The Spider Web of Modern Renter Journeys

All right, welcome to the Multifamily Women podcast. I'm your host, keri Antrim. Today, I'm excited to welcome Carolyn Wallentisch, director of Customer Success at Sochi. Carolyn is a technology leadership professional with more than 12 years experience spanning government, real estate, nonprofits and now multifamily. She's passionate about building and scaling teams, mentoring emerging leaders and driving technology adoption that truly delivers value for customers. She also balances all of this her amazing career with raising two young boys at home in Charleston, south Carolina. We're thrilled to have her on the show today to talk about Sochi and the important role technology plays in helping multifamily operators succeed. Carolyn, welcome to the show.

Carrie, thank you so much. I'm really excited to be here and thank you for the lovely introduction.

Well, it's my pleasure and we're happy to have you here. Can you just give us an overview on Soshi? What is it that you're doing? How are you making the industry better? What's going on over there?

Of course. So Sochi is today a fully distributed remote team, but we were started in San Diego, california, and, interestingly enough, we serve multiple different verticals today types of businesses but we started it with multifamily. So we are purpose-built for multifamily and our mission is truly to make digital marketing easier, more streamlined and, ultimately, more successful for our customers in the multifamily industry. So we are a digital workforce for marketing automation and, if you think about marketing and the really thousands and thousands of tasks that have to get done in order to be successful, we streamline those tasks, bring them together in one platform and ultimately and I'll share a little bit more about this later is actually do that work for our marketing leaders that we work with at the customer side. So we handle SEO. So we handle SEO. We handle reputation management, mundane tasks, the thousands and thousands of them that have to get done in order to successfully market their properties and show up for their residents and for their potential residents.

Yeah, that's really interesting, especially with how quickly things change in digital marketing. All these strategies change and then the platforms themselves. They change their algorithms and their rules and things like that. It sounds like you are a helpful partner in navigating that.

Yeah, that's a big part of what we do. Right, so we are a software. Right so we are a software. We're a platform. We are also an agentic workforce. But if you take sort of the actual delivery of what we do out of the equation for a moment, a big part of the value that I see us driving for our clients is help me stay up to date with those things that are changing so fast for our industry. Help me understand what's trending in SEO. Help me understand what changes Google has made just this week, which we know are many. We help our customers by having on-site experts who have kind of been in their shoes and now just focus on telling them hey, here's what's happening and here's what you should think about and change, perhaps this week. Perhaps bring it to your team meeting because it's going to impact your life. It's going to impact what you do on the day-to-day.

Yeah, absolutely. And so your role of Director of Customer Success. What does that entail? What does that look like for you?

So I run our team of customer success managers who work one-on-one with all of our multifamily customers that are using the Sochi tools. So my role, as I like to say, is everything that happens after you buy Sochi. That's me. I'm responsible for making sure that you're hitting your goals, I'm responsible for making sure that you know what your resources are, and it's my team that's going to deliver co-deliver those outcomes for you. You know, help you make sure you're getting exactly what you need out of Sochi. Now that you are one of our customers, now that you're part of the Sochi family, so you mentioned Sochi has different verticals.

but staying with multifamily, what are you and we kind of touched on this a little bit with how quickly things change and you mentioned Google new rules, you know, every week, every day, whatever that looks like, but what are you seeing as the biggest challenges that you're helping solve for multifamily specifically?

Sure. So at Sochi we like to break up sort of the marketing bubble, if you will, into three pillars. So those three pillars are reputation, search and SEO, and social. So within each of those pillars, the key problems that we're helping our customers solve are within search and social excuse me, within search and SEO, it's visibility. So, at the end of the day, how am I showing up on search accurately and how am I showing up in as many searches as I can? Now, that's just, of course, it's not just Google, as we all know. It's within ILS, it's within ChatGPT, gemini, perplexity, it's really anywhere someone goes to search.

Second pillar reputation. We are helping scale reputation management for our customers by ensuring that they can respond to every single review within 24 hours, that they can see all of the different places where they are getting reviews, whether that be on their website, whether that be on Google itself and their Google business profile, or even things that aren't directly reviews, like how are you responding to and managing your engagements, your direct messages on social channels? Just a great example of how these pillars today all sort of cross each other. It's not nearly as simple as just the three pillars. And then the third pillar, as I mentioned is social. How are you showing up on social every day?

How are you making sure that potential residents and current residents see what your community is really like? How do they get to know the team that works there and how do they ultimately build that trust that makes them say, yes, this is where I want to live? Of your potential renters, they're touching at least three points of reference when they're deciding where they want to live. So we talk about these three pillars, but really these three pillars are so intertwined today, so really what we're solving for is how do you get found? And then how do you validate that you're a great choice? How do you build trust with the potential renter when they're looking at your reviews on Google, when they're jumping to your website, when they're then checking your Instagram and then they're validating their top three choices on chat, gpt how do you make sure that they get the information they need and that you are putting your best digital footprint forward when those people are making a really important choice?

Yeah, that's a really interesting renter journey that you just kind of outlined with all the different touch points. I mean there's so many now and, like you said, how does?

it. It is all over the place today.

Yeah, how does the?

company we all think of in marketing, like, oh my gosh, it's barely a funnel anymore, right. It's like a spider web.

Oh yeah, that's actually a better analogy Because, yeah, there's so many different touch points, and how does a company even know where they are? You know where they're being mentioned. Is it on TikTok? Is it on Google, is it? You know what is ChatGPT saying? That's really interesting For the users of your platform, of your services. What does that look like for them? You know, if we can get into the nitty gritty like how is Sochi making their lives easier?

Yeah, of course. So if you imagine sort of what some of our users might experience today if you don't use Sochi, if you have sort of distributed platforms, you might be logging in one place to manage your reviews. Perhaps you've already taken the really great step that you do manage it in one place. Awesome, you log in, you see. You know, know, hey, I got 25 reviews today, so you're going in and you're trying to respond to all those reviews. So let's imagine that's one workflow. And then you log into your social media. Let's pretend you're on site. You're, you know you have your responsibilities in the day, or I go over here to manage my reviews. I have to respond to 25 of them and I have to do it within 24 hours, because I know that makes a big difference. Your social media you go in and you're like, oh, I haven't posted in a couple of days. I should probably post something. I have to think about what to post, when to post it, and then, hopefully, if I'm ahead of the game, I'm creating some sort of a calendar that tells me what I'm going to post for the rest of the week and then you're going into a tool to manage your SEO. You want to make sure that, if you're just responsible for one property, that all the information is accurate, that you're connected and you're as visible as possible. So that's kind of the distributed task list of a marketer who's maybe responsible for one property. Maybe you're a property manager too and you're being tasked with all of those things.

Now let's say you use Sochi. You have one platform where you navigate. You can navigate it on your phone or you can navigate it on your desktop at work, where you can monitor all three of those things in one place. It's a little bit. It's laid out the way that you would imagine for most of your softwares. So you've got your reviews tab. You can see what's going on, what came in in the last 24 hours or whatever, what has been responded to, what needs to be responded to. You can also look at metrics how is your property doing over time? You can take a look at sentiment and sentiment themes so that you can report out to your team members about what is going well and where you might need to dig in, because you've got some themes popping up this month about, say, maintenance. So you're looking at themes and you're responding right there. You click over one tab. You've got all of your SEO information right there. Is everything synced, is everything up to date? Then you click one other tab down. There's your social media calendar. You can build content, schedule content and get suggested content right there, and that's kind of the core functionality and experience for a user in our platform.

What we have evolved to and what a lot of our customers are using and what I'm most excited to really talk about and I spend a lot of my days talking to our customers about this and working on it with our teams is our agentic workflow. So Soshi now has an agent that is essentially going from this property manager I just talked about doing their own work in the platform to an AI agent who essentially is doing the work for that team member. So that's kind of where our platform has most recently developed and I'll pause there, but I'm excited to share more about, like, what is an agent? Because I think sometimes we hear a lot about it but we don't necessarily dig into what it really means. It's like a fun buzzword, but I'll pause because that's sort of where we're going as a company and what's the latest. But I want to make sure that the way the platform works and the things that we touch on today make sense.

Yeah, no, absolutely. And that's funny that you paused, because that was the exact next question I was going to ask you is what are you excited about? What's on the frontier, what's coming? What is Sochi doing? So, please, you've got the floor.

Cool and clearly I'm excited about it. I jumped right to it.

No, I love it.

That's great. It that's great. So we're hearing about AI so much in our day-to-day lives. We're hearing about it at work, we're hearing about it at home. It is everywhere.

And I, at least, also feel like I'm hearing about agents. And until we started talking about it and really diving into it and I was able to experience it through my work, I kind of didn't fully grasp what an agent means and how it can kind of change our day-to-day. So an agent really requires I'd say it's like five real things that you need to have to be a real agent to have a real agentic workflow built into your solution. So what an agent is going to do is you're going to be able to autonomously give that agent a goal and it should be able to execute and understand the steps that are necessary to reach that goal, the steps that are necessary to reach that goal. So let's give an example of generative AI. That's chat, gpt, that's perplexity. You can ask it a question and it can generate that answer. That's one piece of what an agent does. So with an agentic workflow, you will be able to feed information into a smart system. It will have a reasoning engine that takes that information, makes decisions about what to do with it. It has enough training to actually take the action that you need it to take, and then it's also going to have a learning feedback loop. So the more guidance and training you give it, the smarter it's going to be when it takes that action.

So, as an example, I think our reputation, our genius reputation agent at Sochi, is a really good example. So let's start with the classic platform management of reputation and reviews. You get a review, you see it pop up in your platform, you write your proposed response and you say click and you send it off and off it goes. And you say click and you send it off and off it goes. Now, if we fold in generative AI, you might get a proposed response using AI. You can say make it friendlier, and that's pretty cool. You can tell it to make the answer friendlier. It rewrites it for you and you say okay, great, I like that. Click and off it goes.

What the Sochi Genius Reputation agent will do is when you first hire your agent, you're going to go through a training where your agent is going to scour the internet for all of the information it can learn about your brand and your brand guidelines. You can upload any training you have for your teams about your brand and your brand guidelines and you're going to continue through like a 10, 15 minute training with that agent to give them more information about the way you want to show up for your residents or potential residents in your review responses. Your agent is now trained. You tell that agent when it's okay with you for it to autonomously respond to those reviews and you also tell them, hey, agent, and you also tell them, hey, agent, under these few circumstances I actually want you to come tell me because I want to vet what you're proposing that we say in certain situations.

So you're putting guardrails in place of when a human needs to be involved and otherwise you're telling your agent through training and rules that you're okay with it going and doing every other step of that process for you. So you can now know all of my reviews are being responded to in my brand tone, the way that I want it to be responded to, and within, say, two minutes if there are special circumstances. I can trust that my agent is coming to me and I'm going to handle those sticky situations with the guidance of my team. So we're going from I respond to every single review and I have to find time in my day to do this to hey, I've actually kind of got this team member. He's my genius reputation agent and he does this for me, following my guidelines and rules and getting humans involved when need be.

That's really interesting. So I would imagine you know, just going off the example you gave, you know if a property gets a five-star review, that's great. You know that response might be a little easier than the sticky situations you were mentioning. You know, maybe if there was an issue or something that needs to be addressed a little more carefully, that's really cool that you can train it to then say come to me first, like propose it, but come ask me just in case.

And then over time, depending on the feedback that you give on. Like, let's say, you put more guidelines in place early on and then you give more input over time as you propose changes to the reviews you look at. As you have more and more situations where you're giving input to that agent, it's going to learn what you like, it's going to learn what you want and it's going to become even more efficient at managing your reputation online for you, which I think we all know, especially in this industry, is critical, like I was talking about how those pillars are not separate today. I mean, 91% of potential renters are looking at reviews and those reviews Google has confirmed influence your visibility and how you're showing up in searches online. Both the volume of reviews. Google's also recently confirmed that responding to those reviews is impacting the way you show up and how visible you are.

Yeah, I mean, I know personally, just for myself, if I'm going to purchase a product off Amazon, or you know, I'm going straight to the reviews always and I'm going straight to the one and two stars, right, because I want to see what was the issue. Did the seller or, you know, the store, whatever I'm purchasing did they respond? How did they respond? You know all of those things are you're taking into consideration? Um, I think, just as a consumer in general, in any yeah, it's, it's absolutely what I look at personally.

Um, you know, no matter what I'm doing, if I'm going to a restaurant, especially if I'm unfamiliar that my residents are looking at chat, gpt and AI-driven engines, will my reviews impact what they see there? And the answer is yes, absolutely yes. We're also seeing that you don't necessarily have to do anything fancy or different to make sure that you're solid practices of both review management and SEO. If your practices are really solid, like we're seeing we're hearing some, like you know, keywords being thrown around like GEO, generative engine optimization Really, if you have solid SEO and you have solid reviews management, you're still going to show up in those chat GPT engines. And I actually will ask chat GPT when I'm searching for things like what do the reviews look like? Show me one or two star reviews for XYZ product and it's pulling them in. So those solid review management practices just they stay relevant and valid, both for the very human exercise of wanting to know what other people are saying and about other people's experience, and also in this new world of AI. It stays relevant.

How are you personally staying on top of all this? I mean, you've worked in government real estate nonprofits. Now you're in multifamily. You've been in different industries. How does all that experience relate to what you're doing now? How are you finding time to stay on top of all these trends and things that are happening?

That's a great question. Sometimes I think we all wish there was more hours in the day, but I'll focus on the multifamily piece. I I've been in the multifamily space on the prop tech side for um about four or five years now. Um and I. I started with a company that was more on the financial and operations side, so I got to learn a lot there and I still try and stay up to date with that side of things because I find that again things are becoming more and more interconnected. So even though now I'm more on the marketing side of property technology, I am able to speak to the way that marketing tools can streamline operations and it helps me talk to COOs. That helps me talk to people who are on the more operational side and help my direct clients on marketing teams connect with those other departments and speak to how their marketing efforts are streamlining operations and vice versa, how operational goals can still be applicable to what we're doing and what we're trying to push on the marketing side. So one side of the answer to that question I think is having touched so many first industries helped me with my acumen around technology and how it grows and how it develops and how you can successfully deploy it in any organization. And then within the different sides of multifamily that I've been exposed to, I think it helps me connect the dots and help my customers connect the dots. It also helps me to have a background of understanding of here's what's happening recently on the operations and finance side. Here's what's happening on the multifamily side. Here's how we make connections between the two so we can make the best, smartest decisions. And then I guess the second piece to that question is how do I stay up to date on the trends in marketing, which my answer is that's a whole job in itself. Stay up to date on the trends in marketing, which my answer is that's a whole job in itself. So I rely on my teammates.

As I mentioned, when you work with Sochi, you're not just working with my team, your customer success manager. You're also garnering and getting the benefit of the industry experts that we have on staff. So we have dedicated social strategists who their whole role at Sochi is to feed our teams, who work directly with clients, insights about what's going on in the social world, so that we can help you stay up to speed. We also have SEO specialists who come from that world, and that's all they do is they meet with Google, they talk to OpenAI, they talk to and do research on the field and they then feed that information to the lucky people on the go-to-market side, where we talk directly to our clients and we meet with them.

A lot of our clients we have biweekly what we call cadence calls. Some clients elect to just do quarterly business reviews and then otherwise we work together async over email. But we are getting those experts synthesizing all of their input and then, knowing what we know about our clients, we're giving them the most important nuggets of information that we know will impact their business. Our clients can also choose to get that information directly. So we have a really fun webinar called the SEO juice and it's our SEO expert, basically open hours. He comes with like what's hot this week and, um, you can attend that directly and you can hear right from him. You can ask him questions, um, and yeah, I can't take credit for staying up to up to speed because I get it fed to me from the SEO juice, from our social media experts and everyone who we have on staff at Sochi.

Yeah, no, I mean, it takes a village right.

In a number of ways.

Yeah, that's great that you're excited about that. You see, within the next few years even, or in other industries, just anything in general that you're like this could be big or you see something trending out.

Yeah, so let's see trending out two things in two things. One thing that is definitely trending out is Google is actually getting ready to get rid of their classic Q&A. It's going to move to more of like an FAQ functionality. So that's something that we're talking to our customers about and that is a big change. That's something that we're talking to our customers about, and that is a big change.

Another thing that I'd say is trending out is on the social side. We are seeing less and less hyper curated, hyper produced content. We are seeing and steering our clients more to organic content that's created on site. Um, that's, luckily, we all love this. It's a lower lift. Um, it's, it's that onsite, authentic, genuine content. Uh, that is trending and that is getting the most uh views, the best reach, the best engagements. It's what people want to see. They want that authenticity and, as I talked about earlier, a lot about social.

When you're talking about a potential renter, a prospective resident, is about building trust and giving a real view into what is happening at your community.

On that same note, another thing that actually a customer of ours has been talking about, that's on their mind, that they think is going to be a goal for 2026 and beyond is getting their actual residents to create more content on behalf of the property, is helping their residents especially anyone who is technologically inclined feel more like an ambassador, and they are exploring what those programs could potentially look like for them. And a lot of that is because they're trying to capitalize on the understanding that this genuine content, this content that isn't perfect for them, and a lot of that is because they're trying to capitalize on the understanding that this genuine content, this content that isn't perfect maybe it's a video of your pool, but it's a little wobbly and maybe it, you know, pivots over to one of their friends or somebody on site Like that's the stuff that is really connecting and that's a big. That's a big trend, a big trend in yeah, I love that.

I agree with that. I mean, you see that everywhere on TikTok, it's you know someone just filming themselves in their car talking to the camera right it's not overly produced. Yeah, I think that's. That's really interesting. I love that perspective. Is there anything I haven't asked you that I should, that we didn't get to, that you want to share?

Let's see Um. I think what I would love to sort of double click on is um is back on is back on the front of AI. Like we've got customers who are really embracing AI and then we've also got a lot of customers who are more cautious, and there's definitely really good reasons for that. I want to encourage everyone to at least dive in to what it can do for their properties. I'd say that the results that we are seeing for customers who are leaning into automation for their teams and approaching the adoption of AI tools really thoughtfully and taking their teams along for the ride, they're seeing incredible results. We're seeing sort of this economy of scale progress where things are starting to really trend upwards more quickly than we've seen them before. We're seeing teams that are telling us that, despite hesitancy to adopt new tools and despite some hesitancy that is healthy around AI, when they have put in the groundwork to, let's say, train that agent and go through some of the bumps that happen right at the beginning and bring their teams along for the ride by sharing the why is.

Hey, property manager, I know that you have been struggling to keep up with all of the leads that are coming your way and handle all of the follow-up.

We're going to be implementing this new tool.

I need your help with it for the next two weeks to make sure it gets off of the ground. With it for the next two weeks to make sure it gets off of the ground, but it is going to take your review responding basically off of your hands. I know you spend three, four hours a week on that. I'm so excited to see how this can help you focus on following up with people who have reached out this month, like via whatever avenue, so that you can overperform against your goals, make more money, meet your bonuses, whatever it is that those teams like are really driven by. That's where we're seeing the best results is when teams are implementing AI, but they're taking a very human approach to ensuring adoption. They're talking about the why before they get to the what, and I think that's been so impactful to see the successes that our customers have had when they take that approach recently that I kind of want to just evangelize that and that approach, because I get a front row seat to seeing these really successful launches.

No, I think that's really important because, like you said, you have the set of people that are all in yes, let's go, let's do it. And then there's others that are like, well, I don't know, I don't know enough about it, or it's overwhelming or scary, I don't get it. So there's such a balance between humanizing, you know, using the AI, but also being able to humanize it, make it work for you, personalize it, customize it, you know, to your brand, your product, whatever it is you're trying to use it for. I think that's a really important point. I'm glad you brought that up.

Yeah, and I'd say that's another thing I've kind of learned from being able to be in technology for quite some time, spanning lots of different industries.

One thing that's universal is if you don't bring the human element and the people element into any technology implementation.

You know, ai happens to be the tool of the day, the tool of the year, maybe the decade, but if you don't bring people along the way, you'll never be as successful as you could be, and that is something that has been something I've learned, you know, across industries, and I'd say maybe I see it almost even the most in multifamily.

What I've learned and loved about this industry is how people and human oriented it is, which, of course, we're dealing with people's homes. It's incredibly important work and it's, you know, very human work. Like a lot of us, or some of us now today, work remotely and sit in their offices, but so many people that I get to work with now that I work in multifamily, they're interacting with people in their homes every single day, so what they do is incredibly important to them. Interacting and having the time to interact with their residents and give residents an excellent experience is very important and core to what they do every day. So we have to keep that human element there to really be successful and help people to adopt whatever technologies we're bringing to the table to really be successful and help people to adopt whatever technologies we're bringing to the table.

Yeah, absolutely, and so I know you're going to be attending the Women's Summit Very excited.

This is just coming up here around the corner, so obviously our attendees can meet you in person and talk more about this there. For those who are listening and they want to learn more about Sochi and you and what you're doing and what's exciting, what's the best way for them to get in touch?

I would love if they emailed me personally, so hopefully we can share that across the podcast world and then I'll also be there in person. But that is the best way to get in touch. I would love to hear from anyone who wants to hear more about Sochi, learn more about what we do. We have some clients who will be there, so I'm really excited about that. But please shoot me an email. We also have really easy intake forms on our website, sochiai, but selfishly, I would love to hear from you. Please send me an email.

Okay, absolutely, we will make sure that all of that information is in the show notes. Um, so, sheai is the website. Carolyn Wallentisch, thank you so much for spending the time today. Uh, I appreciate you being here with me and I look forward to meeting you at the summit and, uh, we will actually see each other very soon.

Yeah, I can't wait. I'm so excited for the summit. Scottsdale, here we come, and I will see you soon, keri.

All right, thank you. Thanks for tuning in everyone. Make sure you get registered for the Multifamily Women's Summit. You can do that at multifamilywomencom. Thank you for listening and we'll see you in the next episode.