A few weeks ago we had the pleasure of attending the Digible Annual Multifamily Marketing Summit in Denver, Colorado. Put a room of multifamily marketers and technologists together and the conversation gets interesting fast. I am not a marketing professional, so these are the notes of a data person at a multifamily marketing summit: how the leasing lifecycle connects, what centralization demands, why attribution is still unsolved, and where AI leaves room for human connection. Many thanks to the entire Digible team for putting on such a generous gathering.
Connectivity of the entire leasing lifecycle requires communication, not just integration. In the multifamily industry we are entrusted with one of the most important assets in many people’s lives: their home. As housing providers we carry a real responsibility to keep the homes we provide safe, clean, and well maintained.
That sounds simple. It is not. If it is hard to get your kids to keep a bedroom tidy, imagine keeping a 100+ unit community humming. The staff, the residents, and the competing pressures of market conditions, investors, and regulators all pull at once. Then add the unpredictable daily events every community produces. Flooding in the lobby. A feral cat with kittens in the maintenance shed. Every manager in a region out on leave at the same time. The result is stress, chaos, and confusion.
The minutiae are exhausting on their own. The harder question is what exact information should move up the chain, and how much of it. Site staff report to regional managers at the management company. Regionals report to ownership and asset managers. Ownership reports to investors. Each handoff is a chance for the picture to thin out. Deciding what flows to whom is the real work behind portfolio reporting that owners and managers both trust.
Connecting data sources helps surface issues. It does not, on its own, tell a whole and complete picture. A dashboard can show that delinquency moved. It cannot explain that the regional was covering three properties that month. The value of technology here is narrower and more useful: it removes the noise created by repetitive tasks that still need doing. That frees people to focus on what matters and needs to be shared, which is how the housing experience improves for everyone.
This was the first theme of the multifamily marketing summit for me, and it set up the rest. Marketing sits at the front of the leasing lifecycle. Operations and reporting sit behind it. If the two do not talk, the data connecting them will not either.
Centralization equals efficiency, but only with clearly defined roles and responsibilities. As a startup founder and serial entrepreneur, I am a generalist. In startups, founders wear many hats, and sometimes all of them. That is the opposite of what centralization asks for.
Sina Shekou, founder and CEO of Aptly, made this point in his keynote. When hiring remote teams, it is critical to provide a narrow job focus and detailed documentation. Centralization requires discipline and clarity, which are hard to hold onto in the ever-changing world of a startup. Remote workers need detailed, well-defined workflows to be set up for success. Give each role narrow tasks. Let the team member focus and master those steps before adding more.
Sina’s platform provides automation, which is the other necessary tenet of centralization. A centralized team without automation just moves the repetitive work to a different desk. Not every operator has the size and scale to go all-in on a centralized model. That does not mean the idea is out of reach.
Many steps in the resident lifecycle can be centralized or automated on their own:
Practices like these warrant serious consideration for operators of any size. Centralization is a spectrum, and most operators can move along it one function at a time.
Marketing attribution for residents is still a challenge, and it came up in a lot of conversations at the multifamily marketing summit. The problem is structural. There is often no reliable way to nail down the originating source of a marketing lead online. A prospect may see an ad, visit a listing site, search the property name, and then call. Which touch gets the credit?
The usual fallback is manual tracking, where leasing teams ask prospects how they heard about the community and record the answer. That does not produce high levels of accuracy. Prospects misremember, staff are busy, and the field becomes a formality. The attribution report then reflects data-entry habits more than marketing performance.
Apartment marketing attribution means assigning each lease to the marketing source that generated it, so spend can be judged by results. Doing that well takes three things the industry has not consistently had:
This is the same problem operations teams face with occupancy and renewals, just wearing a marketing hat. The case for standardized and normalized data across the multifamily industry applies to marketing data exactly as it applies to the rent roll. Until the definitions agree, the attribution numbers will not.
As the marketing landscape keeps evolving, multifamily professionals have a real opportunity to use big data and artificial intelligence to transform their marketing strategies. These tools can surface insights, sharpen targeting, and optimize marketing effort. That part of the discussion was expected. The next part was not.
So what does any of that have to do with human connection? The group posited that layering in more and more technology touchpoints will create an inert craving for human connection. The more automated the journey becomes, the more people may want to pick up the phone and reach out on a personal level. AI, on this view, does not replace the human conversation. It makes the human conversation the scarce and valued part of the experience.
Whether that is the unintended consequence of adding AI to our workday routines remains to be seen. It would still be nice to get a call every now and then. For a multifamily marketing summit, it was a refreshingly human conclusion to a technology conversation.
The same tension shows up on the data side. Models are only as good as the inputs behind them, which is why we have written about predictive analytics and machine learning in multifamily management as a data problem first and a modeling problem second.
Authenticity and vulnerability rock, and they are a little bit scary for most of us. Cyndie Spiegel, author of the book Microjoys, gave an inspiring keynote that challenged all of us to rethink and relearn our perception of leadership. Cyndie dared us to face our fears, set our vulnerabilities aside, and acknowledge that our shared experiences are what make us human.
Her point was that doing the “scary” things has a reward. It uncovers an authenticity that builds teamwork, trust, and community. In an industry that runs on site teams, regional teams, and vendor relationships, that is not a soft benefit. Trust is what makes the communication in takeaway one actually happen.
The proof in practice was the Digible team itself, led by Reid, David, and Nicole. Their honest care and concern for one another, their clients, and even other vendors like us who were invited to speak was self-evident in how the summit ran. There was no sales pitch. There was barely a mention of Digible and its products. The multifamily marketing summit served instead as a testament to a simple idea: authentically caring for one’s community is, and continues to be, the best marketing tip of all.
These Digible summit takeaways were aimed at marketers, but each one lands on a data and reporting problem. Here is how I would translate them into work an operations or analytics team can start on.
Write down what site staff send to regionals, what regionals send to ownership, and what ownership sends to investors. Then ask which of those reports is answering a question someone actually asked. Connectivity without that map just moves noise faster.
Follow Sina Shekou’s advice. Pick one function, define the workflow in detail, and give each role a narrow focus. Add automation once the manual version is stable. Expand only after the team has mastered the steps.
Decide which system owns lead source, define what a lead and a lease mean, and stop asking staff to remember what they cannot know. Accept that the online origin of a lead is often unknowable, and design the report to say so honestly rather than guess.
Every automated touchpoint should have a visible path to a person. If the group at the summit is right, that path will be used more, not less, as AI spreads. Make it easy to find.
The thread running through all four is that reporting only helps when the people on both ends of it agree on what the numbers mean. That is the premise behind a BI tool built on standardized property data, and it is the same premise a room full of multifamily marketers arrived at from the other direction.
Marketing attribution in multifamily is the practice of tracing each lead, tour, and signed lease back to the marketing source that produced it, so spend can be judged by the leases it generates. It remains a challenge because there is often no way to nail down the originating source of an online lead. Asking teams to track attribution manually does not produce high levels of accuracy either.
The leasing lifecycle spans site staff, regional managers, ownership, asset managers, and investors, and each handoff has to decide what information moves up and how much. Connecting the data sources helps surface issues, but it does not tell a whole and complete picture on its own. Technology is most useful when it removes the noise of repetitive tasks so people can focus on what actually needs to be shared.
The Digible Annual Multifamily Marketing Summit is a gathering of multifamily marketers and technologists hosted by Digible, held in Denver, Colorado. The 2023 program mixed keynotes on leadership, centralization, and remote teams with open discussion of marketing attribution and AI. Notably, it ran without a sales pitch, which is part of why the community it built was the strongest takeaway.
Centralization moves functions such as accounting or marketing out of individual properties and into a shared team that follows defined workflows. It requires discipline, clarity, narrow job focus, and detailed documentation, especially for remote teams. Automation is the companion to centralization, and steps such as lease signing and renewals are natural candidates even for operators without the scale to centralize everything.
Big data and AI give property owners and managers better insight, sharper targeting, and more efficient marketing effort. The less obvious effect discussed at the multifamily marketing summit is that more technology touchpoints may increase the craving for human connection, prompting more people to pick up the phone. Whether that is a lasting consequence remains to be seen.
Leasing, marketing, and operations data from every property, standardized into one model, so the people at each handoff of the leasing lifecycle are looking at the same picture.
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