How to Plan Your 2027 Multifamily Marketing Spend

Building next year’s marketing budget isn’t about copying last year’s numbers—it’s about preparing for how renters will search tomorrow.

In this episode of The Multifamily Marketers Podcast, hosts Josh Grillo and Caroline Mills break down how multifamily marketers should approach budgeting for 2027, from auditing current performance to investing in the channels that will matter most in the year ahead.

With AI reshaping search, short-form video influencing decisions, and renter expectations continuing to evolve, this episode provides a practical framework for creating a smarter, more strategic marketing budget.

You’ll learn:

• Why every marketing budget should start with performance data—not dollar amounts
• How to audit vendors and eliminate tools that no longer provide value
• Where to invest more in 2027: SEO, AI visibility, websites, video, and reputation management
• Why AI search is changing how renters discover apartment communities
• How to build a budget around leasing goals and conversion metrics
• Which marketing expenses deserve extra scrutiny before increasing spend
• Why flexible budgets outperform static annual plans in today’s market

To suggest a topic, get in touch!

For more multifamily marketing help, connect with us at Resident360.

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TRANSCRIPT

Episode 51: How to Plan Your 2027 Multifamily Marketing Spend

Podcast Co-Hosts: Josh Grillo and Caroline Mills, Resident360

Josh: Welcome back to the Multifamily Marketers Podcast. I’m your host, Josh Grillo, co-founder here at Resident360, and I’m joined by my co-host, our digital diva, Miss Caroline Mills. Caroline, good morning and good afternoon. I know you’re on the East Coast and I’m on the West Coast, so it’s mid-morning my time and afternoon your time. How are you doing?

Caroline: Doing well. I can’t believe it’s August already. We were just talking about how quickly your kids’ summer has gone by, how fast summer in general has gone by, and now the year.

Josh: You know what? It really does go quick. The older I get, and I’m 51 years old now, which I hate saying, the faster it flies by. You’ve got to stop, take a second, and take it all in, because it will fly by. And speaking of time flying by, it’s getting to be budget time, so we thought it would be great to do an updated episode on budgets. Caroline, you came up with a really good angle for this episode, so why don’t you introduce what it’s all about?

Caroline: When you go into budget season, there’s often a lot of focus on what worked during the current year. But because the marketing landscape has changed so much in the past year, if your budget doesn’t evolve with it, you’ll probably end up overspending in some places and under-investing in others. So we’ll talk about which marketing sources are working for your property, but we’ll also talk about what’s changing in the landscape. How did the renter journey change this year, and how do we expect it to change in 2027? That way, you’re not only investing marketing dollars in what you already have, but also expanding and looking ahead.

Josh: So let’s talk about starting with the data, not the dollars. The biggest mistake we see is people starting with a number instead of starting with performance.

Caroline: Exactly. I think the most common approach is saying, “Okay, we have X dollars for the year. What do we do with it?” But before you decide what to spend next year, you need to understand what happened this year. So the very first step I’d always recommend is an audit of every lead source.

Ask questions like: Where did our leases actually come from? Which channels generated quality tours? Which sources produced leads that never answered the phone? You want to look at it from both ends. Which vendors are costing us money without moving occupancy? It’s easy to get caught up in cost per lead alone, but if Google produces fewer leads than another source and twice as many leases, that’s a much better investment.

Josh: So don’t just measure volume; measure outcomes. Is that what we’re saying?

Caroline: Yes, completely.

Josh: Okay, great.

Caroline: And that leads into our next part: auditing every vendor. This is a great time to audit all your marketing expenses. Look at every contract and ask: Is this still providing value? Are we actually using this platform? Does our team even log into it? If we removed it tomorrow, would anyone notice? Sometimes you’re paying for tools simply because you always have.

Josh: So marketing budgets tend to accumulate over time. Nobody removes anything; they only add. That’s how budgets often become bloated.

Caroline: Yes, they can. I often hear, “Well, we added this, and then this, and then this.” I understand trying what you need to. But then the property reaches stabilized occupancy, and we realize nobody ever went back to audit whether those sources are still valuable.

That brings us to the next segment: follow the renter. Instead of asking what we should buy next year, ask what changed about renters this year. One of the biggest trends, and one we talk about all the time, is AI changing how people search for apartments. Search behavior is becoming more conversational. Renters are often watching short-form videos before they visit websites; we have a whole episode about how people spend time on social before they ever get to a website.

Reviews are a huge one. We’ve had several episodes on them over the last year, and reviews are becoming even more influential in decision-making. There are higher expectations for website speed and mobile experience. And residents expect immediate answers through chat and messaging. It’s just something we’re getting used to in the landscape. All of those behaviors should influence where your marketing dollars go.

Josh: Let’s dive into where we’d shift budget in 2027. If we were building a typical property’s budget today, where would we invest more?

Caroline: That’s a good one. A few areas. First, like we were saying, SEO and AI visibility. Google is changing rapidly. It’s still where we see the most investment, but it’s changing fast. People aren’t just searching “apartments near me” anymore. They’re asking AI platforms questions like, “Where should I live if I work downtown?” or “Which luxury apartments allow large dogs?” Properties need strong local content and optimized websites if they want to appear in those answers.

Second is the website experience. We’ve talked about page speed, calls to action, and everything else that goes into a website. Sending traffic to a slow website is like paying people to drive to a leasing office with the lights turned off. It’s just not going to work. Your website should be fast, mobile-friendly, and make it easy to tour, apply, and contact someone. If you want to go deeper, Josh, we had that episode about call-to-action buttons and what to enhance on a website. So it’s not just page speed, but how people interact with the website.

Third is photography and video. Short-form content isn’t optional anymore. We don’t need Hollywood-style productions, and it doesn’t take a big investment, but you want authentic walkthroughs, amenity videos, maybe some lifestyle content, which is one of my favorites, and resident-focused videos. Those continue to outperform static images. I tell my teams all the time: Capture all the video you can and send me whatever you’ve got. We can use it in all different types of Google Ads campaigns and social media campaigns, so it’s much more than just posting on your feed.

And lastly, reputation management. Resident reviews directly impact conversions. A property with hundreds of recent positive reviews is simply easier to lease than one with outdated or, especially, negative reviews.

Josh: Okay, with all that, Caroline, which areas would you really scrutinize before increasing the budget?

Caroline: That’s a good one. Look closely at any lead source that can’t clearly demonstrate return on investment. If a vendor can’t tell you how many leads, conversions, tours, or leases they’re helping you get, it’s really hard to justify increasing spend. A lot can go into that, like where your tracking comes from and how it feeds into your sources.

I’d also be cautious about buying every shiny new AI tool. AI is incredibly valuable; we use it every day at Resident360. But not every platform with “AI” in its name deserves a line item in your budget. Sometimes your existing tools are already rolling out built-in AI features, or you have vendors who use AI and can help you with it, like we do. So lean in the right direction, but don’t invest in something just because it says AI.

Josh: All right, that was a lot, by the way. That was a ton. Let’s talk about building budgets around goals. This is probably my favorite part. Marketing budgets shouldn’t exist in a vacuum. They should support operational goals, right?

Caroline: Completely. Start with your leasing goals. That’s the biggest part. We can say we got 20 leases from a source, but whether we’re leased up or not determines what our goals need to be. How many leases do you need? From there, work backward. That’s the easiest way we explain budgets to people.

If your property needs 120 leases, look at your conversion rates. How many applications does that mean you need? How many tours do you need to get there? How many qualified leads? How many website clicks? You work backward through the funnel, and once you know the funnel, your marketing budget becomes so much easier to justify, because it’s tied directly to your outcomes instead of arbitrary numbers.

Josh: Let me ask you this, Caroline: What questions should every team ask before finalizing the budget?

Caroline: With so many eyes on the budget, before it’s finalized, ask: What generated the highest-quality leads this year? What are we paying for that we no longer use? Are our marketing dollars aligned with how renters are actually searching today?

One example just popped into my head. Years ago, at the beginning of my career working on site, we used to post on Craigslist. That was actually a line item in the budget. If you looked at that today, you’d say, “Absolutely not; I’m not allocating any marketing dollars there.” But that changed pretty quickly, so look at what you’re using today the same way.

Also ask: Are we investing enough in our website? Are we prepared for continued AI-driven search? That’s a good one; if you haven’t had those conversations, you absolutely should. And do we have enough flexibility in our budget to adjust if the market or our marketing needs change? The reality is that the best budgets aren’t static. They’re flexible. They ebb and flow and taper on and off, as we like to say, and those are the ones that get you results.

Josh: That’s really good feedback. Wrapping this all up, I’d say if there’s one takeaway from today’s episode, it’s this: Don’t copy your 2026 marketing budget. Use this season as an opportunity to rethink it.

Caroline: Absolutely. The leasing landscape is changing. Search is changing, and technology is changing, so you want your marketing budget to evolve right alongside it.

Josh: All right, thank you, Caroline. That was fantastic insight. Hopefully everybody was paying attention on that one, because I got a lot from it. We’ll wrap the episode up right there. We appreciate everybody listening today. As always, we’ll be back next week with another exciting episode. Leave us a review, subscribe, and share it with your friends, your on-site teams, and all that good stuff. Help us grow the show if you can. We appreciate you listening. Take care, and have a fantastic rest of your day. Bye-bye, Caroline. See you later.

Caroline: Bye!