then whatever you think needs to come from that. Will It’s a it’s a little karmic. It’s a little do good business and you’ll get more good business. But you stick with people. One of the things that I did when I first got started was to put together these little swag bags that had a stamp of our logo on the front, a little paper bag, and inside was an organic countertop spray we made and a tote bag and a piece of chocolate. And we and I would go to my business card and I would go to open houses for real estate agents. And I would say, Hey, I’m not an agent and I’m never going to be an agent. That’s also led to a lot of success for me is highlighting that difference because I’m not poaching clients from real estate agents. So we only do management brag about it. And I would hand these bags out to folks and 15 years later I still have people say, I remember when it came to my open house and you gave me a gift. If you want to understand how you’re going to build momentum and visibility for your company, I recommend reading the book Influence. And if it doesn’t influence the way that you do your work, then it should. Then you should just burn it. But it’s a great book and it will teach you how to engage with people in ways that are deeply memorable. And oftentimes growth takes one person that who is going to be your ambassador, and you can create lots of those ambassadors over time, especially if you’re authentic.
Pablo Gonzalez
So much I love there. I don’t know if you can tell, but the book influence is right here over my shoulder. Okay. So to distill what you just said there being it’s not about news jacking or trend jacking or jumping on something, it’s about finding that thing that you really, really care about going all in on it and serving others in that capacity, which then allows you to gain this like sustainable momentum over time because you are consistently showing up differently and people know you as that.
lisa wise
I mean, you you get to tell your own story as a business owner. So what story do you want to tell? What do you want to change? What problem or resolving? If it’s not just for money, like whose lives are you changing and why? Think about what we all come to the table with, which is that access to people in their homes caring for people in their homes. So I mean, and we are neighbors, doesn’t matter if you’re a national brand or not. You can be very hyperlocal. We do trash walks all the time. And I’ve had people blog about us doing trash blocks. We get the whole staff and we take trash bags and then we walk to a lunch spot, wash our hands. Really, really, really, really well because we’re in an urban environment and then we walk back and that’s a that’s a thing that you never see anybody do. So you can do things can be true at the same time. You can be giving away your time and you could be building your business the exact same time.
Pablo Gonzalez
I love that. I love that. And, you know, one of the things that kind of down that same path, one of the things that JWB did right, so JWB is, you know, we differentiated them as being like fully vertically integrated because most of these turnkey rental property investing companies might have a partner that’s the property manager in a different location, but they’re not fully integrated into a city. Right. And like JWB is a major, major player downtown and fully integrated into the community. One of but one of the things that they’ve done is they use about 5 to 10% of the resources in like R&D, in figuring out what the next thing is going to be and kind of like being able to corner that. That’s why they were able to bring build-to-rent in for lost to market at one point. One of the things that they did in downtown was they developed these container apartments in downtown Jacksonville and that was fully part of their business strategy. But the amount of press that they got from from doing this, like different kind of real estate project downtown equated into one of these things, kind of like what you’re talking about a bunch of people writing about them. Jacksonville getting a lot more publicity, all these kinds of different things that led to more leads, more business development, more people wanting to do business with them. Again, not something that they did to get publicity, but something that they did that is in their best interest. It’s good for the community. And on top of that, they got publicity. My biggest question with all that stuff is when it happens, when you’re doing all the things right and you get the publicity, like, you know, very recently, Mark Schaefer wrote like a case study on us in a book. And I wonder, like, once that happens, do you also have ways to like, what is your move when when you get great publicity of something you love and something you care about, how do you push it out? What’s the what’s kind of like best practices for that for an in your in your eyes.
lisa wise
When you’re on to the right thing? Like how do you…
Pablo Gonzalez
Yeah, like you did something, it’s getting a bunch of press. Do you have like a playbook?
lisa wise
So yes, for me, if I feel it here, then I’m going to work out. If I see my team happier and people around us happier and the work is going well, then that’s the measurement. That’s the data set.
Pablo Gonzalez
Okay. Well, do you have a way to get in front of more eyes? Like, do you like is it an email? This is a social.
lisa wise
I wrote a book about it, so I wrote a book called Self-Elected: How to Put Justice Over Profit and Soar in Business. And it tells the full story of how I continue to tell that story. So, yes, I mean, I’m here in part because I love the way I do business. I love doing business with a justice lens. And I think that that’s ultimately led to me having a more successful business of it.
Chuck Hattemer
I think in just I was just going to add on of what to kind of touch on what we talked about earlier, like when if you are involved in getting involved in the community, you know, taking the time and investment to capture those stories and in the form of high-quality photography and if any, if there’s an opportunity with a client or if something happened that really pleased them, you know, really taking the time and making those investments, it’s often times it’s not like you know, it’s not like advertising where like you put a dollar in $2 back or something like that, but it’s those stories can be really great evergreen content that then you can spread throughout your network. And then the other thing just really being intentional with creating and staying engaged with the community leaders around you and going to have lunch or coffee on a regular basis, if there are people that are covering housing in the local community and being open and sharing with them what the trends you’re seeing that you’re seeing in your portfolio with them, And then you will become that kind of expert resource and a trusted advisor for them. And they’re really engaged in telling the story of how housing and the world around you is operate. And I think that’s important for property managers to be doing, especially now where in the last few years there’s been sort of this perception shift around housing providers and operators. Right? And you know, it’s we see a lot with the institutional investors, the kind of narrative working against the institutional investors in the media. But when you look at the big picture, right, it’s such a small fraction of the market that institutional investors actually manage and operate. So if you can share those stories of the landlords and residents in your community that are doing great things to help provide great housing and living experiences, I think that can help shift the perception, even on a hyperlocal level and so I think like this point earlier about the High Court is something as simple as high-quality photography and videographer. It goes a long way.
Pablo Gonzalez
But you’re you are thank you for transitioning beautifully into this topic that we all agree to. We wanted to talk about right like this is such a trust sale, right? Like whether it is, hey, come live and you know, I’m going to manage your property or trying to attract the residents or anything like that. Right. Like, you, as a as a simple-minded person. What is your how do you think about including trust, how you market and how you communicate?
Chuck Hattemer
Yeah. So, yeah, trust is like the most critical thing that we talk about in everything when it comes to marketing. And it always goes down to kind of the raw stories of what’s happening behind the scenes in the business and being open with that and sharing those stories, whether it’s something like I spoke about earlier, about, you know, the offshore operation, not keeping them behind this kind of crowd and, you know, really opening it up. And we’ve got it. You can see we’ve got a whole social media channels just focused on that operation. And we interview our employees there and they get on camera, we put out we put the faces of all local teams, you know, all over the website to try to tell their stories and share their experiences in the business. And then and then, you know, that’s also baked into the offering and the product offering, you know, all the data and decisions we are making about our clients properties, our exposed to them through for us, it’s through the platform, but for, you know, for it could be through the way you set up your email workflows, you know, and, and using that information to build trust with clients I think gives them that confidence to stay with you long term and add more properties along the way. So I would say it’s, you know, it’s sharing the stories of customers, residents, employees, opening up the kimono a little bit on what’s happening and trying to expose as much information as possible to the clients and residents. I think that that goes a long way with building trust.
Pablo Gonzalez
Thanks for that. Lisa, anything to add to that?
lisa wise
Yeah, I think, you know, we are ultimately a human business. And if you want to pick the one thing you can do to differentiate your company from everybody else, it’s the human component. Everybody’s focused on AI right now and what do we get to do that’s different from I is like show up in person and help people with things that are hard. That is a competitive advantage no matter how you see it. So embrace that, share it with people. Make that a huge part of what you’re talking about when you’re doing your advertising. As that, we answer the phone and we show up where a person get to know us. Use highlight your team in social media, because I know that when Shaq and I talk, it probably seems like that’s a lot. It also took me 15 years to all that out and I’m still working on it. So little things you can do, like just do one post a week on your social media about a team member and how in a win they had or a testimonial somebody, It can be super simple and just continuing to remember that, that you can make changes in your business very incrementally and that alone can get you where you’d like to be just over time.
Pablo Gonzalez
So, so good. All right. As we close out here, let’s give like a real tactical piece of advice. Put yourself back in. You are building company. You have a couple of properties under management. You’re going to make your first marketing hire as a as a person or as an investment. Right. That’s going to drive this. What would you if it was today, what role would you hire for? Like what? What would you put in place if you had a budget of like, you’re going to hire somebody for like 55 grand a year or something like that, What would they be doing for you?
lisa wise
I’ve never hired anybody in marketing. We will engage third-party marketers under our direction. But traditional marketing is not the approach that we’ve taken, and so we’ve done all of that in-house.
Pablo Gonzalez
Okay, let’s say you have a $50,000 budget, like make a bet on something that could grow the company. What would you advise somebody that’s on right now?
lisa wise
Honestly, someone who is adept at communication through writing and someone who is adept at pushing out real-time social media content, like engaging and in all the real-time ways that you can consistently is the number one way you’re going to get in front of the most people that as often as you can and somebody that can do that well, it can be done really poorly. It can be an absolute waste of time. But if you have good if you have good social content and it’s got personality and brand and it’s appealing, it will elevate your reputation and visibility as a company and differentiate you because everybody falls into that. I’m going to have a house logo or Akeelah, all of it. Just do the opposite, and you’ll be good.
Pablo Gonzalez
Love it. How about you Chuch? $50k.
Chuck Hattemer
Yeah, Great question. I think. Well, you know, I got I don’t know if, this would fit into the well, the $50K model but I would say like I think storytelling is a key component of a great marketer today is and that manifests itself in the form of great writing, great content production. But would also look for someone that also understands how to build that into the DNA of how your company operates, someone that really understands the value of the customer onboarding experience, for example, and knows how to leverage marketing automation tools and and creative ways to create a very pleasant, personalized experience for the customer. Because that onboarding experience is so critical to the future retention and ultimately word of mouth that I think, you know, that’s an and if you understand how to do that, you can apply that to other kind workflows to the business. So someone that understands how to leverage technology to amplify the storytelling that they know and are able to do, I think that’s sort of the skill set I would look for love.
Pablo Gonzalez
My quick take on that is hired the best Filipino video editor you can find, which you can probably get for like 20, 25 grand, spend the rest of it on local photographers to capture content and you make the decisions on how to distribute based on like a good graphic designer, video editor kind of person. I think that can go a long way if you have like a strategic mind about it yourself. But Chuck Lisa, this was amazing. We are on time right now to wrap this thing up. I really like very flattering to share the stage with both of you. Thank you so much for being part of this. And thank you all for being here in this conversation. We’ve got a bunch of them.
Chuck Hattemer
Yeah, I do as well. Thank you so much, Pablo, for moderating. Thanks, everyone, for joining.
lisa wise
Thank you.
Andrew Smallwood
That's all for today's Triple Win Property Management podcast. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you so much for sharing a piece of your life with us. We do not take it for granted. I also want to give a shout-out to Carol Housel for everything she and her team does to make these possible. It's crazy to think about; over 5000 professional Property Managers have pressed play on episodes and season one and season two now. We want to encourage you to keep giving feedback because more and more people are listening. It's getting better and better and better thanks to everything that you're sharing with us. If you liked this enough to listen, I want to encourage you to share it with other people. You can give us feedback directly on social media channels, Facebook, LinkedIn, and wherever you're hanging out. You can also send us an email at TripleWin@SecondNature.com. And we just want to give more! There's no sales pitch here; I just want to offer more resources that help you find and stack your next Triple Win and become a Triple Win driven Property Manager. So where can you find that? You can find a private Facebook group. You can find our blog; you can find our newsletters to find more resources at RBP.SecondNature.com to search for what you're looking for there. And every time we see you, we want to see a better version of you and your business. To that end, keep it going, feel inspired. Take our encouragement and we'll see you next time.
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