As we enter 2025, there’s only one certainty – change. Every year, the multifamily industry continues to evolve (at what seems like an ever-increasing speed). This means that apartment marketers need to stay informed and agile to remain competitive. With rapid advancements in AI technology, a changing search landscape, not to mention all the other hurdles we face in multifamily, 2025 is set to be a transformative year. Here are five key predictions for apartment marketing in 2025, along with actionable insights to help you thrive.
According to Survey Monkey, 88% of Marketers now use AI in their day to day. My first prediction for 2025 is that as the year goes on, the way we work with AI will begin to evolve.
Right now, most use of AI is task based – I.e. using Chat GPT to help with an email, an article, or a graphic. I believe that this is the year where we’ll see an increase in AI usage to thread tasks together to help reach the end goal of delivering entire campaigns.
For example, we’ll have access to tools that can draft an article, email, and sms campaign with a single prompt and some settings.
Further, I believe that task threading will be dominated by, niche-specific AI tools that are purpose built for this. I.e. – Instead of having a large AI toolbox with dozens of different apps, the big players will start buying up the smaller apps, and we’ll see AI marketing environments pop up.
Actionable Insight: Begin testing AI tools now to identify what works best for your property, and integrate them into your marketing strategy before competitors do.
As tenants become increasingly savvy, authenticity in marketing will continue to be a critical factor in attracting and retaining residents. Being authentic isn’t easy, either.
Pro tip: When dealing with frustrated tenants, go the extra mile. Oftentimes, your biggest advocates will be those who had a negative experience turned into a positive one. We have a client with a 4.9 star rating and over 250 reviews. When I asked what their secret was, the owner of the company shared that for every negative review he gets, he finds out who left the review, and personally calls them to help remedy their situation.
Actionable Insight: Develop a strategy to encourage and leverage UGC and reviews while ensuring your brand’s voice remains consistent across all channels.
It’s my personal belief that when Unsplash was founded in 2013, a page was turned in the stock photography world. The open source movement along with careful curation led to a stock photo library that had beautiful, not corny stock photos. As companies realized that there were better free alternatives to bad stock photos, the internet became less and less cluttered with bad stock photography.
But with the onset of AI, I feel like we’re being pushed back into confusion – there are dozens of easy tools to use ai to generate license free images to support our online content efforts.
And because AI imagery is free, easy to use, and relatively contextual, it’s becoming very popular today.
But just because something is easy and cheap doesn’t mean it’s good. All too many of these AI generated images are off brand, out of place, or downright misleading. While there is a time and a place for AI generated imagery, it's probably not on your property listings.
More popular than full on AI generated imagery in the apartment space has been virtual staging, which serves a much greater purpose, but in our opinion should still be used carefully.
AI Generated images are images completely made via AI using tools like Matterport, Meta’s Llama AI, or something similar. While these images are getting increasingly photorealistic, they almost always miss the mark in the apartment space. The key challenge here is that they just struggle to represent your property accurately.
While I do see a time when AI generated images will play a larger role in property management and marketing, the lack of authenticity in this space weighs heavily on the reality of implementing such a tool .
Virtual staging is the process of virtually adding photography to a photograph of an empty unit, so that it looks staged.
At Lease Engine, we’ve frequently used services like PadStyler (a paid service) or Virtual Staging AI (paid AI tool) to make it easy to digitally furnish empty units, saving time and money for our clients.
While Virtual staging can dramatically increase the appeal of a photo of an empty unit, it’s important to be careful in how you use virtually staged photos, as you don’t want to mislead someone and lose their trust as a result.
Yes, but not in the way you might think.
Google is changing, and now pushing traditional website listings so far the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) that people have to scroll for ages to find traditional website links, and once they get to organic links, the competition is stiff, as Apartments.com, Zillow, and other major aggregators dominate the top few results for most major cities.
This means that traditional apartment SEO more challenging than ever before.
How to Approach SEO for Apartments in 2025
Rather than spending tons of money on SEO to drive your website to what is now the bottom ⅓ of a search results page, the new and best way (aside from PPC) to be discovered organically online is through Google Business Profile Optimization.
Google business profiles only show up for local businesses -- and apartments count as local businesses. Google ranks businesses based on proximity to the searcher, number of reviews, review quality (average star rating), review recency, and a number of other factors.
Because GBP is only available to local businesses, it cuts out the big players (I.e. Apartments.com and Zillow) as SEO competition, and helps level the playing field for apartments.
While optimizing your profile can be intimidating, a few easy steps you can take to improve your local map pack profile are:
1. Complete Your Profile: add photos, amenities, hours, and a compelling description.
2. Leverage GBP Posts: Share updates, events, and promotions directly on your profile.
3. Encourage Reviews: Positive reviews on GBP significantly influence visibility and trust.
While traditional SEO seems like it will play a much smaller role over the next few years of search, if you are large enough and determined enough to make it work, we have a few tips:
Actionable Insight: If you are still spending a bunch of money on traditional SEO, it may be time to re-evaluate and shift your strategy to a hybrid model that combines GBP optimization, strategic PPC campaigns, and high-converting landing pages.
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As privacy regulations tighten, Google’s move away from third party cookies will transform how apartment marketers track and target audiences. This is a big deal because for most of the last 25 years cookies have been the most popular system for tracking user behavior and targeting people via online ads.
While this will shift our ability to target people on many platforms, it doesn’t mean we can’t track users on our own websites at all, and there are becoming more and more viable solutions to the removal of 3rd party cookies as time goes on.
Build Your Customer and Lead List.
It's now been 5 years since Google first announced their desire to go Cookieless -- and although that's a long time, most of the internet isn't ready. Here's what you can expect.
Unfortunately, the shift away from cookie based tracking is already impairing the performance of certain ad types like Retargeting. To truly get this ad type to work, cookies need to be in place, users need to consent to third party cookies, or you need to have one heck of a large database.
Google and Facebook have already established their answers to degrading cookie based retargeting performance:
Stay informed about evolving privacy laws like GDPR and CCPA, and be sure to stay up to date to ensure your marketing practices are transparent and compliant.
Actionable Insight: Future-proof your marketing by investing in privacy-compliant tracking solutions and building a robust first-party data strategy.
The multifamily marketing landscape is rapidly changing. To me, AI is driving the majority of this change, and it’s being seen everywhere.
By embracing AI, prioritizing authenticity, leveraging new visual content trends, adapting to shifts in local search, and preparing for a cookieless future, apartment marketers can stay ahead of the curve and drive amazing results once again in 2025.
To truly keep up with the change, you'll need to stay informed, and adopt a fluid strategy that can keep up with the rapid environment we're working in. Be sure to subscribe to our newsletter for the latest updates in the Apartment Marketing World.
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