Create mega fans: From employees to residents

Nick Latz: Welcome home multifamily pros to the Resident Experience Podcast, Episode Nine. We're talking with Lori Snider from RedPeak on how you can create mega fans from employees to residents. How do you keep the balance between technology and the human element? How do you connect with residents in value-added ways and how do the actions you take lead the mega fans? Well, today we answer these questions and more. I'm Nick Latz, your host, and I'm talking with Lori Snider, head of learning experience at RedPeak.

RedPeak acquires, develops, and manages apartments in Denver and along Colorado's front range. RedPeak special sauce is their culture, and they pride themselves on creating distinctive living environments and bringing people together. Today, we are talking about how you can create mega fans across employees, suppliers, and residents. Lori, welcome to the show.

Lori Snider: Thank you.

Nick Latz: So we're super excited Lori to have you on the Resident Experience Podcast. And you've actually been on our radar screen as a guest for a while ever since we had Jen Piccotti onto the show, because she had a ringing endorsement Peak and I want to make sure I get this right, remember it correctly. She said, "At Peak, their employees, their residents, and their suppliers are mega fans," which is a fantastic ringing endorsement. And so we're excited to have you on today.

Lori Snider: Thank you. I'm so excited to be here. This is really, for me, getting to talk about my very favorite things, and so I love Jen and I'm glad she thinks so much of the work we're doing. You know, we try. One of my roles really as culture keeper is really just to always be worried, right, because I don't ever want to be to the place where like, "Yeah, we're so groovy," because we're not. And we need always improvement. So yeah, I'm excited to be here.

Nick Latz: Great. And I want to start out by asking you about your role. What is the head of learning and experience responsible for RedPeak?

Lori Snider: So as I said before, I'm the company culture keeper. What I do is I work to ensure that we grow leaders, that the experience that people have at our place of business as well as our communities is good and that people feel supported and welcome. And that is kind of a big job. One of my biggest roles is really to keep an eye on the culture and just kind of always be doing the litmus test in it because I'm looking for the funk, and I know there's always some funk happening somewhere in the culture. You can't have 130 people and not have all funk going on, right? And so it's my job, really, to be aware of it, understand it, and work to eradicate and change... Be an instrument for change when we need to be.

Nick Latz: Got it. Great. The culture carrier.

Lori Snider: I don't think that my job description would say if you're really working with them.

Nick Latz: So the real SKU, I like that, in monitoring the funk, creating the funk. And so, it seems like this is a thing at RedPeak, right? You've got a role around it. You've got focus around it. You're proactively kind of focusing on this culture, this funk, why is this such a big priority? Because it seems like this is a bigger priority for you than maybe some other owners and operators that we've spoken with.

Lori Snider: I think a lot of owners and operators give lip service to it. And I think that it's kind of like this cool groovy thing to say we have cool culture. And at RedPeak, we authentically continuously try to improve the culture in the organization because we know that engaged employees, happy employees are nice to residents and will work to solve problems and will also stay longer. And right now, we're looking at a time when one out of three people is saying, "Yeah, I got an itch to go," regardless. And I know one or three people in my organization are probably like, "Yeah, I got an itch to go." Right? And so what do I do to make sure that I do everything in our power as an organization to create the kind of environment where they say, "Man, but it's really hard to leave this." That's really why we focus so much on it and we know that long-term team members add value to the bottom one in the organization.

Nick Latz: Right. And this is a such a problem as we talk to customers and other folks in the industry, employee retention, employee engagement is always such a concern. It's always is something that folks are focused on and sometimes reactively. At RedPeak, how did this focus come about? Was this part of the DNA of the company since inception, or was this around solving a problem?

Lori Snider: A company where people love to be has always been the DNA of the organization since day one. And I think that our founders, Mr. Mike Zoellner, Mark Windhager actually left their previous positions, partly because they wanted to do it a little differently, right? They were both in pretty big companies and I think they wanted a more intimate organization that would really flourish with the people that chose to work for it.

Nick Latz: Right. That makes sense. And that helps so much when it's there from the beginning, because then you don't have to kind of correct the troubles along the way, if you will, right?

Lori Snider: Right.

Nick Latz: It's been part of the DNA. It's been part of the priority from the beginning you can build around that. That's fantastic. You mentioned two benefits of really focusing on the culture, the employee retention piece. And you said, hey, I wrote this down, engaged and happy employees are nice to residents and so there's a resident benefit. How do you guys think about measuring the impact of that? Is it anecdotal? Is it something that you just see or do you guys actually track it?

Lori Snider: Well, we track. I know there are ways to track it. I mean, you can see it in the way in the review response, right? You can see it in the way people talk about or the service request response that comes back, we see things. We also track it because you can track it through retention. You can track it through engagement scores. And we do engagement surveys quarterly, right? At retention rates, we actually have a company goal this year to reduce turnover of resident retention by 5%. And everybody knows that goal, right? And so that's really how we measure and track. It's one of those things that's a little hard because everybody's like, "Oh, so filly," right? It's so filly. But, you'll see it in employee turnover. It'll happen fast and it's pretty brutal when it happened so you'll see it.

Nick Latz: Right, got it.

Lori Snider: No matter what they'll let you know.

Nick Latz: For sure. And do you track retention both in terms of residents and employees?

Lori Snider: Yes we do.

Nick Latz: Do you track both of those and keep going?

Lori Snider: We do.

Nick Latz: Great.

Lori Snider: And right now, it's hard right now coming out of COVID because for a while we had very little turnover and I mean, nobody left because everything was frozen in place as we were talking about before. And so when we start to see movement, now we also have to take that into consideration because there wasn't any sort of movement at all. And we were fortunate, we didn't have to lay anybody off. We tightened our belts and we did what we needed to do and so we feel really fortunate as an organization.

Nick Latz: Yup, that's fantastic. So you've touched a little bit on the employee side and how that's such a big part of the culture. On the resident side, is there anything that you do specifically around resident satisfaction, resident retention in addition to the stuff that you do around your staff? Right. You've said that, hey, employees impact residents. Are there other things outside of that, that you guys focus on?

Lori Snider: For sure. I mean, it's really about with residents, our goal, and this is what we teach is an easy and awesome experience. Let's make it easy, let's make it awesome. Because the truth of the matter is you're either a hassle to do business with or you're not. I mean, that's the truth. I don't care how many parties you have. I don't care how many wonderful signs you have to say we love our residents, right? If you're not answering the phone, if you're not getting back to people, if you're not owning that big blue problem, they keep trying to give you and you keep kind of throwing back at them because no one's dealing with it. If that's what we're doing, then we're not serving the residents. I think you can teach a prescription to some degree, but in the end it's about being, are we easy to do business with and are we awesome in our approach?

And we take that touch point from the minute that that client decides, indeed, I'm going to rent at the Seasons of Cherry Creek, right? And they hit apply, because there's this moment right there that's like, "Ooh," right? And they hit apply. And then from that point on, they mentally and psychologically consider themselves a resident of our community and everything we do from that point really does make a difference. I look at it like bookends. We focused real heavy on the beginning, real heavy on the end, and then kind of everything in between, right?

Nick Latz: Right.

Lori Snider: And because we can really mess it up on move-in day. I mean, think about it, right? That's where it usually gets messed up. That's where we usually have some gigantic horrific thing happened, right? Like why aren't keys ready? I mean, it's always move-in day and people are stressed out on move-in day anyway. So let's make it easy. And communication is key. One of the things that's really interesting... Let me know if I'm talking too long here.

Nick Latz: Okay, I'm checking on it.

Lori Snider: One of the things that's really interesting is that, a few years back, we became pretty reliant on technology and so everyone was going to this online lease signing, all this stuff, right? And so in the process, we took the people out of the mix. And I remember asking a few years back and like, so when we review the lease with people, are we like highlighting the important things or showing them how to be a good residents? And I literally got the response, "Why would we do that?" I'm like, "Well, why wouldn't you do that? Right? And they're like, "Well, why would I do that? They can read their lease." Right. And I'm like, "But people don't know what they don't know."

Nick Latz: Right.

Lori Snider: When you take my 20-year-old son who is a football player and he goes into his first apartment, he doesn't know how to be a good resident. He doesn't know how. He has no idea what that expectation is supposed to look like. What he's supposed to put in the garbage disposal, what he's not? What he's allowed to do, what he isn't, right? And so we need to lay out for people. And we do, we lay out the top 10 things that you need to know living here, right? Because what we were finding is that we were getting all these bad reviews that said things like, "They never told me I had to do a 60 day notice."

Nick Latz: Yup.

Lori Snider: Right? They never told me it had to be written. They never told me. And so, is that our fault? No. But can we improve the experience for that resident through education and insight? Yeah. And in the process, everybody's clear and on the same page. And so we focus a whole lot on that kind of thing, on the communication, and on these little touch points because I like to measure satisfaction in terms of value.

And so, my goal when we have a party for the residents is not just to feed people. My goal is to get in front of those people and to take their temperature. And I look at it as like my value meter, right? So today, you bought a product at this rate and you thought it was fair, right? Do you still think it's fair? Because they got into the apartment, maybe the screen door fell off. I don't know. But every time that happens, the value diminishes a little bit and so we got to rebuild that so that we have an easier time at renewal in justifying and proving that value to those residents.

Nick Latz: Yeah. That's great. Well, I scribbled out a lot of notes there and there's a lot of really good stuff there I want to unpack a little bit. So you you talked about the bookends of the resident experience. You talked about move in and move out is kind of disproportionately mattering in terms of perception of value, in terms of satisfaction. And we've definitely heard that from our customer base, right? The move-in experience matters. People are disproportionately impacted by their initial impression of things, whether that's a new person, whether that's a new experience. So how do you guys approach that? How do you approach the move-in process and how do you make sure that, that's a positive experience?

Lori Snider: So we developed, we actually formulated an experience committee here at RedPeak and it sounds lofty, doesn't it? And we basically designed the move-in experience process expectation. And so, we laid out steps for touch points that are expected throughout that process.

One of the things would be the top 10 things you need to know about your lease, that that is reviewed with every person and that they receive a call from their leasing professional two days before move-in that getting their keys may not be the same day as move-in day, right? Depending on what it looks like, because you want to sit down and talk to people. We walk people home to their apartments because I want that to that moment, if there's any time that we're going to blow it, it's when someone walks into their apartment and there's no ta-da happening, right? And so I want to be there to make sure that if there's anything that needs to be rectified or changed, we can do that. And so we walk people home. Now, does this happen with every single resident? We try, but I'm not going to lie sometimes. We have very busy offices, we do our best, but that is the intent.

Nick Latz: Yup. That's great. I love that. We got a lot of ideas here. So the living experience committee, and then kind of this checklist approach that you guys have to make sure that, that's consistent, right?

Lori Snider: Right.

Nick Latz: Because that's been matter so much. That's great. The other thing I wanted to ask you about Lori, that you mentioned is these resident touchpoints and you gave leasing as an example. And you said, "Hey, things are going more and more automated. Things are going more and more to technology."

Lori Snider: Right.

Nick Latz: We go sometimes we say, "Hey, these touch points are going digital." But you had that great insight there of, it can't go all digital, right? There's got to be some balance or there's got to be some points of emphasis. And so maybe an example of that is leasing is going more digital industry-wide probably if you look at the data. But do you have to couple that with a person to person conversation to make sure things don't get lost for when these things were done non-digitally, how do you guys think about that?

Lori Snider: I think we'd be foolish if we didn't. I mean, we can do whatever we want. You know what I mean? We can make and do whatever we want. But it's really all about the customer and what they want. And if you meet those needs, you're going to get everything you want because if you're making it about the customer, if it's just about being easier for the people in the office, then there's no point. But when you're making it about the customer and you're saying, "Okay, what does the customer expect here?" And in the process of identifying and meeting that expectation, we are also educating and providing insight to that resident as to how to behave, expectation, how to be a good resident? We get ahead of problems.

I hate it when people come in... I mean, people are getting pretty vicious out there sometimes, right? People have lost their sense of decorum.

Nick Latz: It is, yeah.

Lori Snider: They have feel free to just let it rip, right?

Nick Latz: Right.

Lori Snider: And so, when I have someone yelling at one of my leasing people, my first thought is why are they so mad? And second, people yell, they get louder when they don't feel heard, right? Like if you started talking over me and I kept going, right, they get louder when they don't feel heard. And so, if they're so mad that they go and we personally answer every single review, regardless of what it is, and sometimes they are not easy to answer. And we personally do that. But if they write a dissertation online regarding what horrible people we've been and how horrible their experience has been, I can only assume from that, that they're not feeling listened to.

I can only assume from that, that they're not feeling listened to because who takes the time to do that? Nick, do you take the time to write like a dissertation, unless you're so mad and you chronologically list events and you're like, seriously, like they're really mad. And so do I think maybe that we need to look at it from that perspective? Yeah, I do. We also, our fiduciary is for an owner and we run a business and that's important as well. But I think one of the best things we can do as providers of housing is really hone our communication skills. And right now I think our communication skills are a little rusty, right? We don't even know what to do. We walk up to somebody we're like, "What do we do? How do we behave right now? Can I shake your hand?" I don't know.

Nick Latz: Exactly. So that's so interesting in terms of the aspect of, can you be heard, right? Or are you being heard as a resident feel like they're being heard and how do you balance that with automated or digital touchpoints with in-person touch points? And one of the things that I would argue, let me know if you agree or disagree with this is, I think residents want choice in terms of the touch points. I think there's a good segment of residents out there that want the digital interactions.

Lori Snider: Agreed.

Nick Latz: They don't want you to explain every fine print bullet, right? They're happy to read through it themselves and they're perfectly used to that. And there's some that do. There are some that say, "Hey, give me the cliff notes, tell me as a person and let me ask you a couple of questions as a person." Did you see that across your resident base that people want both? [crosstalk]

Lori Snider: Yeah. They want both. And it's just like right now with people wanting a self tour experience, we're offering that, right? And some people are really into that and they just want to go look at it by themselves. But, when they have a question, you better be ready.

Nick Latz: Right.

Lori Snider: Right? And so it's like me walking into Macy's with a bunch of clothes and I can't find a checkout person and then I dump everything and run. And I think, if we can provide options to people and while at the same time knowing when the situation may be escalated and when it's time to take it face to face, because we have all these wonderful devices, right? We have all these wonderful devices. But I'm telling you, I've watched more conversations literally blow up via email because nobody recognized when it was time where this was getting a little heated, right?

Nick Latz: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Lori Snider: And this is like, "Oh no." And you can see the moment where someone said, "Oh no, you did not, blah, blah, blah." Right? And they just start in. And so I think we have to really help people understand in a digital world, there's still a really strong impact on face-to-face. And no matter what, they're going to have a harder time being mean and nasty when it's face-to-face, especially if they know you.

I think one of the reasons people feel so comfortable just letting it rip today's because they don't know the people there.

Nick Latz: Yeah, that's right.

Lori Snider: They don't know the people in the office. And so if you're nothing, I don't know who you are, I'll be happy to trash you. And so I think that's the other piece of it is that human piece. That's why the residents love maintenance so much. They all know maintenance. And that's where the heroes, right? The office people are just the enforcers. And so the maintenance people though, they all know who they are. They ask for them by name. It's like, "I want Hector to come over for sure." They know them and they feel an emotional connection to them. And there's value to that.

Nick Latz: Right, it's so easy to hide behind email.

Lori Snider: Right.

Nick Latz: That's true. I was talking to someone about this just the other day, and they mentioned this acronym PUFP. Have you ever heard of PUFP, I hadn't heard of it.

Lori Snider: No.

Nick Latz: What it stands for is Pick up the Freaking Phone.

Lori Snider: That's so...

Nick Latz: And as good service professionals and that [crosstalk].

Lori Snider: Let me write that down. Excuse me for a moment, I'm writing that.

Nick Latz: Or in this service-based industry, right, in the rental business. And I think we have to sense, okay, how do we provide our customers options? But when there's a disconnect, sometimes we got to recognize, you got to pick up the phone, you got to talk to somebody.

Lori Snider: Right. I mean, as a resident, I may not want to talk to you if I'm just calling in, I need some clock in my bathroom or something. You know what I mean? I may not want to talk to you. I'm totally cool with that. That's fine. I will want to talk to you three months later when I haven't heard back from you and somebody said they had to order a part and something's wrong with my tile in my bathroom and now I don't know what's going on, right? So there's this fine line there.

Nick Latz: Right. You mentioned events and we see community events is something that residents value, that can impact their overall resident experience. But you touched on, there's doing events and there's really kind of driving interaction and engagement across events.

Lori Snider: Right.

Nick Latz: What's your approach? Do you guys do events more than average? How do you think about that across your community?

Lori Snider: We're trying to. I mean, COVID threw us for a little bit of a loop, because I think we knew every food truck in the whole city, right? And now we got the burro people out there with the donkeys and their flowers. I mean, seriously, there was all these different things we brought up. And I think what I believe in is engagement, right. And I believe that people should make it easy and awesome for them. Some people don't want to go sit in a major pool party and then we wonder why nobody shows up, because we expect force interaction out of people. And if I'm a resident at ABC community, I don't know anybody there. And they're like, "Come to the bull party, Saturday. And I wonder and I'm like, "Yeah, okay," I don't know what to do, right?

Nick Latz: So you get your sandwich and you leave, right?

Lori Snider: Right. And here's the thing. If people come in and they get their sandwich and they leave, more power to you. I would rather line up in my office, I'd rather line up a whole table full of pizzas and have my whole team right there behind it, right? And just say, "Help yourself, have pizza with friends of yours, take it up to your apartment. I don't care, pizzas on us. Tell me how was your experience? Tell me how you're doing?" Right, how are you doing?

And that helps me to gauge and also get that, again, that face-to-face in front of the people. So I think events are super important. I think you have to think about your demographic too and what they really want and what they'll respond to. And I think there's so much discouragement with events because they don't go the way they should the first time and you just have to stick with it. They're testing. Your assessors test you and you got to stick with it and you got to be consistent and your messaging has to be good too.

Nick Latz: Right. And I think people want to know their neighbors overall, right?

Lori Snider: I think we do too.

Nick Latz: It's a general statement. We see that in the data, some of the residents surveys that we do is by and large people want to know their neighbors. They want to interact with their neighbors and events can be a good in-person way to do that. Have you come across tools or other things that you do to facilitate maybe residents interacting with each other on their own, right? Because when you do events, that's kind of community hosted. Are there resident self-service options that you can facilitate?

Lori Snider: I think that yes to some degree. I think we're starting to get there. The communities that do really well with this are the ones where we have a concierge program because we do have physical concierge in a couple of our communities, and that seems to work really well because they orchestrate and lead that effort, right? And so there's all these little subgroups and all these things that happen and there's that point contact, right? I would be interested to know more about that actually. You know what I mean? Like how can we better facilitate neighbor to neighbor congregation and communication? Because again, you're not going to have people yelling about their neighbor if they know their neighbor.

Nick Latz: Right. That's right. You mentioned resident retention earlier and you said, "Hey, we've got to target 5% reduction," right? Who owns resident retention and do you measure it the portfolio level, the property level, or both?

Lori Snider: Everybody knows the goal, right? And so each individual community is keeping track of their goal. In the end, leadership owns it, right? This is what we want to do this year. And it comes down to, we need to renew 57 more leases, basically, right? And if we do that, 57 more leases than we did last year, we're going to make our goal of a 5% reduction turnover. And that's enormous money to the bottom line, right? That's enormous money to the bottom line. And so that's our goal. I believe we'll get there.

I think the big thing is you keep it visible to people and you keep reminding them and then you also reward people will go in the way that you want to focus. And so we turned around and we actually increased our renewal bonuses and backed off a little bit on the lease commissions because we really want people to focus on that big pot of money that's available there, right? And that's an entire staff opportunity, so that works. People go the direction and they really focus on the way that you direct them and expect them to behave.

Nick Latz: That's great. I really like that point on tying incentives to the business outcome that you want, because acquiring a new resident costs more than retaining an existing one on average, when you look across the industry, right?

Lori Snider: A lot more.

Nick Latz: Well, yeah. What the data shows it costs $4,000 on average to turn these units.

Lori Snider: Yeah.

Nick Latz: When you talk about maintenance, when you talk about acquiring a new resident, when you talk about all that goes into that. But, I bet if you look at the incentives, leasing staff makes more to your point on the commissions with bringing in new residents versus keeping them.

Lori Snider: Yeah, general.

Nick Latz: So it's backwards, right? The incentives are backwards from the profitable business outcome that you want to drive.

Lori Snider: Uh-huh (affirmative). Well, and I think the other thing is focusing on the resale, right? Because we spent a lot of money in marketing focusing on the sale, right? We're all like messaging and ooh, we love you so much. And there's all this romance, right? And then they marry us and then we're like, there we are, right? And so, I think really focusing on the messaging that you're providing people and reminding them of the value that you're providing and talking about capital improvements and what that really means to the bottom line of a community. And nobody has any idea how much the flowers really cost, right? And they cost thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars, right? And so not to say that you want to just be like, "Well, we just dropped 30 grand on the flowers," but to really remind people that there's value in renting and that their money just doesn't go into a big bank somewhere and into the owner's lap. It's reinvested into the community, and that's important.
And to rebuild value, I always think about, one of my leasing techniques and I will say, always remember, you've got to know what a resident would have to pay for if they left that they feel like they get free living at your community right now. That coffee is worth something every day. You know when you really think of that.

Nick Latz: Yeah, that's interesting.

Lori Snider: The fitness center, they feel like they get free. They move into a single family home, they can walk for free, but they're going to have to go get a fitness center. So those are the kinds of things to really be aware of in how to negotiate on renewals as well.

Nick Latz: Right. I'm so impressed with the way that RedPeak thinks about this and the way that you think about this in terms of consistently reinforcing, reminding of value across the resident life cycle right across the resident experience. But then coming up to the renewal can be the moment of truth. Do you guys do extra things around renewal time period to remind and reinforce that value? How do you push that?

Lori Snider: We do. And a lot of it I think comes down to the friendly messaging. I mean, really explaining what that looks like. It's so easy to do a standard formatted and your new lease will be this much, right? And really getting into the messaging around it, as well as those personal moments.

I mean, we have one service supervisor who's just fantastic and he actually built a Frisbee golf at his community. He's almost like the mayor. You know what I mean? Like he's almost like the mayor. And I would have no problem sending him over to talk to a resident that was on the fence. Mrs. Jones, what can we do? You know what I mean? What are we not doing for you? What's it going to take to keep you? And because they're the heroes, they're the ones that people know, they have that emotional connection and he'll get that lease. He'll get that renewal.

Because it's about who you know, and I think the biggest mistake we make today is not knowing our residents. Not knowing them. People love that. I think about that. You're in a building just to be able to say, "Hey, Mrs. Jones," on the way out, right? That means something to people. It makes them feel welcome and belong and that they belong.

Nick Latz: Part of the community.

Lori Snider: Yeah, right?

Nick Latz: That's great. So final question for you here, or if you can recommend two other guests for us on our podcast, any names that come to mind?

Lori Snider: Sure. I've got lots of people. I would recommend Steve Matre. He was with Banner for many years in Chicago now he's with the Mandel Group in Milwaukee. And I would recommend Nancy Goldsmith, she's with Bozzuto and has been with them for a very long time. She's wonderful.

Nick Latz: Excellent. We'll just hold you to those two. It sounds like you can rattle off quite a few there which is great.

Lori Snider: Yeah.

Nick Latz: So Lori, I think we're coming to the end of our time here. I want to be cognizant of your time, but thank you so much for joining us today. This is a great discussion and we're going to provide access to a couple of links and resources and topics here that you mentioned that will promote with the podcast. And thanks so much for joining us.

Lori Snider: This was so much fun and I so appreciate you having me on. And I really look forward to listening to some of your future podcasts as well because the content is stellar.

Nick Latz: Great. Thanks so much.

Lori Snider: Yay. Yay.