Resident Experience Management Predictions for 2022

Nick Latz:
Welcome, everybody, to our Resident Experience Management Webinar where we're going to be discussing predictions for 2022 from a resident experience standpoint. My name is Nick Latz of Zego, and I'm joined today by an esteemed group of panelists who asked to introduce themselves here. Kerry, do you mind jumping in?

Kerry Kirby:
Yeah. Hey, I'm Kerry Kirby. I'm the CEO at 365 Connect. We're a provider of marketing, leasing, and resident service platforms exclusive to the multifamily industry since 2003.

Nick Latz:
Joe?

Joe Melton:
Hey, good afternoon, everybody. Good morning wherever you are. My name is Joe Melton. I'm the vice president of Marketing and Management Support Services at The Morgan Group based out of Houston, Texas. We're the owner-developer. So happy to be here.

Nick Latz:
Hey, Joe. Amber King who's planning on joining us will not be able to make it today. Amber's an assistant area director at Village Green and just lost her voice today unfortunately, but Brian, I will turn it over to you.

Brian McMakin:
Hello, I'm Brian McMakin. I'm the director of IT for WillMax Capital Management here in DFW area, Texas.

Nick Latz:
Thanks Brian. From a format perspective, we'll jump right in here. We'll do about 30 minutes of discussion from a panel perspective, and then we'll save some time for questions at the end. For those that are joining us live today, you can drop your questions directly in the chat and we will take as many of those as we can get to at the end of the discussion here. If we open it up, we want to hit on and have a conversation around some 2022 predictions and trends as it relates to the resident experience. Maybe let's kick it off with what we're all seeing at the property level which is an onsite staff shortage. Joe, from your perspective at Morgan, and Brian, from your perspective at WillMax, would love to get your guys' kind of views on hybrid versus onsite for property staff and how, from a context perspective, how have you guys been thinking about that over the last couple years?

Joe Melton:
Yeah. Thanks, Nick. It's a great question. I think that we've been really trying to understand kind of in this downtime as we were prepping for the call, I said I wouldn't, and I wouldn't [inaudible]. We've been prepping in this kind of downtime for opportunity to create efficiencies and where you can better introduce technology as it relates to digital tours, self-guided tours, creating centralized leasing centers. Recruiting new employees has been tough for us. I think that they expect you to talk about technology that you're using, and so we're making sure to keep that on the forefront of our conversation.

Joe Melton:
Then I think that the comment that we share internally, as we're talking to new people who might want to come to work for Morgan Group, is understanding how they were treated as a team, what that environment look like, but the new systems help us manage what's going on, but at the end of the day, it still takes people to run the product, right? That's the conversation we always have is how do you manage and run the product and finding those people, putting those people in place? It's been a little of a challenge but definitely working through that through self-guide, virtual options, and then people.

Nick Latz:
Yep. Quick follow-up that, Joe, have most of your property staff been on site in office over the last two years?

Joe Melton:
We have. We did do kind of an AB team setup where we designed it so that half the team would be in the office a couple days a week, the other half would be set up remotely, and then vice versa. The intention behind that was just to have a plan so that the entire office wouldn't be taken out should there be an exposure, or even worse, a case where someone was actually sick. We did stay open. We did do only virtual showings move to only by appointment, and now, we're pretty much open with some very basic protocol in place and we encourage social distancing and masks if our employees or the prospects feel like they need to wear them.

Nick Latz:
Great. Brian, how does that approach compare and contrast to how you guys are thinking about it at WillMax?

Brian McMakin:
We did the same in the very beginning. We had A and B teams as well that lasted for about half the year, and then we transitioned to having everyone back in the office again. We haven't changed a ton. We did offer a lot more virtual kind of... We have our virtual tours on our website and then we also offered a Zoom walkthrough for a long time for a lot of different prospects. Luckily, before all of this happened, we refined a lot of our older application systems and stuff like that so that all of our applications could be accepted online, all the leases could be signed, and special addenda, and all that kind of stuff.

Nick Latz:
Great. Joe, you mentioned that recruiting is challenge in some cases, and so that's maybe led to higher adoption of some self-service use cases. Kerry, what have you seen from a self-service perspective and what do you see as maybe the most popular, the most prominent self-service use cases going into next year?

Kerry Kirby:
Well, what we're seeing is, obviously, a lot more moving, I guess, changes in digital applications. Digital apps have always been around but we're seeing them getting more robust bringing in ID verification into the top of it, income validation, building out leases, and able to go completely digital with the entire process, and there are even some operators out there that are looking to a completely self-service that model front to back without staff even touching it, so more robust systems to onboard residents without staff interaction.

Nick Latz:
Yep. Some touch on leasing, onboarding. Joe, what about maintenance? Are you guys seeing any more kind of self-service or differentiated ways of doing maintenance across the Morgan portfolio?

Joe Melton:
Yes. One thing we did is we had some messaging in place on our... We use an app on most of our communities where you put your work orders or your service requests in. In there, if somebody put in some sort of an emergency work order, not generic work orders that are items we couldn't take care of, and we were not really open wholly, we would ask them to fill out a list of questions that just would identify whether or not they've been exposed or if they were feeling bad. From that, we would wear PPE and take those more serious maintenance requests, but in that timeframe, we also came up with a series of videos that were put out on our app that were available to residents that allowed them to self-serve through a few opportunities and perhaps would give them an opportunity to do something on their own.

Joe Melton:
An example I would use is we had a young lady at one of our communities in Midtown here in Houston that asked for a filter for refrigerator to be lifted her front door, not to come in and change it, that she had watched the video and that she felt very confident she could do that on her own. That allowed us to realize that that was an opportunity, and so from that, we started to create other videos that we felt like were important that people could self-serve, self-maintain, preventative maintenance, if you will, on their own over the last few months.

Nick Latz:
Yeah. I love that. I love taking those simple maintenance use cases and pushing some of those to self-service because at the end of the day, residents like choice, right? There's probably some residents that don't take you up on the videos. We're going to get 100% of adoption, but residents do like choice between having to explain to them versus someone coming in and doing it for them. Second trend I wanted to jump to here is that living and work environments have converged, and this is not new in '22, but something I think we expect to see going forward were 2/3 of residents are saying, "Hey, my work environment is not expected to change in 2022." Brian, I'd be curious across your portfolio. How are you guys thinking about that in terms of common spaces, amenities as well as the actual units and how residents live in and work?

Brian McMakin:
Yeah, that's a big one. I'd say one of our biggest things was making sure all of our properties had fiber access for our residents available. They had that option. We worked with AT&T or Spectrum or whoever to get fiber delivered to the community as quickly as possible. Another big thing that we had going on was our package rooms. We didn't have package rooms across all of our sites and we're starting to implement them throughout more and more. It's a huge time saver for our staff, and our residents really like the ability to grab their packages whenever they have time. Whether they're working from home or if they're out, they're able to get their package delivered to a secure location. Another thing that we've done is, in our units, some of them didn't really have a dedicated space for them to have their office or like a work station, and we've converted some simple spaces in the units to look like they could be easily adjusted for that.

Nick Latz:
Yep. Makes sense. Joe, what have you seen in terms of amenities, in particular, in common spaces in particular?

Joe Melton:
Yeah. I think we've all seen the transition from larger conference spaces, larger meeting rooms, where you can retrofit or create smaller work pods, places to take Zoom where people can take advantage of a clubhouse that's nicely decorated and probably have a better background versus their apartment where they have to have a camera on some sort of a video call and might be from their bar top in their kitchen, and so where we can create those smaller spaces because there was not a reason for six to eight people to meet. We did so and then to the extent that we wanted everybody to benefit from that, to put them on some sort of a reservation system, even if you weren't charging, just so that everybody felt like they had access to this additional we work area.

Joe Melton:
Then what Brian was talking about, I think, is a really great data point. When we survey our prospects, we kept seeing two bedroom meet kind of on the rise, and I think while that might be the case, I think it's also a data point that really means people were in places pre kind of the last 18 months that they didn't need a work from home space, and at some point, the bar top no longer was a great office, right? So, the second space now is either a home office or perhaps it is a bedroom where it's a more formalized office. I call those amenities in our communities, we work, but the places in their apartment homes, you work. So, we tried to find places that were you work spaces where we could, and we got creative in doing so to the extent that we would offer some sort of inexpensive piece of furniture as a way to close the deal that would help to further show them that it would be a area where they could turn into a work from home space.

Nick Latz:
I like that distinction between we work versus you work. That's a good one. Joe, you mentioned reservation systems as a technology layer for common areas. Kerry, from a technology perspective, any other technology use cases that you see that support higher usage of common areas or maybe different uses of common areas in some cases?

Kerry Kirby:
Yeah. We've seen more demand, again, Joe's point to reserve those common area amenities. We've seen Zoom rooms, retrofitting of Zoom rooms get added to that amenity list where people can reserve it, and then a lot of properties are putting time limitations on it. They won't let you reserve it for the entire day. There's maybe an hour time block that you could reserve it for and there's some AI involved in making them smarter so that guy doesn't reserve it over and over again that, "Hey, you can reserve it for an hour a day," and then it's got to go to somebody else. So, we're seeing a lot more demand for that and to both, I think, Brian and Joe's point is our residential communities, believe it or not, the infrastructure is not built for what has taken place.

Kerry Kirby:
It's a huge difference between business class internet and residential internet. You have so many people working remote. From a residential community, it's a big drain on the system so I think our internet providers certainly are stepping up and upgrading systems because when you're working, you could be moving and downloading big files and it definitely has put a strain on the infrastructure system, so we're seeing outside of ourselves a lot more stuff coming in from some of those internet providers to bring that bandwidth back into the residential communities.

Nick Latz:
Yeah. That's really interesting both from a internet and bandwidth perspective as well as I thought it was interesting that you talked about reservations of amenities in common areas and one of that technology was the ability to make reservations, right? That actually tied to a schedule. I think you brought up some of the V2 and different considerations, Kerry, which is, okay, now you can take reservations, but how do you get smarter from a function perspective, and as people start using it more, how do you deal with some of these situations that come up like overuse and how much capacity can each resident get? That, to me, is kind of the V2 of a lot of this functionality coming in.

Nick Latz:
Okay. Let's jump through a third trend, which is convenience economy, which is touching on multiple aspects of our life. Let's talk about one big use case for the multifamily industry, which is food delivery, where multifamily properties have actually seen an 80% increase over the last two years in terms of onsite food delivery. Brian, I would love to get your perspective on how your communities and how your properties are thinking about and preparing for increased usage from this perspective.

Brian McMakin:
One thing we've done is we've retrofitted a lot of our gate systems with the ability for them to have an app on their phone, so whenever the delivery person gets there, they can text the resident and the resident can just tap a button on their phone and it'll open up the gate for them. We've also done a couple other things, like for instance, with Amazon, they have, it's called Amazon Key. This software, it's basically a equipment that goes into your gate systems that allows when Amazon drivers pull up to the gate, it should automatically open for them so you don't have to worry about giving them access to the gates. It also helps with security so that Amazon's in control of which drivers are allowed in and out and you're not having to give several different drivers access to the community.

Nick Latz:
Fantastic. Joe, I know you mentioned an ambassador program. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Joe Melton:
Yeah, so a couple of things. One thing that's great about delivery services, food delivery probably, is probably the biggest example Uber or Favor, is these apps have also transitioned and their technology is a lot better so our residents see in real time when someone's approaching, when they've left the store, and so they're getting notifications to help them understand when's the right time to go downstairs and meet the delivery service and it's food, and so a lot of that has been helpful to us. We're not really at the mercy of hanging off our balcony looking for the pizza truck to come up. You're getting notified in real time on your device. I think one of the things that we've also done is we're appropriate on where it makes sense. We've put a concierge style service in there, which is really like a resident ambassador, who their job is really there to help leverage the building to continue to operate as efficiently as possible.

Joe Melton:
An example would be they check our package room every day, they notice that there's a package that's been sitting there for two or three days, they might offer to put that just inside the door of our residents or leave it outside their front door for them. We have services that are part of living in our buildings that are available to you so that... One of our taglines that our companies live well and it's a pretty broad tagline, and it's with intention because we want to put things in place in our buildings that allow you to live well, live better. One of those things is just those small services that have just attention to detail. Somebody who got the Amazon delivery notice during a Zoom meeting and just didn't think about it when they got home after 6:00 PM, and they didn't think about it the next day because they were onto more busy meetings and so it just escaped their memory, and so we're there to help them and kind of fill the gap, but people don't miss packages very often. They know when their stuff's coming.

Nick Latz:
Fantastic. Let's go on to our fourth trend which is health, wellbeing, and sustainability, certainly, on top of minds of residents as well as property owners and property managers from a sustainability perspective and how that impacts our living environment. From a certification perspective, there's different certifications that are out there for properties that are often used in new resident marketing and resident acquisition marketing. Joe is our marketer on the panel. How do you think about these certifications? Is this something that perspective residents are asking about?

Joe Melton:
Well, I think that it's important to think about your audience, right? What's the value there? We're really careful to not force upon anyone their desire that we are green building or that we have some sort of a, "We care," kind of forward thinking idea when we're building these communities. What we like to do, and keep in mind, there's lots of rebates out there from a development standpoint that are offered in building these communities that are ways that we are able to receive discounts, if not free, thermostats. So, there's a lot of benefit on the development end that we attach ourselves to but we want to better understand what's the value to the resident.

Joe Melton:
We might say something to them like, "Not sure where you currently live, but you'll notice that our common area is all of our restroom sinks and common area sinks are touchless." That's a standard here in our communities and that's just a really soft way of showing that we're being responsible, and then they say, "Oh, that's great. Love that. What else do you do that's green in here?", and then we go down the path. We don't make that necessarily part of our set story selling, if you will. We just allow people to embrace that, and if it creates value, then we talk about it.

Nick Latz:
Great. As it relates to ESG, Kerry, is there a material distinction on how owners think about that in terms of new developments versus retrofits from your perspective?

Kerry Kirby:
Yeah. As Joe pointed out, a new development can be a lot easier. There's a lot of rebate programs, and even some of the power companies are doing things for you if you go green to save energy, but retrofitting, of course, is harder. It's more expensive. So, bringing in any kind of, "I'm going to change all the windows out so I have energy star rated windows," is not always a great possibility, but there's a lot of other things that we've seen people doing such as, "I'm going to put in some better maybe nest thermostats or something so things can be controlled better," or touchless faucets, as Joe pointed out, is a great feature. There's different things that people can bring in and retrofit even hot water heaters as they need to be replaced and bringing in more energy efficiency, but it's very difficult to take an existing building and do what you can do from the ground up.

Nick Latz:
Sure. That makes a lot of sense. One of the things we've hit on here today across most or all of our different trends is the concept of technology adoption, different technology use cases, there's more features, there's more what I'll call a kind of second order functionality around AI that can be beneficial, but all this can be overwhelming too and all this can be hard to implement or at least take time to implement. Joe, I know I've heard you talk about before this concept of ROE. Can you explain what you mean by that?

Joe Melton:
Yeah, so it's something that I talked about a few years ago. It's funny because when you're vetting out these kind of things, there's two things that we really worry about. It's process and price. Initially, it's like, "What's the process look like? How hard is it? Does it work?", and cost. Then the end user that we take into consideration that it's not enough that from our level, whether it be technology or marketing, have vetted this out, but we pass this on to our team on site who are the operators who have to use it. While someone might sell to you that this is a really cost effective solution, what we're not thinking about sometimes is the return on the energy and the effort, that it takes a lot of energy, a lot of effort as it relates to time training continued education the idea that the leasing consulting is a high turnover position in many markets, and it's hard to keep those people long term, and so you're retraining these people on these solutions.

Joe Melton:
If you don't have something in place to continue to support those efforts as it relates to technology, then that energy and effort that you spent to vet out and roll out is really compromised. So, we've tried to think about that and not get wrapped up in the whiz-bang of it all and really think that we strip that all what looks great and shiny about this. It's really a tool. Is this a really a resource and does this move the needle? Does it create better digital curb appeal? Is this something they can't do without to do better business? If the answer is yes to many cases, then it's worth a try. I always say, much like an airplane, things don't do well without a pilot, and so at our company, we believe in pilot programs, we don't believe in rolling things out to the masses, and so we like to try things where appropriate.

Nick Latz:
Yep. Brian, I'd love to hear your perspective on... We all have technology in place across our portfolios, right? I know that you do it at WillMax. How do you think about some of the new functionality that's out there and some of the new use cases and new technologies, and then think about interoperability and how they work with existing systems?
Brian McMakin:
For me, I think the biggest thing is data and how to use that data. Is that what you're guiding to?

Nick Latz:
Yes.

Brian McMakin:
Okay. Well, for me, it's data and it's the way that we use that data with AI technology to help various parts of our businesses. I'll give you an example. You have a digital thermostat that has data that's connected to the property and the thermostat starts to see that there's an efficiency issue with the AC unit outside. You typically will find out that AI will tell you that there's an issue with the HVAC unit before the resident even knows so that your maintenance guys can go out there and address it before it even becomes a problem.

Nick Latz:
Fantastic.

Brian McMakin:
There's different ways to use data and other avenues as well. If you have a certain number of residents that are coming to your site from one particular site and you know that those people are typically going to go straight to your virtual tours, you can have AI set up in a way that it sends them directly to those tours instead of them having to go to your site and then scroll through everything to find where they need to go.

Nick Latz:
You mentioned thermostat and energy efficiency and some preventative maintenance that's possible around that with AI. Are there other preventative maintenance use cases that you guys are thinking about across your communities? [crosstalk]

Brian McMakin:
Like leak protection. If you have little leak detectors under your sinks next to your water heaters, if there's a leak that's detected, they could send that an alert to your superior property manager and they could put in a work order for maintenance guy to go check it out and make sure that leak doesn't get turned into something that's major.

Joe Melton:
Nick, we have a new preventive maintenance feature in most all of our communities and they're actually paying us to live there. They're called our residents so they're home now. They're seeing in real time all of these things that are happening. Before they leave in the morning, they come home at night. Now, they're staring at the wall and they're seeing a crack from sub line or they're seeing paint that seems off or a cabinet that is not straight. I mean, they're seeing things in real time and so our service teams have had to step up because the amount of service tickets that are coming in now that we're back doing business, I wouldn't say it's skyrocketed because we're really proud that we take care of our buildings, but they're noticing things and so the amount of service tickets we are responding to related to residents being home, seeing things in real time has really increased. That's been something we've been working on is how to handle that.

Nick Latz:
Yeah. That interesting, Joe, because that hits on our first trend, too, which is labor shortages from an onsite property staff perspective, and so that kind of hits on the supply into the equation and then now you're talking about, "Hey, but there's more resident demand at the same time than in some properties. There's less staff supply." So, it's a double whammy and I think that's why a lot of us have been talking about more self-service, what are the lowest hanging fruit for a self-service to counteract this lower supply and higher demand.

Joe Melton:
Yeah. I think the one thing that probably we know about and hasn't been mentioned, and Kerry probably knows this as a vendor partner more than anybody, is integration. Just the ability to make sure that everything you do is talking to your community so that the information is getting to them, so you capture and have an opportunity to work every prospect, every lead. I call them opportunities. So, that integration is on the top of our list.

Nick Latz:
Right. Okay. Well, we're right at the 30-minute mark so we're right on time. We've talked through a couple of trends, but I'd love to do a quick round-robin here, maybe Kerry starting with you, on what's your prediction for most impactful resident experience trend in 2022?

Kerry Kirby:
I think it's up in the game on what we talked about earlier, being able to reserve amenities, being able to have data points coming back on that using we call it limitation logic over here where we know, "Hey, Nick used the business center this morning for an hour. We want to give him two slots. We certainly don't want him to come in and book back to back and take the place for the whole day," so I think it's about building flexible I call him middleware systems is going to be where it's at. Again, highly integrated that can talk with everything but it's more personalized and centralized to where adjustments can be made based on what the property deems their supply demand is for those type of amenities.

Nick Latz:
Joe, what's your perspective on most impactful trend?

Joe Melton:
I think that this is a trend a couple of months ago we had a conversation internally about when things get back to normal and then we had a moment like, "That ain't happening. This is the new normal." I think more and more, we are focused on making sure that we meet our prospect and our resident where they are. Meeting where they are. So, offering options as consumers, we're in an apartment as a consumer experience, right? So as a consumer, you like options, and so to be able to not associate a self-cuttered tour with a closed office but associate it with an option of how to view our community.

Joe Melton:
We've been told to do things for so long, and the idea that your psyche's being told that you have an opportunity to do it on your own terms feels really great, right? You can see our property by self-guide, or you can speak to a person or take a tour with the person or create an appointment if that makes you feel safer that there's a scheduled time. I think the biggest trend is staying connected, but not limiting those connections with our prospect and our customers.

Nick Latz:
I like that. Brian, what's your perspective?

Brian McMakin:
I'm going to kind of piggyback on Joe's. I think the leasing process of being connected to residents is going to be huge. I think a part of that is also going to be automating some of these processes. Having more like if this than that type of automation for different processes like throughout the application process, holding a unit, whether or not they have a pet, they get sent different things so that they're not having to wait for the leasing agent to initiate a process. It just happens like that with whatever data they've entered into the application and that'll take out a little bit of the human contact, but it streamlines it, it makes it a little bit faster. I think all in all, people are going to be happier with that. They'll still get the human connectivity when they're talking to somebody to look at a unit or whether they're on the phone with them asking different questions about the community and stuff like that.

Nick Latz:
Great. Well, I'm opening up the chat here to see if we have any questions. While I get that open, Amber, is there anything we need to do to open it up to our audience members to jump in with a question?

Amber:
Yeah. I have a couple of questions here that came in that I can help field for you, guys. I might ad-lib onto a question as well to open it up. One question that came through, and I think this was a comment maybe from Joe about version two, and so are there thoughts on a version two of a current technology you're using now that you're looking forward to, or you're looking to have a version two of a technology you're using now into the new year?

Joe Melton:
I think the answer is yes. I think that as we leverage different technology, you think about the life cycle of what it looks like at your community, and are there other ways it can be leveraged, and is there a benefit that a prospect or a resident gets from using that application, and does it help create value? One of the things we're talking about is we use an app on site that helps put heads and beds and so it helps with our occupancy, and in turn, we're thinking about is this also something that lives in the resident space that as we get closer to a renewal, we can remind them of the experience and we can remind them of all the things that were great living here and all the things, the experience in this environment?

Joe Melton:
Does that help us garner the trust that when we go after our 2%, 4%, 6% rental increases, that it's a no brainer that they think there's a lot of stuff in place in play here, technology included, that really allows me to live really well. We're thinking about things that are, whether it be in the buying stage or the post move in stage, how we can further leverage what that platform does and does it make sense to make sure that we talk about it throughout the life cycle of the resident's lease?

Nick Latz:
I like that, Joe, because as you said, heads and beds can be the name of the game from a resident acquisition perspective and filling more, and sometimes, that's where a lot of budget dollars can point because it's so important, it's a top of mind, but if you can extend that technology, it also retain at a higher rate. We know it's cheaper to retain residents than it is to go out and find ones, and so that seems like a win-win from what's next with existing system's perspective.

Amber:
Next question. Earlier in the conversation mentioned maintenance videos, and the question to you, Joe, was where it's housed, where do you house them, and then my extension on that question to bring everyone into the conversation, Brian, what are your thoughts? Are you thinking about maintenance videos? Then Kerry, maybe do you have a solution for housing them or helping facilitate? The question to start, Joe, is where are you housing these maintenance videos? How are your residents accessing them?

Joe Melton:
Yeah. Our manager keeps them on a thumb drive in her desk. No, not really. We have a Venmo or YouTube. A Venmo, excuse me, a YouTube or a video account. I'm thinking about getting paid for this conference. A video or YouTube account, and that's a great place to store, but we also use an app, and I'm going to say it because it's a platform we use. We use Mobile Doorman, and in there, there's a tile feature and these tiles are great places to park different kind of things, whether it be preferred employer programs, perks. In there, we can park a do-it-yourself type tile. In there, we also have our videos available at the palm of your hand in your PDA. That's where we house us as well, but on the back end in a YouTube channel or video account.

Amber:
Brian, what are your thoughts on those videos? Are you doing any?

Brian McMakin:
When Joe told me about them the other day, I thought it was genius and it's definitely something that I already started talking to a couple of other executives on our team about implementing ourselves. Currently, we have on our website video kind of like walkthrough tours at some of our communities that were recorded by leasing agents that they just wanted to get a video walkthrough done of the unit in case someone wanted to view that instead of look at the virtual tour or instead of looking at pictures. We would just do that same thing. We would just have another page that would be like maintenance, general maintenance items, and just have the videos posted there with the title of what each one represents.

Amber:
Like it. Kerry, I didn't know if you wanted to talk in on that question as well, but...

Kerry Kirby:
Yeah, we've been seeing videos out there for a while. I think it started with the appliance maker's, "Hey, here's how you use the dishwasher," and then it's evolved from there. We see them obviously housed on the resident side, and a lot of times, we see them I call it in the open that you don't need to log in to go into them. They're just out there in the open and there's a video page on the site. We actually have created a little corner called Learn TV, and they'll live in there and it'll be a tap, "Hey, maintenance videos."

Nick Latz:
I like that.

Kerry Kirby:
A lot of communities are doing them so it's a great feature.

Amber:
Like it. I have a couple of other questions but we do only have four minutes left, so I think I'll end on this one. It piggybacks off the round-robin you guys did at the end about what your eyeing trend-wise in 2022. This one was about what are you eyeing in 2022 solution-wise that you think will have a good ROE. Going back to the return on effort, is there anything you're already considering implementing in 2022 that you think will be worth that effort?

Joe Melton:
Yeah, I can start. I think we were just having a conversation about this this morning where if you think about the last couple of years, so many people are trying to be connected and integrated, and as a marketer and running support services for a company, it's so important that we are clearly understanding lead source attribution so everybody's getting their piece, everybody knows where it lands and that they're responsible for providing that opportunity to a site. Lead source attribution is really big but I think it's moving into because people are figuring that out, right? I think it's moving into a lead source assignment mode where there's all this AI now that keeps the lead for a minute and they'll work it. You don't pass it off until it's really a true lead.

Joe Melton:
I think really understanding what that lead source assignment looks like is the next step is really pushing your vendor partners and the people that help drive progress in this process that we have on site to understand when the league gets passed on if they're just taking it and sending it, or if there's something they can do to really fine tune it. We're working with AI and different chat bots and things like that to see when they pass it to us. Lead source assignment, I think, is something we've not talked about yet but I feel like it's happening.

Amber:
Nice. Brian?

Brian McMakin:
Man, I really like that answer. I'll go in a different direction because I was going to go with a similar answer. Skip me and then come back to me on that one.

Amber:
Good. Not a problem. Kerry, anything on the vendor partner side solution-wise for 2022?

Kerry Kirby:
Yeah. We've been putting our heart and soul into trying to eliminate some of the redundancy and smoothing out that onboarding process. I think both Joe and Brian touched on this earlier. What can we do to make onboarding? I don't want to say totally people less but the things that we do know that we can go out and build these things and deliver them back and get a prospect into a lease quickly without somebody having to touch everything, I think we have the technology, we have all the... I think Brian said it best. What if you must have worked in development? Because we call it what if statements. All the what ifs kind of worked out, so that's kind of where we see the opportunities in 2022.

Brian McMakin:
I did think of something now. It's just refining the leasing process for us a little bit. Right now, we have a solution that does our application, we have a solution that does our ID check, and we have a solution that does our credit and criminal check. I would really like to find a solution for our company that brings all three of those pieces together. I know there's tons out there. We just want one that's integrated with our software because, as Joe said earlier, that's a very important thing for our companies for all of our partners be integrated with our technology and our information systems.

Amber:
Yeah.

Joe Melton:
I think the other thing I would just add, I know we're short on time, is it's okay to sit down internally and talk about what's not working. It doesn't mean it's a bad product, but as you adopt other technology, the expectation is to keep everything else you have and just continue to add to this back. We sometimes have those more spiritual conversations, if you will, internally and say, "This is great, but based on this, what's not working? What can we get rid of? What can we challenge a little more to keep it?" Those, I think, are the conversations that really, in the right way, help our vendor partners, people like Kerry, really move the needle and continue to be relevant in our space.

Amber:
I like that. That's a good closing comment. With that, we are out of time for questions. Nick, I don't know if you want to wrap it up, say a few last things.

Nick Latz:
Yeah. I just want to thank a big thanks to all of our panelists here, Kerry, Joe, and Brian. Thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for our listeners for joining in. We'll host this podcast or this round table on the website. We at Zego are big believers in this concept of the resident experience and we published a lot of thought leadership on it, so if you're interested in getting some additional information, you can check us out on our podcast, Resident Experience Management Podcast, or come to our website, gozego.com, or you can follow us on social like LinkedIn. Thanks, everybody, for joining.

Joe Melton:
Thank you all. It's nice. Bye-bye.

Amber:
Thank you. Thank you to the panelists.