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Go-to-market is a well-established business framework, but it's a concept that's only beginning to gain traction in multifamily. In this episode, Anne Baum and Chris Johnson sit down with Mike Wolber, Chief Sales Officer at Apartment List, to explore how go-to-market thinking can help organizations design better customer experiences.

The conversation begins with Apartment List's latest AI innovations, including the launch of Kaleno and Sunny, and how they're rethinking renter search and demand generation. From there, Mike shares why the best organizations don't optimize individual departments. They align marketing, leasing, operations, and leadership around one connected customer journey.

Together, they discuss how multifamily can embrace go-to-market as a framework for breaking down silos, creating alignment across teams, and delivering better experiences for prospects and residents. Mike also shares his perspective on why data without context is just noise, why clarity is more powerful than micromanagement, and how AI can strengthen the customer experience without replacing the human relationships that matter most.

In this episode:

• Apartment List's latest AI innovations and what they mean for multifamily
• How go-to-market thinking can transform the customer experience
• Why cross-functional alignment is essential for better outcomes
• The importance of using data with context
• Leadership lessons on clarity, culture, and building stronger teams

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400K+ units use Flamingo’s Resident Retention Platform to stop Retention Leak & hit 63%+ retention.

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What if renters aren't choosing communities based on amenities at all?

In this episode, Lia Nichole Smith, Chief Brand Strategist at Spherexx, joins Anne Baum and Chris Johnson to explore the rise of identity economics and what it means for the future of multifamily.

Lia argues that today's renters are increasingly making housing decisions based on identity, belonging, and community fit rather than simply comparing features and amenities. As consumers become more hyper-tribalized, the communities they choose become an extension of who they are and the lifestyle they want to live.

The conversation explores why apartment marketing has fallen into a sea of sameness, why traditional buzzwords like "luxury" often fail to resonate, and how operators can use zero-party data to better understand what truly drives leasing and renewal decisions.

In this episode:
• What identity economics means for multifamily
• Why renters are becoming more values-driven and community-focused
• The problem with amenity-based differentiation
• How zero-party data can reveal why residents choose, stay, or leave
• Why "luxury" may be one of multifamily's most overused marketing terms
• A new approach to demonstrating value at renewal
• How authentic community partnerships can strengthen brand awareness

If multifamily is going to stand out in an increasingly competitive market, Lia believes the answer isn't better marketing. It's building communities that people genuinely want to belong to.

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400K+ units use Flamingo’s Resident Retention Platform to stop Retention Leak & hit 63%+ retention.

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Andrea Taylor, Founder and CEO of Livsee, joins Anne Baum and Chris Johnson to discuss how AI is reshaping multifamily leasing, pricing, and operations by turning renter conversations into a continuous source of intelligence.

Andrea shares how operators are using AI-powered follow-up to re-engage lost leads, improve tour conversion, and uncover what prospects and residents actually care about. These signals are then feeding into decisions around pricing strategy, concessions, amenities, and retention.

The conversation explores:

• Why “dead leads” still contain valuable leasing intelligence
• How renter conversations reveal patterns that impact occupancy and demand
• The role of AI in follow-up, renewals, and leasing workflows
• Why concessions and pricing decisions are becoming more data-driven
• How operators are using conversation data to inform amenity and asset decisions
• The ongoing challenge of attribution and understanding true renter intent
• What voice AI and automation may (and may not) change in the leasing experience

Along the way, the group discusses how renters are more informed than ever, how search behavior is shifting earlier in the decision process, and why the future of leasing will depend less on isolated touchpoints and more on understanding the full context of renter intent.

This episode highlights a shift in multifamily from managing leads to learning from every conversation that happens along the renter journey.

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400K+ units use Flamingo’s Resident Retention Platform to stop Retention Leak & hit 63%+ retention.

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This week, Anne and Chris sit down with Martin Canchola, co-founder and chief strategy officer of Apartment SEO and founder of Multifamily Builders Club, for a conversation about how apartment search is evolving and what multifamily marketers should actually be paying attention to right now.

Martin explains why many of the SEO fundamentals marketers have heard about for years, like local listings, reputation management, FAQs, schema markup, and helpful content, are becoming critical again as platforms like Google, ChatGPT, YouTube, Reddit, and Bing reshape how renters discover apartments online.

The conversation explores:

• Why Google Business Profile and Yelp still matter
• How reviews and sentiment influence visibility
• Why video may become one of the biggest opportunities in multifamily marketing
• How marketers can experiment with emerging tools without getting overwhelmed
• What operators should prioritize first as search behavior continues to change

Martin also shares the vision behind the Multifamily Builders Club and why curiosity, experimentation, and AI fluency are becoming increasingly valuable skills for multifamily marketers.

This episode is packed with practical takeaways for anyone trying to understand where apartment search is headed and how to stay visible as the landscape evolves.

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400K+ units use Flamingo’s Resident Retention Platform to stop Retention Leak & hit 63%+ retention.

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This week on The Apartment Department, Anne Baum and Chris Johnson sit down with Brian Miller, Director of Partner Experience and Engagement at Zillow Rentals, for a conversation about what marketing teams are really navigating right now.

Drawing from conversations with operators and marketers across the country, Brian shares the patterns he’s seeing across the industry, including affordability pressure, rising concessions, operational complexity, and changing renter behavior.

In this episode, they discuss:

• Why nearly 40% of rental listings nationally now include concessions
• Markets where concessions are appearing on more than 60% of listings
• Zillow data showing that nearly 1 in 13 for-sale shoppers also engage with rentals
• How renters are using technology and AI to evaluate communities differently
• Why communities need their online presence to match the actual resident experience
• The operational reality behind managing apartment marketing today
• How marketers are pulling data from multiple systems just to understand market position and property performance
• The growing conversation around enterprise-wide AI strategy inside multifamily organizations

The conversation also explores how marketing teams can better communicate what makes a community valuable, why generic messaging is becoming less effective, and how operators are thinking about flexibility, speed, and transparency for today’s renter.

If you work in multifamily marketing, operations, or proptech, this episode offers a grounded conversation about the challenges teams are trying to solve right now and how the industry is adapting.

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400K+ units use Flamingo’s Resident Retention Platform to stop Retention Leak & hit 63%+ retention.

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This week, Anne and Chris welcome back Jude Chiy, founder and CEO of Flamingo, for one of their most candid and wide-ranging conversations yet. Jude opens up about the early struggles that shaped his leadership style, including hiring mistakes that pushed him to completely rethink how he builds and manages a team, and how those hard lessons led him to build a company where every role, every feature, and every decision ties back to one metric: resident retention.

Jude breaks down the performance management framework that runs Flamingo, including how he writes job descriptions around outcomes instead of tasks, why he doesn't care how long something takes as long as the result is achieved, and how giving employees a clear north star actually empowers them to push back and prioritize better.

The conversation also gets into the evolution of Flamingo itself, from a wellness and fitness platform called Hello Healthy to a full resident retention suite, and what Jude learned from walking the streets of Chicago for four months talking to property managers and residents. Plus, why he believes consistent resident communication is one of the fastest ways to improve retention, what authentic resident-driven engagement looks like, and why brand may be the most important long-term advantage any multifamily operator can build.

If you've ever struggled to get your team aligned and moving in the same direction, this episode is worth your time.

Flamingo - Resident Retention App
400K+ units use Flamingo’s Resident Retention Platform to stop Retention Leak & hit 63%+ retention.

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Marketing and operations are aligned around the same goal: stronger performance across the portfolio. In practice, that alignment often takes shape through reactive and responsive workflows.

In this episode, Justin Godwin, Director of Marketing Strategy and Innovation at Cushman & Wakefield, breaks down what it actually takes to evolve that dynamic at scale.

From restructuring a lean marketing team supporting hundreds of properties to redefining marketing as an extension of the leasing function, this conversation gets into the operational reality behind making marketing more proactive, not just responsive.

We talk about how marketing teams operate in response to requests, what it takes to shift that dynamic, and how trust evolves when marketing starts showing up with data, recommendations, and a point of view instead of waiting for direction.

The core shift is moving marketing from reactive execution to proactive performance support.

This is a conversation about systems, communication, and what changes when marketing is structured to drive outcomes, not just respond to them.

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400K+ units use Flamingo’s Resident Retention Platform to stop Retention Leak & hit 63%+ retention.

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What role does visual content actually play in apartment performance—and why are most operators still treating it like a one-off asset instead of a system?

In this episode, Anne Baum and Chris Johnson sit down with Izzy Carunungan of LCP (Lights, Camera, Pixels) to unpack how photos, 3D tours, and unit-level media are evolving from marketing “nice-to-haves” into operational infrastructure.

They explore how the rise of sight-unseen renting, inconsistent unit upgrades, and fragmented property data are forcing a new approach—one where visual content becomes standardized, scalable, and deeply integrated into the leasing journey.

This conversation goes beyond content creation to examine:

• Why your website should function as a true source of truth for prospects
• The operational challenges behind maintaining accurate, unit-level visuals
• How inconsistency in media impacts trust, conversion, and leasing velocity
• What it looks like to treat content as a system—not a campaign

If you’re thinking about centralization, standardization, or how to better connect marketing to operations, this episode offers a practical lens into where the industry is heading.

Flamingo - Resident Retention App
400K+ units use Flamingo’s Resident Retention Platform to stop Retention Leak & hit 63%+ retention.