The Truth About LLMs, AI, and Your Property Management Website | Kristen Ewen

A Podcast | Kristen Ewen

Pete Neubig: Welcome everybody to another episode of the NARPM podcast. I'm your host, Pete Neubig, the voice of NARPM. I have Kristen Ewen, who is the vice president of SEO and PMW marketing at Rentvine. So I got me a big wig from Rentvine here. So Kristin has been helping product managers to grow their online presence and generate more owner leads through data-driven SEO, high value content, and emerging search trends. She's got over 20 years experience, focusing on property management since 2009. She's recently published numerous articles on AI-driven search optimization. And so we're going to talk a lot about that today. Kristin, thanks so much for being here.

Kristen Ewen: Yeah, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Pete Neubig: All right. So I'm going to throw a fastball at you. Is AI killing SEO?

Kristen Ewen: It's not killing it, it's changing it, right? We hear, you know, the king is dead, long live the king. So it's the same thing. SEO is dead, long live SEO. It's just, it's gone from search engine optimization to search everywhere optimization. And we just need to, we don't throw Google and the strategies out with the bathwater. It's just time to start thinking three years ahead and Google proofing and where is search going to go and how do we get prepared for how users are changing the way they search? So it's just different methodologies and adding in that new layer of tactic.

Pete Neubig: So let's talk a little bit about that. How does search change when I'm doing a Google search versus like a ChatGPT search? Like break it down for me.

Kristen Ewen: So the actual words and the intent behind the search are extremely different. We're finding that when users go and they search in ChatGPT and you're cited, so that means your brand is mentioned and there's a clickable link back, that traffic will convert at a 35 times value. And it's because they're searching specific queries that have a long tail. I'm an owner investor. I have 12 properties. I'm looking for a property manager who deals specifically in my market, who does these things, recommend the top five. And they're really putting their questions, their concerns, or I'm struggling with property manager, they're not communicating and those things in there and they're trying to get answers and recommendations. So it's almost like a referral when those come over to the website. Standard search though is still like 90% of your traffic. So we can't forget about it. That's property management, companies near me or property management in Jacksonville, in Dallas, whatever location that you're in. So searches are still happening. Google's taking up space now with their AI answers at the top, but we still have traditional ads and organic showing below it. Those users, a lot of times aren't as likely to convert first time to the website, but that's where still most of our leads are coming from. So we need to stay focused on that, but also prepare for those longer trail searches, make sure that we're giving AI all the information that we can answer the questions and cover the owner pain points. And AI is so different because it understands sentiment and synonyms and it doesn't want fluffy marketing. Hey, we're the most communicative property manager ever. No. What does that mean? It means that we're going to respond within 24 hours or we're going to respond within three hours. We have after hours maintenance. Those are the things that AI wants to see and wants to give to the owner where marketing speak is very, very different. So it's finding the balance there to get your brand voice and message out, but also answer all those queries and give AI those things that they feel comfortable recommending you.

Pete Neubig: So I know there's a lot of tricks of the trade to being found on Google, right? There's the Google My Business page and then there's having a bunch of Google reviews. Is there any tricks of the trade yet that are known to being found on an AI search?

Kristen Ewen: There's quite a bit. It's not just writing more blogs. It's write a better blog, write something more in depth that answers specific questions, gives details, next steps, and has an opinion. It doesn't mean you have to go in there and be a bulldog. It just means if there's a law or a rule or regulation coming out, speak to it. Say, here's what's come out. Here's what it means for you as an owner investor and give them more context on it. AI knows what the law is, but they don't know how to interpret the law to say how it's going to affect the owner investor. And that's where it will start leveraging you and your answers if you're giving it more context and give it an opinion and something that's providing value. So it's changing that up.

Pete Neubig: Is it still like, if I just jump on AI and I'm in Houston and I start saying, find me a property management company. Do most people say, find me a property management company in Houston? I'm guessing that they're doing that in that, would you call that long that long tail search. So you don't have to worry about like, you know, having like a geofence or anything like that with AI, because most people are kind of doing that in their search criteria already.

Kristen Ewen: Yeah. They are putting in the location. They are keeping it local. AI is a pattern matcher. It doesn't, like Google, it doesn't know where you're physically sitting in order to bring you an answer. You have to give it more context. So that's one of the big differences. Now, Google AI answers. We'll probably get around that because they've got a little bit more information on the user. But with AI, they are putting in the physical location. And it's really kind of interesting. We had a customer, shows up really, really well in organic search. And we look at AI and they recommend the top 10 companies in this location, and they're not listed. And they've been in business for like 20 years. And why are they not getting listed in this? And you can ask it, why are we not listed? And like, there's not enough reviews in other places. AI is not just looking at Google reviews like the user would. They're pulling sentiments from multiple locations, from Reddit, from Better Business Bureaus, from all these different listicles. And they're looking at a couple of sentences before and a couple of sentences after. So they're not really looking for a star rating. They're looking about what words are used around your brand. What information is an owner saying about you versus a tenant, and they know how to separate those. And if you don't have enough of that information out there, you're not recommended in that list. So when you pull the organic Google result versus an AI result, they are never the same. I've never seen one that matches.

Pete Neubig: Interesting. I heard that AI looks at like third-party kind of companies, right? Like I know propertymanager.com is coming out and they're kind of touting that. And you have mentioned this, you just mentioned the Better Business Bureau. So is there getting publicized in other publications? Does that help now with AI and getting rated by third-party companies? Does that help now as well?

Kristen Ewen: Yeah, we just did a five-series training within our team. And we went through, what do you have to have on your site? What can you control? What happens outside of your site? And how is all of this evaluated? And some of the biggest sources for answers in AI are Reddit. It's just another place for tenants to complain, but you got to be active in Reddit. It's a real thing. The Better Business Bureau is a big one. And honestly, the biggest source that we're finding repeated across all of the answers, and it's one of the only search engines that's not losing traffic, is YouTube. So the biggest answers are coming and the most often cited. So like four out of 10, with most of my queries recently have a YouTube video. And AI was always just pulling the transcript and using the transcripts from YouTube videos in their answers. But they've stepped up their game again. And now they're listening to the content as well, to pull out tone in not just the text. So they're really leveraging video a ton. So that's one of the biggest areas that you can improve on quickly is just getting out more video content.

Pete Neubig: I heard, and you could tell me if there's any truth to this, that if you create specific like city pages off your website, that it helps with AI search criteria. That sound far fetched or?

Kristen Ewen: That happens. And it works with standard search as well. And it allows you to dial into that specific location and give your opinion on what the market's doing. What's it like? What are the best neighborhoods and property types? Talk about the trends and what's there? Why did tenants want to rent there? What kind of tenants are finding? What's the average rents? Are things moving up and down? What's going on in the location? And improve your expertise there. It works for both standard search and AI.

Pete Neubig: So basically what I'm kind of reading through the lines here, but what I'm hearing is that there's still a lot of stuff that we can do that will help with SEO and also help with AI. Am I hearing that correctly?

Kristen Ewen: Yes. If your website's structured correctly for SEO and you've got really good code and everything is clean and set up correctly, it's going to perform for AI. They're looking for a lot of the similar things. Standard SEO is going to use backlinks and history and Google has their algorithm. AI is very different. They care more about the content and the content depth and the expertise in the content. So as long as you're building those things, you're going to be set up for success.

Pete Neubig: Got it. So I'm going to kind of go through here and then let's kind of... So step one, if I'm listening to this and I'm a property manager, step one is like, I need somebody hopefully like PMW to actually review my website to see if it is SEO. What'd you call it? SEO certified or just- Optimized.

Kristen Ewen: Optimized.

Pete Neubig: So that's kind of step one, right? Step one is have a website. I'm hoping everybody has that, right? And then step two- A lot of people don't. And then those are the same people that say, I've never paid one, I never invested $1 in marketing and I have 14 homes. I'm like, great. Okay. Anyway, so step one is have a website. Step two is optimize it for SEO. I'm assuming that professionals like you guys can look at it and kind of look at the backend code and see if it's optimized. And then step three is really review your content and build different type of content, not the old style. So that's kind of where the biggest changes I'm hearing. Does that sound right so far?

Kristen Ewen: Yeah. It's like a spoken wheel, right? The center of the wheel is your pillar. That's the main focus content. Then you have the spokes that come off. So let's walk the owner through the property management lifecycle. Let's walk them through the screening and the marketing and the maintenance and the rent collection and the reporting, all of those pieces. And then connect all those pieces with really high quality blog content that associates and links internally to those. And it creates that really nice wheel that has full depth of coverage for the topic.

Pete Neubig: And each one of those contents should have a video associated with it.

Kristen Ewen: If you can do it. Yeah. And AI video works. AI does not hate AI content and AI does not hate AI video. It's looking for the content in there. It doesn't care who created it. It's their expertise and it's their value. And that's what they're looking for. It should still be, it's going to perform better if it's professionally written and if it's user written, but they're not going to ignore it if AI was used to help modify or put pieces of it together. And we have, even at Rentvine, some AI video that we've put out that's performing extremely well and getting cited. So just having the pieces is really what matters.

Pete Neubig: Got it. Okay. And then, so don't stop trying to get Google reviews. I'm hearing like you still need them, but we need to step our game up and have reviews from other sources. Hopefully not Yelp, but anything else, right? I'm just teasing.

Kristen Ewen: It depends. California, Yelp does really well on the West Coast. It's just a thing. Not so much everywhere else, but yeah, they got to have reviews everywhere.

Pete Neubig: And then, you know what, if you're not going to pay the Gestapo called the BBB, might as well pay them and get a rating on them as well. That's probably some investment that's going to go a little further now with AI. It's a third party company that's using you as a trusting source. And then create some city pages and go really deep into that. What about like, you know, we have like local publications here in Houston, right? We have like the local realtor thing or the local, like this community thing. What about like getting articles written about your property management firm for something that's, you know, it may cost me a couple hundred bucks, but it's not very expensive, but you know, I get, because in the past, the publication really didn't have a lot of people, but now the publications are all online. Is there any value there where AI would see that? And it's a third party kind of source that's doing an article on the PM company?

Kristen Ewen: Yeah, AI and standard SEO, both like those. So AI is looking for the big trusted sources, but then it's also looking for local sources. And Google is doing the same thing. All of this stuff really matters. It's something we've been pushing for a lot of years is go to your chamber of commerce, go sponsor a lunch, go participate in something. You have to do the boots on the ground work as well. Get on a podcast and do a local podcast. Find a real estate investment trust that has a local meetup. Go and get involved in these things, write for them, offer to do the things, get those links from there. All of that is going to help.

Pete Neubig: Does social media help? Like I'm not a big social media guy, but if I posted on the LinkedIn and the Facebook and all that other stuff, would that help as well?

Kristen Ewen: So I tell people this all the time, you can write all the content you want, but if you never get eyes on it, it's like it doesn't exist. Nobody cares if it's never gotten any traffic. No one knows it even exists. We have content that we have not shared on our social media and it's got zero backlinks, zero keywords, zero traffic. It's like it doesn't exist. So when you have content, you're writing content, you're producing it, you have to get eyes on it. The fastest way is social media. Links back from social media creates social proof that you're an active company and people are interacting there with you and coming back to the site. Again, it helps both SEO and AI citations.

Pete Neubig: Does it matter if it comes from a company SEO account or your personal SEO, sorry, company social media account or your personal social media account?

Kristen Ewen: It depends on the target audience and who you want to see. You're better off posting to your company account and then sharing it from there into your personal because then that will help build the audience on the company account. If everything's tied to you and you're like, okay, I'm done, I'm retiring, I'm out, then you've left your company kind of in a bad situation where what are they going to do going forward with social media? You took it all with you. So it's good to always make sure we start with the company and then have the individual team members share from there on their personals. That's how you build a LinkedIn following. That's how you build a lot of those pieces up.

Pete Neubig: Now, I'm old enough to remember Ask Jeeves and Yacht and Bing. Now, there are so many different AIs out there, right? There's ChatGPT and Claude and all these other ones. In the past, when Google was first coming out, Google would show me, but I wouldn't be seen on Ask Jeeves or anybody else. Is it kind of similar or is all the AI kind of all inspired on the same type of sites and looking at the same stuff?

Kristen Ewen: It's very similar what they're looking at, but how they decide what shows and what they're using for citations is a little bit different. We have AI tracking tools and we actually have AI overboarding at PMW that you can sign up for, and it pulls back all the major search engines and AI at Google Answers and shows your performance compared to your competitors, especially for the property management topic. It shows you where your gaps are and what you need to build up and kind of who's winning for all of the citations and mentions in your local market. So it's definitely something you should put eyes on and be aware of, and each one operates a little bit differently, and some will use video more, some will use listicles more. That's why it's so important to show up in all of these different ones. ChatGPT owns most of the traffic right now, but Perplexity is gaining, Gemini is gaining, and Google AI Answers, they're really doubling down on this last algorithm update, the beginning of this month, and then they just did another one yesterday. They just rolled out the end of another algorithm update. So Google's not going to let 70% of the traffic leave, which is the predictor. 70% of standard search is going to leave and go to AI. So Google's trying to replace standard search with their version of AI. So Google's not going to let it all go away, but it is going to change. So we need to just be prepared for that.

Pete Neubig: And it's a little too early to tell who the winner is going to be.

Kristen Ewen: And we're starting to see ChatGPT ads come out now on the free accounts. I'm doing everything I can to get into that beta, but we're starting to see some of that come out as well for free, only on the free level accounts.

Pete Neubig: What are some of the myths out there that property managers need to stop believing in?

Kristen Ewen: Writing as much mass content as possible, short and fast. You're much better off with a longer, more in-depth piece. And also that it's hard. You can just talk to your phone for three minutes and create a blog out of it. You can take a five-minute video that you shoot and turn that into 18 different assets. You can do these things very easily, but don't write 15 500-word blog posts. Those are not going to get sourced. There's no expertise in them. That's probably one of the biggest myths is they just pump out more content. And that's just not the way it's going. You're better off with quality content that has your expert opinion in it. And also, you're going to still need to do SEO. Google's not going to fully go away. You still need to do all the basics and the standards. And AI is not replacing all the jobs. That was something I talked to Mark Cunningham recently about. And I'd say this to my team and everyone else. AI is not replacing us, but the people who use AI are going to replace the ones who don't. So you have to embrace the change. It's a difficult change. It's going to be hard on a lot of people. AI agents are going to be a real thing. AI is going to start turning into your own personal agent. It's going to start answering questions exactly how you want them answered. And each person is going to have their preferred agent that they work with and just start thinking in those types of terms.

Pete Neubig: The average property manager is my age, about 55 years old, 56 years old, around there. And they also are doing something called managing properties and they're busy.

Kristen Ewen: They're very busy.

Pete Neubig: Very busy. What is your recommendation for somebody who's like, man, I feel very behind. I don't really know the tech. I don't really want to know the tech. I'm a small firm, maybe 100 units. Would you recommend that they use a third party company like you guys? Or are you seeing more and more of your clients hire a remote team member from VPM to basically do the marketing and then connect with you guys? What are you seeing out there? Are you seeing that you guys work with owners, you guys work with remote team members? Are they hiring a marketing person local? What are you seeing out there as far as work structure?

Kristen Ewen: I love having remote team members. We work with a set of clients, probably about 60 or so in our package, where we dig into all of this, the SEO structure, the AI, and just work on dominating in their market. And the clients who have a remote team member that we have access to, that we can say, okay, here's the next piece of content. Here's the next video we want and work directly with them, get answers, FAQs, all the different things produced that we want. It goes 10 times faster. If you've got one that knows what they're doing, great. But most of the time, they don't know the questions to ask. And the same thing with property managers, everything's time or money, right? Every single thing we do is time or money. If you don't have the time to do it, or you don't know how to do it, or the questions to even ask, then hire someone who does. And it's just that simple. If you don't want to get involved, you don't want to learn all the nuances of these things, hire someone who knows it, who can report it back to you, so you can speak clearly on it and see the performance. And that's just the best way to go with everything, is if it's time or money. So you either have to invest the time or invest the money.

Pete Neubig: So you still see AI as a tool for us to use versus as a replacement to us. There's a lot of gloom and doom out there from a lot of industry professionals, big stalwarts of the industry, I guess. And they're talking about gloom and doom. And one of the areas is like, I don't need a marketing person to write blogs anymore. I'll just have AI write blogs. I'll have an AI agent do that. Do you think that's coming? Is it there? Or do you really think that two years from now, we're still going to have marketing people that are using AI to literally just help build content, whether it's video, blogs, whatever?

Kristen Ewen: Well, here's the question. What content are you building? What's your strategy? How often are you putting it out? What expertise? What's the structure? What questions they have to answer in there? What's the tone or what are the concerns that the owners come up with? And you have to think through this and create that process. And you still have to put in the time to develop all of that. So it's not just can AI write the blogs for you, but what blogs are you writing? Where do you push them out afterwards? How do you track the performance on them? That's where you're still going to need humans involved on the strategy side. Can you imagine asking AI about trust accounting? Most humans can't figure out trust accounting. It's just not going to happen. We're always going to need hands-on. It's a pattern matcher. It's great at matching patterns. Mary had a little lamb, right? Well, if Mary had a dog, it's not going to know that. You have to tell it. You have to train it. So it will be a tool. Is it going to be a smarter tool? Sure. But right now, it's not there. It's still going to need our expertise to identify what do we really need? What are the questions? How do we use these pieces? It's going to make us better. It's going to make us faster. We're going to convert higher rates. We're going to just be better for our customers and more optimized, but we're still going to need to have hands-on.

Pete Neubig: Is there an AI tool that you would recommend for PM firms? An AI marketing tool for PM firms?

Kristen Ewen: I mean, I probably have six or eight different tools that I use for different reasons, and each one has a focus. I use SEMrush and Ahrefs for keywords, for tracking, for audits, but I have AI tracking tools and Profound and all these others for the AI side. And there's no one tool that can do everything. It can identify topics, but you still have to build it. You still have to track it. You have to put the pieces together. So it's just there's no one perfect tool out there. A lot of them do an okay job with getting you some stats. SEMrush has been pretty good with their AI things, but it's not good enough on the reporting. And what I hate about a lot of these AI tools is you have to track per prompt. So you have to assume what their guess, what they're typing in and what they're searching, and you put that one in. But then you have to come up with 3,000 other variations of it and put those out there and pay per prompt that you track.

It's expensive and it's a pain to come up with all of those. So when we do our AIO reporting, we found a tool that reports back on a topic and does that spoken wheel and says, okay, here's the pieces of the topic that you're missing and here's recommendations on content to build. So when we do our AIO reporting, it is 30, 60, 90 day plans of content that you're missing and not so much prompt tracking. So it's just about having the right tools. Some of these tools just give you so much information or you have to know exactly what you want to show up for. And it gets a little overwhelming. So we found something that's a little bit easier for the property managers to understand and prioritize what they do next with it.

Pete Neubig: What's a question that I should have asked that I haven't asked yet?

Kristen Ewen: I guess that's a hard one because we've gone through some good things. Reputation's been a big one.

Pete Neubig: Does domain authority matter as much anymore?

Kristen Ewen: It matters to Google. It doesn't matter to AI. AI doesn't use it at all. They're completely different. They're so different. Google comes to your website and says, okay, here's the content, scrape it, pull it, store it, we'll run queries on it.

AI comes there and it says, I'm going to read your title and your description. And if you have LLM summary tags, it's going to read that and says, okay, cool. I know what this page is about. And it'll come back later. It's not necessarily grabbing your whole page of content right then and there. They work extremely differently on how they get and pull content from your site. Also, I guess one of the big things we didn't talk about is hallucinations. AI gets it wrong all the time. We're constantly having to fix it.

Pete Neubig: I haven't had a hallucination in a long time. I used to hit the pen every once in a while, but it wasn't called a pen back then. For old men like me that don't know what that is, what is a hallucination?

Kristen Ewen: That's when AI just gets it wrong. If you don't, just like Mary had, it's a powder matcher. So if every property manager in your market has a 10% management fee, but you have nine and you haven't put that on your website and identified what your pricing is, it might assume that you have 10% because of everybody else.

So you have to be very, very, very clear. No marketing fluff. Here is what it is and structure the content the right way. Have schema. Schema is a big one. Best way to describe that is tagging your content so that it better understands the pieces of that. Having all of those pieces built in are extremely critical. And those are the types of things where people say, I'm going to build my own website. You don't know what that is or how to build it or that you need it. Where this is all just standard things that we've been building at PMW for years. We knew this stuff was going to be coming out. We're trying very hard to always stay ahead of the game and be three years ahead.

Where is it going to go? And make those pivots. And that's why we have that elite group. We test everything with them. That group gets everything first. We try all the strategies. We figure out what's working and then how to rinse and repeat it down to the rest of our clients. So avoiding hallucinations is one of the big ones. And some of our AIO that we do for those elite customers is we go through facts and it tells us everything that AI knows about your company. And we check off the items to make sure that there's nothing that's pulling back incorrectly. So that's a big one. Oh, and brand.

We've got to stop with the generic brands, property management company. Okay. Someone says, tell me everything you need to know about this company. Which one? Which one? If you don't have a unique brand, you're not going to get found in AI when they search for you. There's so many companies out there that will do that, and it's just not working anymore. The generic brands were fine before as long as it included a city name, and there's a chance AI will fund you now, but having a unique business name has become more and more critical with AI. So that's another big one that property managers can take away. If you haven't rebranded in the last five to eight, maybe 10 years, it might be time to do a rebrand and get something a bit more unique that is searchable.

Pete Neubig: Interesting. When should a property management company hire... I'm assuming if I'm just starting out, the best thing to do is really work with PMW or somebody like you guys to kind of... I don't know what I know. When should they get a full-time person to help with this? It seems like you need 26 different people, right, to run markets these days.

Kristen Ewen: It's budget. It's budget and growth. So it's, are you getting the amount of units in? Are you getting the leads that you want? And what does responsible growth look like for you? Because if you take a brand new company and you throw a marketing person in there and you drive a ton of leads, but they don't have a great owner onboarding, they're just going to lose those owners. It's not responsible to do that. So it's always responsible growth. We have a middle tier package at PMW that includes content writing, social sharing, and the AIO reporting. So if that's more in your budget, which likely it is rather than having a full-time person, we handle all of that for you and you don't have to worry about it. We make sure that everything's showing up correctly in the AI, that we're writing the content AI is looking for, and we're handling all those things. If you're looking to get, you know, a hundred plus leads a month, then you better be in a pretty big market.

And that's when it's probably a good idea to have at least a remote team member that we can work with and make sure that we're producing everything that we need to, to get that kind of volume through. I've got a lot of customers who get over a hundred leads a month. And then I have others that are happy with, you know, 25, 35 good quality leads.

So it just depends on your market, your growth and where you want to be. And if I threw 150 leads at some people that would shut them down, they wouldn't even be able to answer the phone that much. So it just, it's all about responsible growth at that point.

And then changing as your needs change.

Pete Neubig: If somebody wanted to reach out, they wanted to learn more about, you know, PMW or reach out to you, what's the, what's the best way to get in touch with you?

Kristen Ewen: Just right through the website, right through the website. There's a ton of contact pieces in there, get you connected directly with somebody to talk about your goals. That's the first thing that we bring up. We're not just there to talk about a website. We want to talk, what are your growth goals? You specifically and how do we help you?

Mypmw.com. Yep.

Pete Neubig: Mypmw.com. And if you are listening to this and you're not a NARPM member, shame on you. Go to NARPM, narpm.org, or give them a call at 800-782-3452. And if you do need a remote team member that can help you with your marketing or be a liaison to PMW, go to vpmsolutions.com or shoot me an email, pete@vpmsolutions.com. Kristin, thanks so much for your time and being here today. And I look forward to seeing you at the next conferences.

Kristen Ewen: Yeah, I look forward to connecting. Thanks so much.

Pete Neubig: All right. See you.