Professional property managers want to create great experiences for residents, investors, and their teams. They also want the profit rewards that go along with it. But experience design and innovation is hard and requires a skill set that is distinct from real estate knowledge and expertise.
In this Bonus PMLX Masterclass, Andrew talks with Joe Pine, author of the bestseller “The Experience Economy” and the world’s leading authority and trainer on becoming an experience designer.
To learn more about Joe Pine and his company, visit his website.
Follow the conversation PMs are having about this and more in our Facebook group.
Follow The Triple Win by Second Nature and never miss an episode!
Related: Check out the other property management podcasts we recommend for single-family property managers.
Transcript
Joe Pine:
And it's all about understanding that ... It's all about the individual living, breathing, human being in front of you. He's not part of a market and he's not part of a segment, he's not part of a niche. You don't think of him as part of a generation or a persona or any other agglomeration of anonymous buying units of indeterminate size. It is a living, breathing human being. The more you connect to that person, the more personal the experience is going to be, the better it's going to be.
Andrew:
Joe Pine, Joe Pine is here, bestselling author of The Experience Economy. excited about this one. You've probably been hearing the word experience a lot, resident experience, investor experience, your team experience, the rental experience. It's language being used more and more and the word is really intentional. We'll get into why that is. Well Joe, thanks again for being with us today. And I know we've really been looking forward to this at Second Nature to have you on. We've been studying your work for some time. I think I first saw a recording of your TED Talk a couple years ago.
Joe Pine:
2004
Andrew:
I only saw it a couple years ago. It's still making its way around, even though you did record it in 2004. I remember there was a Qualtrics conference that they had you speak at that at least a portion of it was recorded. And then some people here know Christopher Lockhead because he was actually a speaker in one of our previous events. And I caught you on his podcast. I'm like, "Man, this guy's popping up everywhere."
And this idea is really interesting about the experience economy and taking a step back and looking at how are businesses, how are people creating value today? How were they doing that yesterday? How might they be doing it tomorrow? And I'm looking at our interview questions. Just really excited to hear what you have to share here. Joe, why don't we get started with what sparked the Experience Economy? It's a big freaking undertaking to write a book for anybody that hasn't done it. And so what were you seeing or what happened? What sparked for you the call to say, "We got to write a book about this."
Joe Pine:
Well, it actually came out of the first book that I wrote, which was Mass Customization. Mass Customization is about how do you efficiently serve customers uniquely, give them everything that's exactly what they want, but do it at a price they're willing to pay? And what I recognized was that customizing a physical good automatically turns into service because you're helping people design what it is they want. Then you make it and then you deliver it to them individually. Goods are standardized, services are customized. And ask what customization does to a service, I shot back that customization automatically turns a service into an experience. And I went, "Wow, that sounds good. Hold on a sec, I got to figure this out."
And I recognize that if you do design a service that is so appropriate to this particular person or company that you're working with, then you can't help but make them go wow, and turn it into a memorable event, turn it into an experience. And so from that, I realize that experiences are in fact a distinct economic offering. That's probably the most important thing to understand. But so many people read the book and still don't get it, they think CX means experience and it doesn't. But experiences are a distinct offering, as distinct from services as services are from goods. And that means you'd have an economy there, "Well, look at that. I love it."
We've gone from an agrarian economy based off commodities, to an industrial economy that makes goods or products as you have in there, through a service-based economy. And now we're in an experience economy. That's what people want, they want experiences. And we don't need more stuff. We got enough stuff. What we want are the experiences that we value and give our lives meaning.
Andrew:
Well, I think that's great. And I know a couple people have seen that image before and that layout before of, "Hey, there's a customization train going up here. And there's a commoditization train going the opposite direction."
And the more easily that something is duplicated, the more easily that it's replicated, the commoditization effect starts to take hold. And a lot of property managers experience that because they've been in a service business for a long time and they see technology, they see other people interested in getting the business, et cetera. And whether there's specific names or just categorical examples like that, they can feel it. There's competition and pressure on management fees, et cetera. And they got to find ways to create new value. And a lot of them have started to make this shift into a more experience centric business. Here's what I want to ask you Joe, to follow up, which is the book was originally released in the 1990s. I don't know if that was ahead of its time or in some places, I'm sure it was right on time.
Joe Pine:
Right on time.
Andrew:
And people are saying, "Well, in other industries now, we're really feeling this is right on time for us now."
And so you've updated the book from the 1990s to 2011 to just this past year, I think. What has changed in your mind? What updates would you share in thinking from when you started to today?
Joe Pine:
Well, there's so much obviously that has changed, although the basic principles or frameworks are all the same. But you think about when we wrote it in the late 1980s, is that the worldwide web was this nascent thing and most people still hadn't heard of Amazon at that point. And now, it's just taken over. And the thing is that the internet, which basically first came about for research for information services but then became a place that ... We use the term surfing because it was an experience to be on there, that it basically became the biggest force of commoditization in the world. The frictionless environment means that customers can instantly compare prices from one vendor to another and tends to push them down to the lowest possible price. But yet, now then you have the continued rise of digital technology. In fact, I wrote a book a number of years ago called Infinite Possibility, Creating Customer Value on the Digital Frontier, now the possibilities exist to be able to create digital experiences, whether through augmented reality, virtuality, through using our phones, through using other technologies, digitization of so much has been a big effect. And it has both that commoditization as well as that customization effect because anything you digitize, you can customize, and then as well as the enabling new experiences that were never before possible.
One other thing we saw since we first published was the rise of authenticity, that as the world became more and more of a paid for experience, people increasingly questioned what is real and what is not. And people don't want the fake from the phony, they want the real from the genuine. Authenticity is basically the new consumer sensibility for the experience economy. And of course, obviously what you've seen in the last 20 some years is this explosion of experiences. Escape rooms didn't exist when we wrote the book. Immersive art experiences didn't basically exist when we wrote the book the first time. All these new genres of experience are out there and all of them are out there trying to capture people's time and get them to spend with them. You have this tremendous competition in the experience at County Four as we put it in the subtitle of the 2020 rerelease, is we're competing for customer time, attention and money.
Andrew:
That's a perfect segue to talking about competing for time, attention and money. And I know time will probably underline a couple of times. I remember in your book you talked about a service is time well saved, and an experience is time well spent. Could you give a couple of examples to highlight that point?
Joe Pine:
Yeah. What services do basically, is it's people doing activities so you don't have to do them yourself. When I get together with a large group of people and I want to make this point, and it's probably not worth raising your hand here on Zoom and that, but the question is how many people here still change their own oil in their car? If there's one person, I'd be surprised, that still changes [inaudible 00:09:15]. Why? Because you can do it so much better, so much cleaner than I can do it myself. And that's what services do. Whether it's going out to a fast food restaurant instead of making it home, whether it's sending your clothes out to a cleaners or dry cleaners instead of washing them at home, changing the oil in the car, all services are about that, or calling up a taxi or an Uber or a Lyft instead of driving yourself. All those are activities that provide time well saved. What experiences are, as you said, is they're time well spent, where people actually value the time that they are spending with you.
And experiences aren't a new economic offering, experiences have always been around. And you think about sport events and concerts, plays, movies and entertainment of all sorts. Really, it's the time that you're spending that is what people value. A question then becomes, "Are you in the service business or are you in the experience business?"
Now, experiences are built on top of services. There's aspect about time well saved inside of experiences. You don't want to go to Disneyland and spend a half hour getting into the park where all that fun stuff is right there for you to do, you want that service of admission to go as quickly as possible so you can get to the fun stuff, to the time well spent that you want. That's true of any of business. Build atop those services how when you are spending time with your customers, more importantly, when they are spending time with you. And then again, that could be you personally, that could be on an app, that could be on your website, on your call center when you're talking on the phone. How can you make that into an engaging experience? That's the key word, experience. You engage people, you reach inside of them and engage them in an inherently personal way that creates a memory. That's the hallmark of an experience.
Andrew:
And Joe, just before we go into what makes an experience meaningful and memorable, I know you've got five elements we'll talk about, but I just want to share with the audience in case they haven't heard this example before. I know our CEO has taught this at certain times of ... If we look at the example of a birthday cake, we were actually talking about this I think, right before everybody came in. Actually, I'll come back right over here. If you come back to the commodities, you've got the flour, you've got all the things that go into it, the milk, the eggs, et cetera that go into it, the sugar. Well, Betty Crocker and Pillsbury et cetera, said, "Well hey ... "
Joe Pine:
Duncan Hines.
Andrew:
Duncan Hines, good one. They customize all those materials to say, "We're going to make this specific product of a cake or a birthday cake, not just a cupcake or something else."
There's a customization across all those materials into different products. And of course, what's the price here versus the price here? You know can see it's starting to go up. Well, that's been commoditized. And so then you start to see, "Okay, services are built that are inclusive of the product, that are inclusive of the materials."
And you go all the way to a party planner who is doing everything from custom invitations to all of the different products and services et cetera, and bringing it all together to create an experience that people say, "Wow, that was time well spent."
And not just time well saved, in addition to that. And so thinking about ...
Joe Pine:
The increase in value there ... Sorry, the increase in value there Andrew, could be an order of magnitude. Every one of those levels you get 10 times as much money. Why? Because you created 10 times as much value.
Andrew:
That's it. And so thinking about property managers starting to think more, I think they have rightly said, "We're in the service business."
And delivering great service is still going to be critical but the verb changes from delivering services to staging experiences. When you read the book, that'll mean more to you, designing experiences and staging experiences for people. Let's talk about what makes an experience meaningful and memorable, Joe. You've got five elements. How do you want to lay these out and walk through this?
Joe Pine:
Basically, to state them is that, ... And this is the structure we put on the 2020 rerelease of the book, is that what you want to do is stage experiences that are robust, cohesive, personal, dramatic and even transformative. And so robust experiences to start there, are those that hit the sweet spot of these four realms of experience. And I won't go into all the details but basically, you can have experiences that are entertainment, educational, escapist or aesthetic. And entertainment, we all know we're watching TV, going to a movie, a concert, play, that's entertainment. Educational is about where we learn as a result of what we're doing, which can happen in not just a formal classroom, it can happen anywhere, where we have that. Escapist is where we're going from one place to another. And your tourism is the number one industry in the world. The World Tourism Organization says 10% of the world's population is based off of tourism, and that's fundamentally escapist from where you are. But at any time we're actively doing something. We watch golf on a TV, entertainment. We play golf, escapist.
And then finally, there's the aesthetic experiences. Aesthetic experiences are those where we just want to hang out and be, like going to a cafe, going to an art gallery or museum, being in the Grand Canyon for example, is the height of aesthetic experiences. But the best, the most robust experiences are those that hit the sweet spot in the middle, that have aspects of all four of those. It means you need to think about how you design for all four elements. Many businesses are naturally in one of those but the question is, "What elements can we add that would make it more entertaining? What can we do to help people learn? What can we provide for them to go and to do? And how can we provide a place we just be?"
And that includes the design of the experience, how things look and feel, et cetera. Again, try and hit that sweet spot in the middle, is what robust is about.
Andrew:
It makes me think about Starbucks as being such a great example of that, they asked the question, "How do we create an experience so good that people make this their third place where they want to be?"
How would you think about cohesive and breaking that one down?
Joe Pine:
Cohesive is about having an experience that hangs together. What so often happens, we have an experience, say, "Oh, let's do this. Let's do that."
You just splat all this stuff against the wall and not all of it sticks. It's about having an organizing principle for the experience. And it's very simple, is it's what we call a theme. For a lot of people, theming has bad connotation because you think, "Well, it's got to be fantasy like Disney. It's got to be in your face, like a themed restaurant."
... which is not the case but it's what's your organizing principle? It's how you decide what's in and what's out. I'll give you just one hotel example because you think about a property there, and that's the library hotel in Manhattan, it's on 41st Street and Madison Avenue. And the theme in the library hotel is slightly different. It's actually Dewey decimal system. Everything's organized around the Dewey decimal system. You walk in, there's a card catalog behind there, you get bookmarks and so forth, there's books there. And so it's a boutique hotel of 10 floors of rooms, six rooms in every floor, and everyone is a different classification on the Dewey decimal system. There's a art floor, there's a math and science floor, there's a literature floor and so forth. And so you get to your room and to your classification, it's filled with both books as well as art objects for that particular one. It's simply how they organize the experience and it works wonderfully well. If you don't design a cohesive experience, then it becomes like everything but the kitchen sink.
Andrew:
I can already tell ... I want people to know, after we cover these, we're going to talk about a concept of how does this apply in real estate and a little bit more to you? And again, we think the people on this call and the people that we're going to get this book to at NARPM Nationals in Kansas City, if you're thinking about things this way, you're going to see opportunities. It's that effect of, "I drive a yellow car. Before I had a yellow car, I never noticed yellow cars on the road. And now that I have it, I start seeing them everywhere."
And it's not because there's more yellow cars all of a sudden, but you start seeing opportunities differently. And I hope you can take this framework in to say, "Okay, as I look for these principles at play, see more examples, I'll start to see opportunities in my own business to do this."
But we'll give a couple practical examples and put this in some context before we're done here. Let's move to dramatic. Joe, if you can cover that one next.
Joe Pine:
Yeah. Actually, let me look at personal first because you want to lead up to the drama, you got to lead up to the climax. Personal is recognizing again, that experiences happen inside of us. It's the reaction to the stimuli in front of us. You need to reach inside people and engage them. And then that brings in customization again, customizing all the goods and services. A great way to be able to do that, to understand, it's as simple as using somebody's name or the preferred way that you want to call them, to write personal thank you notes when things are done. Two, using the high end of technology to fully mass customize things that you're doing, such as increasingly being done with experience platforms to be able to do that. And it's all about the individual living, breathing, human being in front of you. And he's not part of a market and he's not part of a segment, he's not part of a niche, you don't think of him as part of a generation or a persona or any other agglomeration of anonymous buying units of indeterminate size. It is a living, breathing human being. The more you connect to that person, the more personal the experience is going to be, the better it's going to be.
Andrew:
I know there's some people on this call who have gotten personalized cookies with their logos on them and experienced some of this at Second Nature as part of our interactions with folks, where they've seen personalization and customization at play. All right. You said you want to end with dramatic, does that mean we're going transformational next?
Joe Pine:
Well, I want to lead up to dramatic. We've still got transformative after that, but dramatic is dramatic. Dramatic is recognizing that you can't have a flat experience that's time well saved if nothing much happens. You got to rise up to a climax and come back down again. It is about designing things intentionally to create that dramatic arc. Otherwise, you've got nothing. And recognizing too, that when you stage experiences, your work is theater. It's not a metaphor, work as theater literally mean your work is theater. Whenever you're in front of customers, you're on stage and you need to engage them in a way or you need to act in a way that engages them as the audience of your performance.
Andrew:
I know at Second Nature, we talk about every interaction is an opportunity to create an experience. And when you start to view things that way, you start to treat the opportunity or the moment differently. We have a practice that we call moment making, and it's how do you make a moment happen for somebody? How do you make their day? How do you make their week? How do you surprise? How do you delight? How do you create the unexpected, which seems like it plays into the dramatic piece. And then transformative, so that we can round out the five and not leave people hanging, what would you say about that, Joe?
Joe Pine:
Transformative in fact is the fifth and final economic offering, that experiences can be commoditized, that when you customize an experience, when you design one exactly right for this person, you can't help but turn to what we call life transforming event. Or in other words, a life transforming experience. Transformation is about understanding that we only ever change through the experiences that we have. And so if you can understand what somebody's aspirations are and help design those experiences, help them achieve those aspirations, whether that's to go from having an apartment to being in a home for example, as being a key aspiration that people have, how do you help them make that transformation? Then you'll gain even more economic value. And so healthcare, fitness centers, management consulting, coaches of all stripes are all really in the transformation business. And I think it's an opportunity also in property management.
Andrew:
In starting to turn practical, I'm going to deliver on that promise here, which is something we talked about last month Joe, and it was featured Brian Jenkins, Deb Newell, Karen Jordan, a couple of whom are on this call with us today, they talked about running high impact Zoom calls for investors. And so what these property managers are doing is every quarter, they're getting their clients together and creating an educational experience for them. And when I think about transformative, language reflects a difference in thinking or a difference in being. And we notice this important languaging happening in our industry of there's old language of owners. And it's this static thing of, "Yes, I'm the property owner, I have property."
But something happens that these property managers are doing as they're educating folks from property owner to turning them into property investors or an accidental owner into an intentional investor, and that they're participating in that process and in that transformation. That takes effort, that takes time. But that's something that down the road, we'll see ... I think people do that extremely well and there's ways to monetize it. There's companies on this call who offer consulting if you will, as a service. And they're really guiding these type of transformations for folks who are helping them get to where they want to go and helping them be who they want to be in creating those experiences that move them along the way. Could you talk a little bit about ... I think people have got to be wondering like, "Okay. Andrew, we've got this thing here but surely if we're here at the experience economy, eventually ... "
Maybe it's a hundred years in the future, whenever it happens, but there's got to be something after this, Joe. If you customize experiences, what comes after that?
Joe Pine:
That's the transformations. The transformations are in fact a distinct economic offering where people are asking for your help to change them, rather than being left up to all the different possibilities out there. Develop a solution that helps them achieve their aspirations. You talked about terminology Andrew, in transformations you think in terms of aspirations and outcomes. What's the outcome that you're going ... And customer success, how do we make them a success and what they want? And ends versus means is another key one. And ensuring that things happen. All those sorts of words are important. And the aspect of the economic function, you deliver services, you stage experience as you pointed out. You guide transformations, you can't do it for them, you can't make them do it really. You can lead a horse to water but you can't make them drink, you can only set the conditions, it's a guiding, a coaching standpoint. Think about being guides and coaches for your property owners and as you say, then transform them into property investors.
Andrew:
That's really great. And there's a lot of brilliant minds on here I think, they know the information gaps, they know the skill gaps, they know the things that they can start to work with to help take people on that path. There's a great comment here I just want to call out from Michael McCrery, and I would throw it up to everyone. We'll probably have a couple minutes here at the end if there's any questions you have specifically for Joe about the Experience Economy or things that we're talking about, things you'd want to be more clear, feel free to drop them in the chat. If we have time, we'll get to those. But I want to read Michael McCrery's comment just in case anyone's catching this. I remember there was a couple people driving right now, I don't want them to try to go read the comment, "We're doing so much with tech website showing services, portals, that the personal touche has become such a challenge, even with multiple remote team members. It seems that getting that personal touchback in the relationship for both clients, the investors and tenants or residents, has become the missing key to the different second nature shown by example."
And so here's what I want to come back to that I love, that Michael's pointing out here. Again, there's two trains. One is the customization train for creating value up the stack here. On the other side, you've got the commoditization effect. And I don't want to discount this because this is an important part of a way to create value in a business if you're the fastest to do it a little faster, a little better, a little cheaper. If you outsource labor that's more expensive in one place and you outsource it somewhere else to get the same job done less expensively, well, it's easy to see how that creates an economic difference, et cetera. But if that's the only train that you ride and the only train you ride is the train of commoditization, then where you might find yourself ending up is in a low margin business that isn't creating a lot of new value that's more defensible over time and bullet proofed against other forces or competition coming to the space trying to get the same job done for customers.
And so what we would encourage people to do is not think it's ... It's not one or the other, it's both. You want to do things more efficiently, you want to find a way to do things at a lower cost. You want to find a way to be more effective in those ways and lead on the commoditization side, that's one way to create value. But there's this huge upside on the other side like Joe was talking about, where you get factors of multiples. You're not shaving a percentage here or there, 20% here or there. You've got a chance to 3X, 5X, 10X, orders of magnitude, create a whole different business. And that gets us at Second Nature very excited about the future of property management in this industry and the people here who can participate in those opportunities. Joe, here's what I want to do. Experience platform lessons, let's cover that and then I'll draw one more picture for people about what's happening in real estate as we see it in different segments and what they can see for the 20, 30 year vision out here for family rentals. Experience platform lessons, as I say that, what does that spark for you?
Joe Pine:
Yeah. I actually just completed in June a multi-client study on experience platforms, I'm coming out with a toolkit in the coming months about it. And we see more and more of the economy on platforms and commodities first have always been sold on platforms. The Amazons and eBays did it with goods, you've got the Ubers and the Lyfts et cetera, with services. And now increasingly, we see experience platforms too. You think of probably most notably Airbnb experiences, where you don't just rent a couch or a room or a house, you book the experiences that you want to have while you are visiting a particular locale. And so one is to recognize that we can create platforms for that. And with platforms, what happens is you could now create an ecosystem of complimenters that can vastly expand what you can do. You could never do everything it takes to be able to provide a total solution for an apartment owner for everything that they're doing, but if you can be the one that has the relationship and then connects in all of these others for them as well as for their tenants, I think that's where the big opportunity is, is the tenant's the one that are experiencing this, is what can you then do for them through such a platform that goes beyond just the mere services of replenishing toilet paper and so forth?
I think there are huge opportunities there. There are four different functions that you provide in a platform. The one that all of them do is basically connect, you connect the end user with a experienced stager out there somewhere. Make that connection, they can book it and boom, done. But you can also then curate these, not just open it up to everybody but you can say, "Okay, we've got a certain ... "
Virgin has Virgin experience days in the UK and in Australia and other places. I think they're coming to the US actually this year. And you can book all these experiences but they all fit in with the Virgin brand. They're things like adventure travel and going up in a balloon and eventually into space and so forth. Curating them according to who you are as a company can be a big help. Customize is the other one, is great customizing. And one of the big things we see is companies that are creating mass customized itineraries that basically, "We're going to schedule out the entire experience for you."
Carnival does that on its cruise with its ocean medallion system, for example. But Airbnb doesn't do that. You're left to your own devices, "Oh, I got to remember I got this event now and this event then and I got to check out at this time."
... instead of creating you an itinerary of what the possibilities are. And I think that's a big deal. And then finally, the most values in creation, is how do we actually create a platform that allows people to create their own experiences and then be able to share those and come together with different people to be able to do that. And so you need to think about where you can provide the most value in creating an experience platform for tenants as well as potentially for owners and investors.
Andrew:
I promise one more picture, and I'm going to see if I can throw this out here. Okay. What we've got referenced, I think most people will know the acronyms here. We've got single family rental, which as a professional industry is growing and expanding. We've got multi-family housing, call it apartment living. There's hotels, and I'll have you fill in this blank in just a moment here Joe, but here's what we noticed, is that hotels are probably leading the way as far as in the real estate industry for experience design and staging experience, et cetera. If I go to a Ritz Carlton hotel in Marina del Ray, there was a property there I went to to celebrate an anniversary, and I said, "Hey, it's our anniversary. I called in a day before, is there anything you can do?"
And of course, there was champagne chilled when we got there, there were chocolate covered strawberries, there was a nice note, concierge services, everything else. And so I remember that specific property, even though I was only there for a couple days, it's a really memorable and meaningful experience that they created around the service of, "Here's a bed to lay your head on."
And you see the hotelification of large apartment buildings starting to happen and the amenities and the community spaces and they're thinking about how are we connecting our residents to each other? What experiences can we offer and create for them here, and what's available to them here that's inclusive of paying us rent and everything that's going on there? And then we start to see, "Man, it's like the wild wild west over here in SFR."
And a really exciting possible future that we can go down. But things that people in their 20s want, the golf simulator and the bark park might be different from the couple with a kid or two, there's different demographics here and different experiences that people might create to attract the residents that they want and that are typically in single family rental housing. And it's everything from the product chain, service chain on up, that we're seeing of a single family rental house that's designed for rent. Build for rent is a big topic in our industry now. And the hallways are wider and the stairways are wider because they know there's furniture that's going to be moving up and down out of those homes a little more frequently than your typical home. And there's a lot that's happening here. Now, I think you say the ones that hotels should be looking at and eventually maybe everyone could get caught up to at some point, are places like amusement parks. You were talking about Disney earlier. I think you even said cruise lines as an example of an aspirational example to think about as a north star to head to. Could you talk a little bit about that?
Joe Pine:
Yeah. Well, I think it's basically those companies that have been in the experience business for a very long time that already are ahead of the game. And hotels are catching up. I still remember an ad from the 1990s the Marriott had that said, "The last thing you want in a hotel stay is a memorable experience."
Because the only thing they could imagine you create a memorable experience out of is bad service, something bad happens and now everything they talk about is that experience. But there have been companies that have been in this for decades and that's who we need to learn from and recognize that were in the experience business. And again, with those transformation possibilities. Probably what you want to do is not draw one arrow there leading from a hotel but 10 arrows, maybe a hundred arrows, maybe a thousand arrows, of all the companies that are competing in experiences now as well as in transformation, where the one I'll mention is transformative travel. And what a lot of hotels are doing is recognizing that people actually want to travel to help transform themselves, the communities which they go in, transform the world. And so there are huge opportunities when we play into that about what we can do to help people feel a part of the world and then help give meaning to their lives and what they're spending their time on. We talked about services as time well saved and experiences as time well spent. Transformations are time well invested that pay a dividend and gain compound interest now and into the future.
Andrew:
The driving questions for the single family and small multi-family garden style apartments, the people on this call, I saw Brian Birdie who has some short-term rentals, and you referenced Airbnb, they're really creating an experience of live like a local.
Joe Pine:
That could be a good thing.
Andrew:
That's their theme, live like a local. It's not just a different version of a hotel or a cheaper version of a hotel, it's a whole different experience of living like a local, which is a great example, and how much hospitality comes into play there. That's big. As I think about the driving questions for our industry, we think about the Triple Win podcast and the lens through which we see it through is, "How do we create a resident experience so good that residents say, 'I don't want to leave, I'm not moving to another property'."
And there's everything that goes into that. It's the maintenance, it's the leasing experience, the application, through all kinds of communication, at every interaction point is an opportunity to create an experience. There's a lot of ways this can add up over a long term residency with a property manager. How do we create a resident experience so good people don't want to leave? Another one is, "How do we create an investor experience so good they don't want to sell? They want to hold and they want to buy more."
And that's something that really gets juices flowing and the opportunities there, how we can create better investor experiences. And then finally is, "How do we create a better experience for our team so that talent wants to be in this business forever?"
And many of the things that you talked about here, people can even just think about their own work environment, how things are staged, not just the physical environment but what's people's experience at work? What's the experience of their team? What's the experience of their vendor networks, the extensions of their team, connecting with their organization? Is it the organization and experience created where they say, "I love that property manager. When they call, I'm answering. If it's after hours, I'm going to take care of that."
Because there's great experience design taking place all across the board. It can feel a little bit like going to Mars here to say, "We're going to go from here to there."
And this big grand vision. And I just want to offer people that Second Nature thinking about this, we said, "Well hey, what's the number one first step you can take? And what's a experience platform we might be able to provide?"
I know Randall Henderson's on the call, Steven Walters was telling me at the PMI conference, there was a franchise that stood up and said, "My number one source of revenue is my management fee. My number two is my leasing fee. My number three is my resident experience platform, my resident benefits package, which has a suite of different services that all roll up into this unique professional experience that differentiates the professional manager from the accidental landlord and what they can do on their own. It's why we're so passionate about this and we believe it's a great place to start, an easy place to start on the journey. And there's a lot more mountain to climb ahead to create a truly amazing resident experience, investor experience and team experience."
Joe, I want to leave you with the last word before we get people into our activity. Is there anything else we didn't cover today that you just feel it would be a shame if you didn't cover it?
Joe Pine:
Well, there's too much. And so the thing about it is that you can't get everything from this conversation in this time we're having. But Andrew, I love those two questions you brought up. Those are exactly the right questions. When everybody does get the book, read it. Be sure to read chapters 1, 4, 6 and 9 and the preview. Those of you who feel like, "I don't want to read this whole book."
Those are the ones, preview, 1, 4, 6, and 9.
Andrew:
Well Joe, thanks so much.
Speaker 3:
That's all for this episode of the Triple Win. Thanks go out to Carol Housel and Jeff Tucker for everything they do to put these episodes together. And we want to remind everyone that you can find more resources, upcoming events, a link to our private Facebook group where the conversation continues in between these episodes with other professional property managers, all of that you can find at rbp.secondnature.com. Again, that's rbp.secondnature.com. And until next time, keep transforming what it means to be in professional property management by finding and applying your next triple win. We want it to be true that every time we see you, we see a better version of you and your business. With that, cheers.
Topics: