PM News - 5/22/26 (BIG NARPM News, Zillow Pulls Phone Numbers, Google Bans Common Review Tactics)

NARPM just made a major change to their backend operations after 20 years. Zillow pulled phone numbers from all free rental listings, and Google quietly banned a bunch of review tactics that a lot of you have been using for years, including me. Hey, it's been over a month since I did a news update, and a lot has happened that you may have missed. So this one's a little longer than normal. Let's get into it. First up, NARPM just announced a major change behind the scenes. The board voted to not renew with OMG, that's Organizational Management Group, when the current contract expires in December of this year. Starting January next year, a new company called MCI will take over as NARPM's association management partner. This is a much bigger deal than it might sound. OMG has been running NARPM's day-to-day operations for 20 years. We're talking education, communications, publications, all of the national conferences, all of it. After two decades, that's a deep operational footprint to swap out. The decision came out of a four-month organizational assessment led by an independent consultant. So this wasn't a snap decision. The board clearly looked hard at this and decided NARPM needed a different operational engine going forward. Couple things worth flagging. The CEO question just got a lot more interesting. Troy Garrett has been NARPM CEO since Gail Phillips stepped down last year, but Troy's technically an employee of OMG. So when the management contract transitions to MCI, the CEO seat is up for grabs. MCI is also a much bigger fish than OMG. OMG is a specialized association management company that runs a handful of trade groups. MCI MCI USA is the US arm of MCI Group, a global engagement and marketing agency. They count the National Association of Realtors among their clients. Whether that breadth is a feature or bug probably depends on what NARPM needs in this next chapter. For now, business as usual. The official announcement and the transition plan will be unveiled at NARPM National in Vegas this October. To be clear, this isn't a knock on OMG. They built NARPM into what it is today, and Gail's legacy deserves to be celebrated. 20 years is a long time for any vendor relationship. And if NARPM 2.0 is really going to be a 2.0, the backend may have needed an upgrade too. If you're a NARPM member and have thoughts on this or intel, hit reply on the newsletter I just sent. I'd love to hear from you. Next up, Zillow. If you list rentals on Zillow and you're not on a paid plan, go pull up one of your active rental listings right now. Your phone number is gone. This is insane. This was first flagged by RentEngine in a May 7th blog post. Phone numbers have been pulled from all free listings, including listings being syndicated through a feed. Paid listings still display the phone number. That's Feed Connect contracts, Multifamily Ad contracts, Premium Rental Manager upgrades. Everyone else now routes through the Book Tour or Apply Now buttons, both of which sit on Zillow's side of the fence. Renters can't just pick up the phone and call you anymore unless you pay Zillow. If you want the number back on your listing, you're gonna have to set up an account and engage in a contract with Zillow. Their stated reason is that it's a safety measure against AI-enabled scraping for spam and fraud. Give me a break. The AI scraping threat is real, and fraud at the application stage is one of the biggest unsolved problems in single-family management right now. So the threat itself isn't made up. What I think they're making up is the connection between that threat and this fix. Because here's the test: if AI scraping is, is a real problem, then a paid Zillow listing should also suppress the phone number, and they don't. A scraper hitting Zillow at 3 AM doesn't pause to check whether a listing has a Feed Connect contract attached. The phone number is either on that page or it isn't. A safety measure that only applies to people who don't pay them is just a paywall by a different name. Listing syndication used to be free. Then Zillow started charging property managers and larger landlords to syndicate. Verified badges, premium placement, performance reports, all introduced over time as paid upgrades. And now phone numbers, the most basic contract imaginable, is gated behind a paid plan. The Q1 2026 numbers from Zillow's quarterly earnings report tell you why this keeps happening. Zillow's rentals revenue grew 42% over the last year to $183 million. The strategy is working. The toll booth is collecting. None of this is going to stop on its own, and I'm very concerned about it. So what do you actually do about this? Here's a couple things. Run the math before paying. Don't panic buy the paid plan because Zillow spooked you. Track inquiry volume and days on market before and after this change and let the numbers tell you. Strengthen the channels you actually own. That's your website, your Google Business Profile, owner referrals, tenant referrals. Those are leads that you generate without paying a per inquiry tax. Move some of your spend to a Zillow competitor. At RL, we pay for Apartments.com. They're owned by CoStar. They have Homes.com and a few others. Their model isn't perfect either, but at least the terms are stable and they don't play games. And you can update your PMA to bill marketing costs back to owners. This is something we're looking at doing. For some reason, we here in the SFR management space have historically absorbed these costs ourselves. I don't think we can keep doing that. Plan for the next turn of the screw because it's coming. The phone number is just another step here. The next one is going to be something else that used to be standard. Now onto Google. On April 16th and 17th, Google made two changes to the Maps review policy. And the second one is going to matter for a lot of property managers. The April 16th announcement was the official one with a press release. Gemini is now part of the review pipeline. Three new defenses on top of their existing systems. Pre-publication scam detection, Gemini-powered edit moderation, and proactive email alerts to verified business profile owners before important edits go live. Those seem decent enough. Google also shared some 2025 numbers in that announcement. They blocked or removed 292 million policy-violating reviews last year. That's roughly 1 in 5 review attempts. That's wild. Fake reviews on Maps went up 21% year over year, and almost certainly because generative AI made them cheaper to produce. So this part is actually good for us. If you've been hit with a string of fake 1-star reviews from a competitor or a disgruntled ex-tenant or ex-employee. The new system is supposed to catch a lot of that before it ever shows up on your profile. The April 17th update is the one that matters more though. The day after the announcement, Google quietly added two new clauses to the rating manipulation section of their policy. No press release, they just edited the policy page. A Google Diamond product expert named Amy Thoman spotted the change and posted about it on LinkedIn, which is how anyone outside of Google even found out. Here's what changed. Merchants Merchants now explicitly cannot direct staff to solicit a specific number of reviews. Hello. And merchants cannot direct staff to request reviews that include specific content. The example Google gives is a review that names a specific staff member. Who here has done that? I'll just say a lot of property management companies do both of those things. Internal review contests, team leaderboards, bonuses tied to how many reviews mention a specific employee. Hey, would you mind leaving us a review and mentioning Sarah? She's been great. If she's been great with you. All of that is now a formal policy violation. Now, I don't know how they're going to enforce this. We're going to have to wait and see. Some California property managers have reported talking directly to Google support about this. And as is Google's usual pattern, they roll out something big, get pushback, and then soften it. So there's some backpedaling going on, but it's so important to know about this and keep an eye on it in case it starts to affect you. As far as my team at RL Property Management goes, the biggest change for us is we're just not going to ask residents to mention a specific person by name in reviews anymore. We'll let it happen organically. A few things to audit this week: your scripts. If you have anything that tells Tells your team to ask owners or tenants to mention a specific person, take it out. Replace it with something open-ended. Your incentives. If you're paying bonuses tied to review counts or to reviews that mention me by name, kill that program. And finally, your tools. If you're using a reputation management platform that gates reviews, meaning it surveys customers first and only sends the Google link to the happy ones, that used to be a great trick. That's been against policy for a while, but Google's AI is much better at spotting it now. Here's what's still fine. Sending a follow-up email or SMS with a review link, putting a QR code on your receipt sheets, asking verbally for a review without specific direction, responding to every review that you get, and continuing to deliver the kind of service that makes people want to write something nice about you in the first place. Google also released its first official article on how to optimize for AI search features, the AI overviews, AI mode, all of that. And spoiler alert, it's basically what you're probably already doing for SEO. The article is a direct response to all the people out there selling AEO and GEO services, answer engine optimization, generative Generative engine optimization. Google's position is pretty clear. Generative AI features in search are built on Google's core search ranking and quality systems. So optimizing for AI search is still just SEO. What matters? Unique, valuable content with a firsthand perspective. Clear technical structure. Good page experience. Local business and product details where they're relevant. So really it's the same playbook that you already know. What can you ignore? LLMs.txt files, chunking your content into tiny pieces for AI to parse, rewriting content just for AI systems. Chasing inauthentic mentions across the web, over-focusing on structured data. You don't need to do these things. If you've been worried about the AI search shift requiring a whole new playbook, it really doesn't, at least not yet. Keep doing what's already working. Write content that's actually useful. Bring your firsthand experience, structure your pages well, and don't get sold a bill of goods by some AI SEO consultant promising magic. Next up, LeadSimple University 2026 wrapped up last week in Salt Lake City. I was there and it was a blast. The team announced a packed roadmap for the product. I'm going to move through this fast because there's a lot. Quick disclosure first, I am a small shareholder in LeadSimple and I do some consulting for them. They comp my ticket and travel for this event and LeadSimple is a Crain partner. So I'm a little biased here, but I know some of you are going to be interested in these updates anyway. 4 big things coming. 1, Workflow Designer, a new chat-based process builder. You can just talk to it in plain English. Build me a move-out process. Add a step that sends a vendor an email when the work order is approved. It drafts the stages, conditional logic, templates, all of it. The existing builder isn't going away if you've already got your process dialed in. 2. Operations Pro. This is what used to be called the Maintenance add-on, and it's getting a major upgrade. Free for existing add-on customers. Overhauled work order process, built-in vendor quote process, cost tracking out of the box, tenant scheduling, and a passwordless portal for the tenants and vendors. This is the first time LeadSimple's maintenance feels truly complete to me. Broad availability coming in June. 3, native e-signatures. Woo! This is the one I've been waiting for. Upload a PDF, drop in your fields visually, multi-party signing support, and here's the part that matters. You can trigger the whole thing as a step inside a process or pipeline. I know we've been waiting for that. Fields pre-fill from data already in LeadSimple. No more Zapier glue. And the pricing is only 50 cents per signature. LeadSimple CEO Chris Wynn mentioned seeing competitors charge up to $5 per signing packet. That's insane. This is is 10 times cheaper than that. In most cases, it's just an email with a PDF attached. I don't know where they get off charging $5 for that. 4, LeadSimple Assist. This is the AI piece, and I want to give the team credit because the framing was just right here. Chris Wynn said, I've seen folks get on the AI train a little too quickly and rush out products. We're taking this stuff very seriously. We want to get the details right. That's the right answer. The product is being rolled out deliberately, starting with LSU attendees. It includes an assignable AI teammate, a morning routine that surfaces what's actually urgent when you log in, and triage by text. Also voice for tenant inquiries. Very interesting. Plus a stack of stuff that's already live. Round robin CRM, auto assignment, Calendly integration, an SMS compliance center that gets you live in hours instead of weeks, advanced ring groups, dark mode, simplified inbox, all kinds of stuff. The thread tying all this together is that LeadSimple is making a real bet that operators are tired of duct tape. Every additional tool in your stack is one more login, one more integration to maintain, and one more place for data to drift out of sync. Killing the jump to another tool tax adds up fast when you're running a business with hundreds of moving parts, as I know many of you are. Last news story. There's an ongoing legal battle between Beagle and AppFolio that's worth knowing about and giving you an update on, even if you're not necessarily a Beagle customer, which I'm not. I'm not a Beagle nor an AppFolio customer, for the record. Quick context: Beagle provides rent and pet insurance verification plus other compliance services for property managers. Their service relies on AppFolio customers adding a vendor account so Beagle can access individual customer data and do their work. To clarify, they don't have a direct integration with AppFolio and they're not on the AppFolio Stack Marketplace. More than 80% of Beagle's business is with AppFolio customers, so they're heavily exposed here. In December, Beagle sued AppFolio in federal district court in California, claiming AppFolio engaged in, quote, a systemic campaign to destroy Beagle's business through interference with Beagle contracts, end quote. Beagle alleges AppFolio blocked their access in order to move into Beagle's business directly and accuses AppFolio of spreading false claims about them, including telling customers in a mass email that Beagle posed security risks. Beagle has been trying to get a temporary restraining order against AppFolio. The district court denied it. Beagle filed two motions to reconsider, both denied as well. On April 7th, so we're coming up to current time here, Beagle appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals asking for an evidentiary hearing where both companies' engineers could testify and be cross-examined. The central technical question is whether AppFolio offered viable alternative access methods for Beagle to pursue. Beagle says no. They argued AppFolio's purported alternatives weren't workable substitutes. Jury trial isn't scheduled until September 28th of next year, 2027. So this is a long road, but it's worth tracking this. This is the kind of dispute that helps define how property management software platforms treat their integration partners going forward, which is of high interest to all of us in the industry. When a software platform controls the data, what are the rules around third-party access? This case will help draw some lines. One last thing before I let you go. Jordan Wille and I are doing the digital launch event for the 2026 PM Trends Report on Thursday, May 28th, 11 AM Pacific, 2 PM Eastern. It's called Inside the Owner's Mind: Key Findings from the 2026 PM Trends Report. Here's why we did it. The people we most need to understand as property managers are also the hardest to reach. Individual small landlords in America aren't on LinkedIn. They don't hang out in any kind of consistent group. Getting ahold of them and understanding their intentions is genuinely difficult. The original PM Trends Report came out 18 months ago, and as far as I can tell, it was the first serious look at the rental owner population in years. Who they are, what they value, where where they find property managers, how satisfied they are, what makes them walk away from their property management relationships. The 2026 edition builds on that with fresh polling and more granular breakdowns. Jordan and I are data guys. We want to bring some science to what's actually going on with these folks. Registration link is in the description. If you can't make it live, we'll post a replay and share the full digital report soon. Go to PMTrends.com for all the details. That's the news for this week. I'm Peter Lohmann. Thanks for watching.