One of the common conversations we see on Multifamily Insiders relates to strategies to lease up a new property.  Similarly, we see other Insiders asking how to compete with new lease-ups that are hitting their own area.  So in this conversation with Katie Trevino Senior Regional Marketing Manager at Avenue5 Residential, she shares how she tackled both at the same time – marketing their new lease-up, Imber at Union Mills, in a market that featured other competitor lease-ups.

In the interview, she talks about how her marketing strategy changed and evolved from past approaches, shifting gears into new mediums like TikTok, reaching the military community, and leveraging Conversion Logix to modify and adjust on the fly.

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Brent Williams: Hey everybody! I am thrilled to be with you all today. We're going to talk about lease ups, which is a very common topic within Multifamily Insiders. And today I have Katie Trevino, who is the Senior Regional Marketing Manager over at Avenue5, and she's going to talk about her recent lease up and her experiences on that front.

Katie, thank you so much for joining us.

Katie Trevino: Absolutely. I'm so excited to be here, Brent.

Brent Williams: So there's a couple of different things with lease ups. Number one, people always talk about, "What do I do? We have a lease up and it's a big lift. There's so much going on and trying to fill up so many units at the same time is daunting."

And then what I find really interesting is that you have the other side happening too, where you have a lease up and then you have other lease ups that you're competing against in your market. And so that's the other conversation that we hear all the time about, "Oh my goodness, there's new lease ups in our market.  There's these beautiful new buildings coming up and they have rent specials, and what do we do at this point?"

So you're kind of hitting both sides. So I can't wait to hear about that experience. Before we get into that, I'd love to hear a little bit more about Avenue5. Could you tell us about Avenue5, what type of properties you all have overall?  And then we can dig into this specific scenario.

Katie Trevino: Yeah, absolutely. So for those that don't know, Avenue5 was opened in 2014 by Walt Smith. And I'll drop in just my little personal anecdote. I worked with Walt and several of our senior leadership executive team back at Riverstone Residential, so a lot of those executive leaders came over, started Avenue5 so it really felt like coming home to me to work with all of these people again.

So today we have more than 600 properties and 120,000 units, and that's across 20 states plus D.C. And we have over 3,000 associates supporting those. So it's a really exciting time for the company. We are headquartered in Seattle, which is where I'm based. And I just want to touch on a little bit on our marketing support and how we're set up.

Walt and the executive team really put an emphasis on the marketing support to really help us facilitate for our operations teams these marketing strategies, these supplier partnerships, such as with Conversion Logix, which is a really key partnership for us. And this allows us to really focus with them on individual property performance and these really deep insights.

Brent Williams: I absolutely want to get into that because I think the whole relationship not only internally with your marketing endeavors, but also how you weave in other supplier partners is really interesting. So now let's dig into this specific lease up. Can you tell me about its situation, where it's at in the process, what type of community it is, and then what does the market look like around it?

Katie Trevino: Yeah, absolutely. So we're going to really focus on a property that it's really kind of in that tail end of lease up with us. It's called Imber at Union Mills, and it's actually in our Olympia Washington market. So for those that aren't familiar with Seattle, I was surprised to find out that Seattle is not the capital of Washington.  Olympia is.

So it's actually our capital, but it is a small town. It's about an hour south of Seattle. In the last few years, there really has not been a lot of brand new multifamily entering into this market. And right around this time in the last year to 18 months, we've really seen a lot of pipeline of buildings being built.  Tons of lease ups hitting that market at the same time.

So that really is the situation that Imber's been in throughout its lease up, a very competitive sub market.

Brent Williams: So they all got the memo at the same time and they're all like, we all have to be in this one spot. So what type of property is Imber?

Katie Trevino: Yeah. So they're a garden style, and in terms of construction, that means that it had a phased approach in how we absorbed the units from construction. So sometimes, especially if it's a mid rise, you get the whole building right off the bat, you got to lease as quick as possible.

And then sometimes you've got that phased approach, which is what Imber has. So you're getting a few buildings at a time as you're working through that first year of lease up.

Brent Williams: Very cool. Are the comps that are lease-ups, are they also garden style, or are they mixed?

Katie Trevino: A little bit of mixed, but some garden and some mid rise as well.

Brent Williams: I think it's always interesting when we think about the progression in how marketing changes over time, starting back with what we would have done three or five years ago, and what would be the normal go to approach there?

And then we can talk about how are you changing things up as you move forward?

Katie Trevino: Yeah, absolutely. We have this conversation all the time. We have quite a few lease ups I'm working on right now and it comes down to when are you opening, right? So Imber had some construction delays, which happens with almost every new construction multifamily project that's out there.

So we had a few delays. We were really working on that pre leasing through the holiday season, that really slow season in Washington, and then opened in January. So we really had a bit of that slow start as we're really trying to get that momentum going, to get up that hill to really get the leasing velocity that we needed.

I would say historically, you really focus on just that PPC and ILS spend, while at Imber, we really tried to focus on more of a multi channel strategy. We really reach deeper into our playbook for strategies to really try to push against that slow season and kind of build that momentum up.

So, by the time spring came, we were really raring to go and ramping up.

Brent Williams: It's trying to start up a lease up in January has got to be difficult. Maybe not where I'm from, as I'm in Houston it probably wouldn't matter, but in in the north, that'd be difficult.

Alright, so you had said that ILS and PPC, those are some go-to strategies and now what are you adding to the mix?

Katie Trevino:  In the last few years, we've really had a lot of platforms and systems open up to us. So we really diversify that digital spend. Conversion Logix and I, we really partner and look at where are prospects spending their time online? And we try to put our marketing in front of them where they are. Instead of trying to pull them to us, which we do, we pull them to our website, but we want to try and get in front of them.

We have seen some really great results from YouTube ads.  I know YouTube's been around a long time, but in terms of multifamily and us running our ads, that's still a little new and fresh for us and we've seen great results. Of course, the meta platforms, Facebook and Instagram, those are pretty old standards as well.

My personal favorite is TikTok because I spend a lot of my time on TikTok and we know this next generation coming up, they are really spending time on TikTok, but they're also using it as a search engine.  They're going in there, they're searching for things and that algorithm, that search secret sauce algorithm that TikTok has is very powerful in putting us in front of those people that want to hear what we have to say. It has produced some really great results for us. As well as CLTV streaming ads has been good.

We also utilize some geofencing as well and really targeting where people are going throughout the sub market. Whether that's a competitor, whether that's a retail space, whether that's a neighborhood gathering spot to really try to hone in on who we're trying to reach.

Brent Williams: So I am sure we're going get some questions.

So how are you using TikTok? Because I know that that's been a big question mark about how to actually approach using that platform. What do you all do?

Katie Trevino: Yeah, I would say in an ideal world, you would have both organic content and paid strategy. That's not always perfect, right? That's kind of the ideal situation.

It really depends on that onsite team, which is just pivotal and a lease up. So at Imber in particular, we really focused on the paid ad strategy. So Conversion Logix really helps us. They develop the creative, some dynamic videos, it's got some nice music. And personally, when I first started running these ads in my mind as a marketer, I thought it would be 100 percent brand awareness.

We're just getting our name out there, we're not going to see much conversion, much action. And it really has actually brought us quite a bit of traffic. People are actually clicking on this ad to find out more about us. So I've been personally impressed by those results.

Brent Williams: So you brought up Conversion Logix.  Let's talk about that kind of relationship. Because I think a lot of companies, they do everything in house and that's a lot. You have to end up being experts in a lot of different things, which can be difficult. So when you work with an external supplier, they can be the experts in their areas.

So how do you weave your existing marketing efforts into using an external supplier like that?

Katie Trevino: Yeah, absolutely. I have a great relationship with our reps there, we are in constant communication. I know it's really kind of a merriment between us as the marketing strategy, them as a supplier partner, and our on site teams.

So we are consistently on the phone talking through strategies, making pivots and optimizations as we go. And again, that on site team is really pivotal in that because they are seeing who's coming in the door.  Whereas I see a lead in a CRM and check a box, they're talking to these people.

They know they're pre qualifying them. They're finding out what they're looking for. And that kind of boots on the ground knowledge you can't replace.

Brent Williams: Yeah. There's so much context that goes with all of that beyond just a few sentences in the CRM, and I think it's interesting what you said about how much you can rely upon on site team to do different things because they're juggling so much. For a while, we were talking a lot about social media strategies, and I always came back to this thought of like, my goodness, they now have to be social media experts too, like, what do we want from our onsite teams?  That just seems overwhelming.

So then when you're talking about working with an external supplier, you can then have them do different AB tests, and so it's not just putting up something and is hoping for the best. You're tweaking, you're evolving that strategy over time, right?

Katie Trevino: Exactly. Exactly. And I mean, just to touch on a little bit too, because I know there's definitely a trend in the industry towards just using AI for as much as possible. And I know our strategy has been to really utilize that AI for some of that beginning lead nurturing. And that's where we can save some of that on site team's time, because we've seen these tools really get really impressive in that kind of texting and emailing with a prospect.

But in terms of kind of actually running these Google ads, we still find it just it's the most impactful to have a company, have a rep really running those ads because they've got that knowledge that me and my team don't have on the Google algorithm and again, finding those right people. You can focus on a lower cost per click and you know, all of these metrics and data, but metrics and data only go so far when you're just, you need those leases signed.

Brent Williams: Absolutely. So what are some challenges that you faced from a marketing perspective specifically because you were in lease up and also because you've had other lease ups in your area? Is there anything that jumps out at you as saying like these were much more challenging than they have been in the past in different scenarios.

Katie Trevino: Yeah, any kind of marketer that's watching this knows you get into a little bit of a concession spiral, right? When you've got so many lease ups, we're all competing and these concessions can get just really crazy to stay competitive. So we really juggled our strategy especially in terms of the messaging, are we really pushing our concession?

Are we really focusing on maybe a loss leader? Our pricing? Are we focusing on a particular amenity, like AC in the units, which to someone in Houston, you're like, of course your apartment has AC, but up here, that's not every apartment has AC. So what are we really honing in on? And I think to floor plan types, really focusing us on two bedrooms, one bedroom studios, really dialing in and optimizing the messaging, we don't just set it and forget it.

Brent Williams: I love all this. This is fantastic. And I'm curious now, are you able to share any results at all? Are you able to share any kind of like what seemed to work well for you all? What you kind of shifted away from, anything interesting for us.

Katie Trevino: Yeah. I think results really just depend on the environment. Is Imber the absolute quickest lease up that I've been a part of?  No, not by any means. I've done lease ups in Austin during the boom, leased up in six, seven months. So I don't think that time frame is always the number one measure of success. But we really did see that leasing velocity pick up.

And when we see it kind of slow down, we're in there, we're optimizing, we're changing things.  Maybe we need to pull some money from this, put it to that. Maybe we're focusing too much on brand terms, we need to focus more on the neighborhood. Also, we really honed in on the military focus in Olympia. There's a lot of military bases. So that was also another really great result and kind of helped us reach our goals.

Brent Williams: Interesting. One last question. You mentioned TikTok. Have you ever worked with influencers?

Katie Trevino: I have personally worked with a few, and its definitely mixed results. I think it really depends on that person, are you working through a third party? Are you working directly with the influencer?

I've seen some really, really great results. And then I've also seen some not great, and a lot of money spent. So, I think it really depends on making sure that strategy is set up from the get go. What are those pieces, those markers of success? How are we going to determine success at the end?

And I think you've got to talk about that at the beginning. I think influencer marketing is a great tool in our toolkit.

Brent Williams: Very cool. Well, Katie, thank you so much for sharing the story of your all's lease up. And I am sure there's a lot of people out there that have gone through or going through the same exact situation as you, so we really appreciate you spending time with us today

Everybody, we hope you enjoyed this interview and we will see you next time. Take care.