DIY Versus Using a Provider for Your Apartment Community Websites

[00:00:05] Welcome to the Multifamily Tech Gurus Podcast series. I'm Kerry Kirby, the founder and CEO of 3605 Connect, along with my steam co-host, Jimmy Lancaster, software engineer extraordinaire, and chief product officer here at 3605 Connect.

[00:00:23] Today we're talking build versus using an industry specific provider when it comes to property level websites. Jimmy over the last two decades in this space, we have seen it all.

[00:00:40] We started back in an era actually when people said, why don't even need a website? People aren't going to lease an apartment online. Fast-forward till today. It's like, man, if I'm not on page one of Google,

[00:00:52] I'm going to die, you know, quick, move me up. What can you do? SEO me. So what, what, what's your third? We still see things float around now and then where somebody wants to go off and build a WordPress site or something of that nature. What's your thoughts?

[00:01:14] I think it generally boils down to one of two things. They either view it as being a really cost-effective way, because you know, you can go get a WordPress host or maybe I don't know, $15 a month

[00:01:30] and it's like, oh, that's a really nice price point compared to everything else I'm seeing out here. That is industry specific or somebody looks at it as, well if I do a WordPress site,

[00:01:41] I have all the control when I can build everything exactly how I want it and get it, you know, just pixel perfect by my own design and so I think I think generally boils down to one of those two things.

[00:01:57] Obviously, I think looking at that as an option might seem attractive but it comes with a ton of downfall that probably doesn't always get considered when decision gets made. Yeah and actually saw one recently where somebody had a really special kind of built-a rent

[00:02:20] product and was very, very concerned about brand and was talking with an agency and they were talking back and forth with us and said, you know, we're going to build a custom WordPress website and have I guess come in with a few questions that are kind of interesting.

[00:02:43] One is, you know, well, how do I get this data out of this PMS to it? So that's pretty important. Yeah, yeah, so that was one and the other one was that I got emailed yesterday.

[00:02:58] I feel like it can be unpaid consultant on this all of a sudden because we're talking about using us as like, oh, how do you tag things where people are coming from? How are you doing that, you know, and it's like,

[00:03:12] wow, that's going to be a tough. I can't even explain it to you, you know, it's hooks and it's all kind of things, you know, that we've built over time and it's not something I can hand you.

[00:03:22] Yeah, let me come ask you for your secret recipes, right? Right, right. So I think that's the end of my consulting on this deal because like I can't help you, I don't know enough about it.

[00:03:33] So so obviously they forego a lot of stuff. They're trying to execute a look. What else do you think they're missing in this bus? Well, I think I think one of the really tough

[00:03:47] things and and I think about WordPress sites. I know how to use it. I've built my wife's WordPress site. You helped build mine. I helped get you that personal WordPress site. So I'm not any

[00:03:59] high WordPress by any means. But I know the amount of time and effort it takes to really build out a WordPress site. And I know what my time, how I value my time. If I value it at $10 an hour,

[00:04:15] it probably cost effective. But I don't value my time at that rate. So so yeah, so once you start going down the road, if I actually building it out, making it right, oh, I need to make a

[00:04:26] tweak. Now I need to bring that tweak across the several pages that I have built. And there's something, it's something that's not working right and I'm off-troubleshooting. You know, I'm so many hours deep into building out a website, something that should be simple. And so I think

[00:04:44] that's one of the aspects that gets overlooked almost immediately is how much time and effort really takes to build what I would consider a good product as far as a website goes. And that

[00:04:57] even includes starting off with pre-built templates that might get you, you know, a good portion of the way there. Yeah. And you know, as you said, we built one, one I'm from me with from myself.

[00:05:11] And it's not that big. It's just a, currently a couple of pages. I'm dreading adding the other couple of pages up, put together on it because it's not a walk in the park. All that effort that I was

[00:05:22] talking about, I haven't even gotten to the point where, you know, I've spent time on the SEO related things you have to do. SEO by itself is a lot of work. And so for these property level

[00:05:36] websites, they generally use the same type of thing. So when you use a platform like the one we've developed, we've put all this time in effort into the SEO aspects and building all the things that

[00:05:51] you need in order to show up in Google for that community. And so that's something that when you're going the WordPress route, you now have to go build all that out yourself. And that includes

[00:06:04] a lot of the technical things. At least I'm thinking about the technical things, you know, properly implementing schema tags and making sure that the content is put together in such a way that

[00:06:17] the surgeons can pick up. Also all the technical aspects to make ensure all of the, what we call assets or optimize correctly. A lot of these WordPress themes are really heavily bloated with

[00:06:32] with things that you're probably not using but they were built for the masses. So they're going to include things that you don't need and all that stuff that really hurts your SEO. So if you want to

[00:06:44] invest in SEO at all, you're going to end up deviling the amount of time and effort that you put into that site. So everything I was just talking about didn't even include SEO. Yeah, you know, a lot of

[00:06:55] people think in the industries they go higher SEO firm and they're like, oh we're going to track keywords and rewrite some content on the page. But what a lot of people don't realize is the infrastructure involved in SEO. It starts with the framework of the site, schema tags,

[00:07:15] title tags, all these different components really need to be built into the framework of it for it to be SEO friendly will say for Google to read it which also Jimmy leads me into

[00:07:31] ADA. So if you think about ADA, a lot of people and we talked about this before in another podcast, slap a widget on it and I'm done. Well that's not the case. And ADA, if you really go start digging

[00:07:46] into Google, it's a new frontier of SEO, why? Because if a screen reader can read your site and speak it to you, it's highly optimized. Search engine can certainly index it and then unless

[00:08:02] come into today's world of AI, AI what's it do? It's got about a read your site to Cypherit and bring it back if somebody types in a question like, what is XYZ apartments and

[00:08:19] Houston, Texas so that it can read your site and bring it back to you? Yeah I think you talking about like properly structured data and that's big and I just think about that from my perspective as

[00:08:33] somebody that would try to use those things. It's so much easier if things are properly structured. And so yeah to do that all that stuff manually, it's a lot of work the ADA stuff.

[00:08:47] You're right on a couple points there. One SEO is concerning, you know, concerning itself with ADA now. If you go use page speed insights which is the number one thing people do for SEO to you know measure how effective at least the technical aspects of their SEO are.

[00:09:08] They have a whole section just on web accessibility now in that report. So it's something that they're obviously looking at otherwise they wouldn't put it on there to begin with. The second

[00:09:19] part to that is that ADA is something that's really tough to do in general so like put SEO aside for a second, if you want to make your website accessible it requires you really getting beneath the

[00:09:34] covers and modifying the code to properly work which involves getting into the actual HTML that is being put out there into the world. In order to do that you have to have somebody that

[00:09:48] obviously knows enough of the technical aspects to go do those types of things. It goes well beyond just color contrast, right? And so again going down that road and we even use tools to help us

[00:10:06] identify those things. But for web accessibility it goes beyond what the tools can even detect. A lot of it involves understanding the context of what you're trying to deliver and making sure

[00:10:17] that you are coding in such a way that meets your actual goals and the computers and the tools that are out there just don't understand that type of stuff. So, you know, initially when we're

[00:10:32] talking about the work I wasn't even including the SEO or ADA aspects of building out a website. Yeah, and ADA as we know we've been into it for a while we just recently certified

[00:10:44] under 2.2 the only guys in the industry maybe we might be in the top percentile of websites now globally that are third party certified under 2.2 so that piece was another quantum leap and there are things that I don't see people doing like focus indicators and

[00:11:08] you know, the obvious thing is right. Right and you know a lot of people like oh it's a color contrast thing as you said man that that is such a small piece of it it's not funny

[00:11:22] and then the other thing is it moves so quick you know we're researching every six months I mean how do you even begin to do this sort of word press site and as we pointed out I have a word press site

[00:11:33] I got to think today and it's like it updates it updates things for you right or something's just been updated what was that maybe I didn't want maybe it broke something else right so you're constantly running

[00:11:45] behind this thing trying to catch updates but I think the you know the other aspects of this thing that that we do is just pure what I call styling updates the web changes quick

[00:12:01] looks change and you know everything moves on what I call devices so screen sizes you know when when we started in this business there was basically 15 inch screens and in mobile came in

[00:12:18] and everybody had two versions of a website I think we were the first and only guys that had responsive sites where there wasn't two different URLs for mobile and now look at the screen size it's

[00:12:33] everything there's iPads there's all this other stuff so you're always doing styling updates because you're chasing two things you're chasing hardware and you're also chasing the most coolest modern thing on the web you're wanting to your customers have the latest and greatest so

[00:12:53] if you go build a bunch of word press sites how do you go and restile those Jimmy painfully go through each one and try to do it it would be really tough I don't want to do it

[00:13:07] and the crazy thing about these styles are they change just like you know fashion changes every year the websites are the same I wish it wasn't the case but it is and so how do you stay on top of that

[00:13:23] how do you make sure you don't have a dated look in website after two years and I don't know how you do that unless you're on using some sort of their party provider that is keeping on top of those things

[00:13:36] and so I see it just you know just in our own industry I look at sites and I know which ones don't move because you look at it you know like this is what websites look like eight years ago and

[00:13:47] you know that's probably when this site was created so I think one of the things is when you look for a provider look for a provider that continually moves you know moves with the times stays on

[00:14:00] top of a styling updates you might not like the fact that your your site gets updated every so often you're like oh but I like the way it looked it's like yeah but this website isn't for you

[00:14:13] it's not for you to like it's for you to attract customers and so having people that are keeping on top of that design and making sure that it's attractive to your customers is something that

[00:14:23] you're not going to get if you're going to you know go with a WordPress site that you set up and likely forget yeah and you know things change a lot you know I'm a bit of a

[00:14:37] I don't know what would you call me font kind of sewer font freak I do have a shirt that says that Jimmy so you know fonts change and I see things that I'm like that's cleaner I like it better

[00:14:52] you know I think things need a little more you know letter spacing and and then there it goes right and then you see things out there that are newer and more modern and it's like a car right the

[00:15:04] website's no different you bought a car in a couple of years there's been a couple of new models that came out maybe you didn't like it when it first came out but you're like man I really like this

[00:15:15] car because I'm seeing them all over the road and you want to get a new car so you need to provide that can mass update stay current for you so you're not hunting the stuff down and and and

[00:15:27] push those updates across a platform to get to keep you on top and not only on top style wise but all the things that go with it right to keep attracting leads into it which leads

[00:15:43] me to the other thing I'm just trying to think of hey what's all the things that I can accomplish for go build this integrations I feel like uh integrations I feel like we're more of an

[00:15:56] integration company than anything else we spend a lot of time making sure integrations are functioning to their highest ability and so that that is something that becomes really tough I think when you

[00:16:11] when you're doing some sort of custom site whether that's WordPress or something else so yeah I think that's one of the big things if you have to if you have to get a developer involved to

[00:16:23] make sure that you're pricing in a build ability is up to date or that your your guest cards are you know getting put into CRM correctly you just blew the cost completely out of the water as far

[00:16:36] as what you would have spent going with a provider compared to trying to do it on your own and and every time it breaks and it will because that's just the part you know a part of custom software

[00:16:50] you have to then you're in a fire drill and you're getting whoever that developer was hopefully he's got the time and he can come debug it and figure out what's going wrong and so all that is

[00:17:02] stuff that I think doesn't get taken into account on the front end and at the end of day let's face it integrations might be one of the biggest contributors to you getting leads I look at we have

[00:17:16] we have some customers I don't recommend it that don't display pricing and they just have inquire for pricing they do not get the amount of leads that somebody would update pricing and up to date availability get and it's in its obvious and yet people continue to

[00:17:35] go against our better judgment and they say no I wanted to say inquire for pricing or inquire for availability. Yeah I think the belief as well if I can get them to come in or get them

[00:17:46] to talk to us we can talk them into something but do you want someone not qualified to come in it's like buying a car right you know hey this is about what I want to spend on it so

[00:17:59] I'm not going to this dealership right because they sell something that costs more than I want to spend but I'm going to get a this dealership because I kind of know the price ranges they put their prices

[00:18:12] online on cars and I think people are no different what apartments they want to know hey what's the syn costs I don't want to waste my time and you don't want to waste your people's time so

[00:18:24] I never understood why I would hide the price. I don't get it either and I would say most markets people have options so if there's 12 different you know communities within my vicinity that be willing to

[00:18:38] look at an 11-room-half pricing and yours doesn't well I'm not why what I bother yours I don't I'm going to go for the noon commodity. Yeah absolutely but but to ping back on just the

[00:18:53] technical aspect of integrations I see a lot of people that do these I'll just like try to in bed a widget or something from the PMS system we're seeing in the world you can do because the

[00:19:04] the SEO opportunity is here's all my different floor plans now I want to click a floor plan right so just click the one bedroom one bath well I want to bring them to a page just about that one

[00:19:18] bedroom one bath with the units I have available in in all my least term are all the options they can select from which changes dynamically changes my pricing why because I just created a new

[00:19:31] title tag a new page some new SEO to highlight each of these things because if you think about think e-commerce for a minute that's your product right why do I want to

[00:19:48] hand that to someone else and have it cluttered in this thing that's not going to get read by the search engine I want that that thing to shine like a new penny and be off all by itself where I can do

[00:20:02] all the things I want to make it show up in the search engine so when somebody says hey I want a one bed or I'm looking for a one bedroom apartment in Houston Texas I got a chance to

[00:20:14] come up in the search engine just on that page yeah and you'd be missing out on that absolutely and you know as we're talking about this this is all definitely the website side of things but

[00:20:26] one thing that just came to my mind is there's so many things that you typically get from a provider that go beyond the website and so like I like to think about us we like to say we

[00:20:38] sell marketing machines because we go well beyond the website and so if you go for the word price site but you miss out on other opportunities to automate your marketing or enhance your marketing because you have you're using it's something that is limited and not built and fine

[00:21:00] to for the industry and so we do a lot of things here that go well beyond the website itself I like to tell people the websites really just the window into your marketing machine there's

[00:21:10] so much more going on here yeah there's syndication updating iolases and and yeah the APIs you know we're like a data hub right you can change a picture on the website no change it across all the

[00:21:24] iolases social media being able to post and and update social media your google business profile which is number one for SEO right we have in a great all these into google posts and we can that's

[00:21:40] right post and then you know one of the things that that we love most about being able to expand that footprint is pumping content SEO optimized content on the site and the form of lifestyle

[00:21:58] blogs or whatever syndicating that out into you know four five six social media channels including Google and just building that digital footprint out and that's something pretty difficult to accomplish

[00:22:14] and a one off non industry website i will call it yeah absolutely so so i think i think a lot of people are probably missing out on a lot of opportunity to do better marketing and you know like i said

[00:22:33] when we started this thing off their initial motives are to either save money or to have some level of fine-tune control over what it visually looks like and i think i think people are really

[00:22:47] paying forward in the long run in lost opportunity or the actual cost to get it out the door they just didn't realize how much it really cost them yeah so i'm going to chalk this one up Jimmy for a

[00:23:03] saying that i love which is don't be penny wise and dollar foolish don't get a website get a marketing machine something that can span wide because that's the way this industry works right we

[00:23:19] need to be everywhere that winners or you know out searching for my losses to social media we need to be high on update and our profiles in Google all the time and feeding content to them

[00:23:35] so a lot of missed opportunities if you go down to path of i'm going to say i want beauty but i'm going to forego the brains of the system and just and just go for the for the pretty

[00:23:52] picture but you can have both you can have beauty and brains and make it all click together that's right so well there's been a phone one yeah so i want to thank everyone for joining us uh you

[00:24:06] can find us streaming everywhere be just sure to visit us online at multifamilytechgoorus.com our podcast always available there and until next time i am carry Kirby along with Jimmy landcaster and we are the multifamily tech gurus