Ask Me Anything: Listing Site Leaders Answer All Questions
By the nature of its business, an Internet Listings Services (ILS) is an a unique position to gather and analyze data about the multifamily housing business. That’s why having five of the top ILSs take the stage to answer questions at the 14th Annual Apartment Innovation and Marketing Conference (AIM 2019), which took place at the Hyatt Regency Huntington Beach on May 5-8, 2019, was a great opportunity. Moderated by Steve Merchant, Senior Vice President, Marketing & Sales, Equity Residential, panelists
- Ryan Davis, Chief Product and Marketing Officer, Business, RentPath
- Chris Erickson, COO and Co-Founder, Apartment List
- Anthemos Georgiades, Co-founder and CEO, Zumper
- Christopher Roberts, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Rentals, Zillow Group
- Dan Russotto, VP Product, the CoStar Group
fielded some frequently asked questions.
Turns out, there are pros and cons to sitting on top of an unbelievable amount of data and customer search data. For one thing, there are many ways to look at it. According to RentPath’s Davis, the customer journey is multi-touch one that “bounces all over the place.” But 65% of customers start looking for apartments with an ILS “to explore possibilities and build a consideration list. And the average number of ILSs used is four.” For this reason, customers who advertise with two ILSs get 3.5 times the number of leases.”
That’s not all: “If you have even one review on your website,” said CoStar’s Russotto, “the likelihood of getting a lead is up by 30 percent.” Apartment List’s Erickson concurred, although noting that “People prefer third-party reviews.” He also added that “Forty percent of leases get signed once the listing shows up three times.”
Data alone, however, is tricky. “Data is dirty,” said Davis. “If you’re getting data fed to you from different properties around the country”. “And you’re doing your darndest to make data-driven decisions over it, there is a greater than 50 percent chance that data you’re looking at has serious flaws and is giving you a picture that is different from the property’s reality.” Davis demonstrated how manually filled-out walk-in cards, which have the least verifiable sources (“I heard about this from …”) can skew attributions, creating inaccurate data.
Also, some of the things data reveals about our business aren’t pretty. Addressing the property-renter mismatch, Roberts noted that, “The way we treat rental shoppers in this industry hasn’t changed much, but,” he added, “their expectations have changed a lot.” Thanks to technology, which creates these expectations, “the data we see is that we’re struggling to keep up with consumer expectations, and we need to do a lot more,” he concluded.
Zumper’s Georgiades noted that one of the reasons for U.S. apartment demand is because Millennials and Gen Zs are delaying marriage 10 years later than 50 years ago. With marriage postponed, one of the decisions tied to marriage - buying a home - is also on the backburner.
Which makes rentals a rich enough environment for Google and Facebook to be angling for ILS data. At the moment, they’re a little behind: Google, said Zillow’s Roberts is having more difficulty integrating ILS data than it did travel data. Georgiades agreed, further noting that Facebook too is very serious about the rental market, “but if you look at the behaviours in the [Facebook Marketplace] app, the belief of Zumper is, they’re kind of a high-end Craiglist today.” He concluded, “They’re definitely going to be players in the space in the next decade, but I don’t know if anyone agrees they will be disruptors tomorrow.”
Conclusion: Renters are willing to give up a lot of information to ILSs but in return hold ILSs to higher level of service. And Google and Facebook are making moves into the market that will be felt 10 years down the road.
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