Your renters aren’t Googling you anymore. And your AI content isn’t helping.
This week we launched something new: the first episode of The Leasing Lens, our new social series where we break down what's really happening in multifamily marketing, minus the fluff and minus the vendor sales pitch.
Episode one goes straight for the uncomfortable truth: the content most properties are posting right now is quietly costing them leases. Our Head of Content Marketing, M'Kaila Carter, breaks it all down in the video below, and we're going deeper on the why in this issue.
The number nobody at AIM was talking about
We just got back from AIM and MSMS, and the theme was impossible to miss. AI, everywhere. Booth after booth promising to make your content faster, cheaper, and more "efficient" than the vendor next to them.
But here's what none of those booths mentioned.
Google searches per U.S. user are down nearly 20% year over year.Source: Meta, Social Search report (2026), citing Datos/SparkToro clickstream data
That's not a rounding error. Renters haven't stopped looking for their next apartment. They've stopped looking for it on Google. They're on Instagram and TikTok, watching a walkthrough and getting a feel for a community long before they'd ever type your property name into a search bar.
As Meta put it in the report, consumers don't think in channels, they think in questions, and where they go for those answers has fundamentally changed.
So why does AI content make it worse?
Because the whole reason renters are on social is to see something real. AI content gives them the opposite.
Only 11% of people find AI-generated content useful or entertaining.Source: eMarketer, 2026
73% of consumers can identify and reject AI-generated marketing.Source: SmythOS, 2026
Put those two together and the math is brutal. The AI flyer you thought looked polished? Most renters clocked it as filler and kept scrolling. And it doesn't just get ignored, it actively costs you trust.
When a brand posts visible AI content, only 7% trust that brand more, while 31% trust it less.Source: Klaviyo / Datalily, 2026
Every piece of AI filler you post is doing the exact opposite of what you hired it to do.
Even Google is betting on social
Here's the part that should settle the debate.
Google Business Profiles now let you connect your social accounts and pull your recent posts straight onto your Google listing. So when someone searches your property, your social content shows up right there in the results.
Think about what that means. Google, the search engine, is now putting your social front and center, because even Google knows that's what people want to see before they make a decision.
Your social media isn't just your social media anymore. It's your first impression on Instagram, on TikTok, and now on Google too. If all of it is AI filler, that's the first impression you're making everywhere at once.
What this means for your budget
You're heading into budget season right now. And a lot of properties are about to walk out of these conferences with five different contracts from five different vendors, all running five different AI tools.
You don't need that. You need one team making real content that reaches real qualified renters. Content filmed by actual people who show up to your property, because a template can't show a renter what it feels like to live there.
That's the whole idea behind how we work. And it's exactly what M'Kaila gets into in episode one of The Leasing Lens.
Book a call before you lock your budget
The Digital Digest publishes every Wednesday. Catch new episodes of The Leasing Lens on our social channels, and forward this to someone on your team staring down next year's budget.
