What Movers Get Wrong About Apartment Referrals: Fabian Lobato's Insider Take

The Snoball Effect Podcast exists for one simple reason: to bring home service company professionals practical insights and tools they can use right now to grow their business.

In this episode, Todd Jensen sits down with Fabian Lobato, Concierge General Manager at Smart City, to talk about how movers actually earn apartment referrals, what a clean attribution system looks like from the partner’s side, the follow-up cadence almost every moving company is getting wrong, and the text-first generation that’s about to redefine how home services sell.

Key Takeaways

• Apartments refer movers they trust, not movers they like: A discount on the move is the floor, not the differentiator. The mover that wins is the one that makes the concierge team’s life easier and protects their brand.
• A clean referral journey is non-negotiable: If the apartment partner can’t track attribution end-to-end, the relationship dies inside six months.
• Most movers stop following up at touch three: Statistically, most buyers don’t decide until after the eighth follow-up. The gap between three and eight is where the revenue is.
• Proactive communication is the cheapest objection-handling tool there is: The fastest way to lose a customer is to make them invent worst-case scenarios in the silence.
• A whole generation that hates phone calls is about to start moving: The home service company that figures out text-first follow-up has a multi-year head start.

The Apartment Concierge’s View of Movers

Smart City is a real estate company operating across every major Texas metro plus Atlanta, Nashville, Chicago, and Denver, with plans to keep expanding. The core business is apartment locating: a free service for renters that takes the legwork out of finding an apartment, funded by the properties’ marketing budgets. After the renter signs a lease, Fabian’s concierge team takes over to coordinate the move-in experience end-to-end.

That handoff covers everything a renter touches between the signature and the move-in date: electricity, internet, renter’s insurance, TV, cleaning services, pet-related logistics, and movers. Fabian’s team of ten makes one-on-one referrals to vetted partners across every category. The mover side of the business is where the trust calculation gets most visible.

The first thing to understand about apartment concierge referrals: they aren’t generated by a discount. They’re generated by the concierge team’s belief that the mover will deliver. Fabian doesn’t add a mover to Smart City’s rotation until the relationship is solid, and his criteria are stricter than most moving companies expect.

“I’d like to know a little bit about them,” Fabian explained about his vendor onboarding. “I’d like to know their history. I’d like to know the history of the company, why they’re in the industry. I wanna understand their entire client journey from beginning to end. The moment that I reach out to you, what’s the cadence of communication that I receive? What am I receiving? What details am I receiving? How do you communicate with me day of, after? If I have an escalation, how does that get handled?”

If a mover struggles to answer those questions, the partnership doesn’t move forward. The reason isn’t pickiness. It’s that Smart City’s entire brand sits on every referral the team makes, and a single mover who drops the ball damages a relationship the concierge team spent months building.

Why Most Mover Outreach to Apartments Fails

The single biggest mistake Fabian sees from movers trying to land apartment partnerships: leading with a discount. A mover walks into the conversation offering 25 dollars off a move and treats that as the relationship’s value proposition. From Fabian’s side of the table, that’s the floor of the offer, not the differentiator.

“Just you approaching me asking to send you leads because you’re willing to give me a discount is not reason enough for me to refer my clients to you because of all the work that I’ve had to do just to acquire that client in the first place,” he said.

What does actually move a concierge team to refer? In Fabian’s framing, it starts with understanding the partner’s actual problem. A leasing office isn’t buying moves. They’re trying to convert tour traffic into signed leases, smooth out the move-in process, and retain residents long enough to renew. A mover that walks in offering to make the leasing team’s job easier, take some logistical load off the move-in window, or generate goodwill that retains residents has actually given the property something to refer for.

His tactical advice for mover-led outreach: invest in the relationship before asking for the lead. Spend the early conversations understanding what the leasing or concierge team is struggling with. Find a way to plug into the gap they have. Then propose a partnership that actually fits the way they already operate. The mover that does this lands in rotation. The mover that leads with a discount stays at the edge of consideration forever.

Fabian also recommended a small move that consistently outperforms its cost: incentivize the front-line staff, not just the brand. A 25 or 50 dollar bonus per converted referral, paid directly to the leasing agent who made the recommendation, can do more for top-of-funnel volume than a much larger discount to the renter. The staff feel the partnership. The volume follows.

What a Clean Referral Journey Looks Like

The second non-negotiable from Fabian’s side: end-to-end attribution. Smart City refers clients to movers in multiple ways. Direct one-on-one introductions during the concierge call. Website placements. Social media features. Each channel has to feed back into the mover’s system with clean attribution all the way through to a booked job and a paid-out referral fee.

“I need a clean referral journey,” Fabian said. “If I refer a client to you, we can track attribution all the way through to the very end. I don’t have insight into the mover’s actual system, which also goes back to why I need to have a great relationship: because I have to trust that you’re reporting accurately on everything that I’m sending you.”

The reason this matters more than most movers realize is that the relationship’s economics depend on it. Smart City earns a revenue share on bookings. If the mover’s system can’t prove which jobs originated from the partnership, the apartment concierge has no way to verify the fee, and the partnership’s incentive structure breaks down. Movers who try to operate referral relationships without a referral tracking layer eventually lose their seat at the table, because the partner gets tired of taking the mover’s word for it.

This is exactly the gap a real referral engine fills. The partner sees clean reporting. The mover doesn’t have to manually reconcile spreadsheets. The relationship gets to build trust without burning out the people running it.

The Communication Mistakes Movers Keep Making

Once a mover is in rotation, the next failure mode Fabian sees is communication. The pattern is consistent across the dozens of mover partners he’s evaluated: communication is reactive instead of proactive, and the silence between touches creates anxiety customers fill in with worst-case assumptions.

“The best way to overcome an objection is before it ever happens. So just be proactive in your communication.”

Fabian Lobato, Concierge GM at Smart City, on the Snoball Effect Podcast

Fabian’s view: moving is one of the most stressful experiences a person goes through, and customers fill silence with anxiety. Every missing communication is a customer wondering whether the mover forgot them, mis-scheduled them, or is about to send the wrong crew. Every proactive update is an objection that never had to be raised.

The good communication pattern, in his framing, runs from the moment of inquiry to the day after the job. Quick acknowledgment. Clear expectations on the quote timeline. Confirmation when the booking lands. A check-in mid-week before the move. A morning-of confirmation. A post-job follow-up. Each touch is short. None of them require a script that takes the moving team out of their day. Together they remove every common objection before the customer has time to invent it.

The cost of getting this wrong shows up directly in Smart City’s ticket volume. Renters call the concierge team when a mover goes silent. The concierge team escalates to the mover. The mover scrambles. The relationship erodes. None of it had to happen, and the prevention is a five-minute update.

Most Buyers Don’t Decide Until Follow-Up #8

The second communication failure Fabian raised was follow-up cadence after the quote is sent. He has had the same conversation with movers more times than he can count.

“I will ask them like, ‘Hey, if a client does reach out, what is your follow-up cadence past that point? How often are you calling them? How often are you texting them, or emailing them?’ And it has shocked me the amount of times that I’ve had people say, ‘Oh, you know, we follow up with them two times, three times, and then that’s it.’”

The industry data Fabian referenced: most buyers don’t make a decision until after the eighth follow-up. The moving industry is no exception. Customers are shopping multiple movers. They’re comparing quotes. They’re waiting for the right moment in their move timeline to commit. The mover who follows up two or three times and then disappears is forfeiting the lead at the exact moment the prospect was getting close to picking.

The fix is unglamorous: extend the follow-up cadence to at least eight thoughtful touches over the quote window. Vary the channel. Vary the tone. Don’t make every touch the same “are you ready to book” message. Send the customer something useful at touch four, ask a clarifying question at touch six, share a related logistics tip at touch seven. Stay relevant without being annoying.

This is also where a real referral relationship has compounding economic value. Every referred lead the mover lets go cold is a check the apartment partner could have earned. The leaky bucket at the bottom of the funnel is what makes apartment concierges reconsider the partnership at the six-month review. Movers who follow up with urgency retain their seat in rotation. Movers who don’t get quietly replaced.

Why Texts Are the Future of Mover Sales

One of the most interesting moments in the conversation came when Fabian shifted from analyzing what movers get wrong today to what they’ll need to fix over the next few years. His prediction: phone calls and email are about to lose primacy as the default customer-communication channels.

“We have a whole generation that is about to start moving that hates phone calls and doesn’t check their email,” he said. “Smart City as a whole, as a company and my whole team, almost 90 percent of our conversation is over text. I think that there’s a wave that we’re gonna have to figure out: text follow-up in a very tasteful way.”

Fabian is actually building a side project to solve the problem for movers: an automated text follow-up layer that can sit on top of an existing CRM. When a quote goes out, the mover’s system fires a seven-text sequence designed to keep the prospect engaged without spam. If the quote books, the sequence opts out. If the prospect replies, the conversation gets handed back to a human in real time. The premise is that movers don’t need to abandon calls and email. They just need text to be the default front door.

The broader point underneath: home services has been talking to customers the same way for decades. That window is closing. The companies that adopt the channels younger movers actually use, in a tasteful and human way, will have a multi-year head start before the rest of the industry catches up.

Connect with Fabian

• LinkedIn: Fabian Lobato
• Email: [email protected]
• Website: Smart City Locating