Property Managers Turn to AI to Enhance Tenants’ and Applicants’ Experience

Forget Siri. Colleen, Elise, Penny and Kelsey are the AI personas that property managers are using to manage tenants’ and housing applicants’ queries.

Colleen, Elise, Penny and Kelsey are artificial intelligence personas offered in AI systems designed to manage resident and applicant issues for property managers. Increasingly, property managers are turning to AI to manage the sometimes-massive quantity of queries that flow into managers’ voicemails, email accounts, web portals and phones. AI is also used to handle maintenance requests, send out late payment reminders and screen potential applicants who visit property websites.

“We are using AI primarily to interact with the large volume of leads, phone calls, emails and text messages that come in, especially to our tax credit (properties),” explains Kelly Johnson, vice president of marketing for property management at Dominium. “As we market these properties, we could have somewhere between 5,000 to 10,000 interested customers. AI has been incredibly beneficial in helping us nurture those leads, keep communication with those leads and help escalate them when it is time for a human to get involved.”

Johnson adds that many in the housing space “see AI products as something that will become the norm.”

Colleen AI, EliseAI and Zuma
Colleen AI, EliseAI, and Zuma are the AI customer contact systems that the property managers contacted by Tax Credit Advisor have deployed. (Penny and Kelsey are AI voices within the systems.) Most of the AI products integrate with property management data systems, such as Yardi, Entrada and MRI software.

“Yardi will spit out who is behind on rent, and Colleen will step in and contact them,” says Chris Fields, senior director of marketing and corporate communication for Kittle Property Group, Inc. “There is direct communication.”

Fields adds, “The product Colleen is pretty comprehensive and offers support across all communications channels. If a resident reaches out via email, Colleen can respond. [Property managers] can also implement a website chatbot that can identify the residents by talking to them and doing a qualification check to make sure they are residents. If there is anything the AI can’t answer, they flag it and send a notification to the property team, and they can handle it once they are back in the office.”

Lee Reedy, vice president of marketing and communication for Pennrose, says her company is piloting EliseAI.

“We started a couple of years ago looking into chatbots for our website,” explains Reedy. “We find that our property management site team members have to answer the same questions over and over and over again. At the time, I looked into chatbots and wasn’t thrilled with the options…towards the beginning of this year, with new products out for multifamily housing, I started looking again.”

Reedy says Pennrose began piloting EliseAI in May, bringing it into more properties by the beginning of June. Now EliseAI is in 15 to 20 properties serving about 2,300 units.

“It will respond to all prospective resident inquiries with a chat function on the website,” she says. “It answers all phone calls and responds to all emails and text messages.”

Reedy says they selected the properties for piloting based on different criteria. If a property was getting an overwhelming amount of traffic to its website or phones, they might select it for piloting. Other properties needed more traffic but might not have the staff to manage it.

“At other properties, it was a staffing issue,” she says. “The leasing office wasn’t able to be open five days a week, so we wanted to address all of the needs that came in.”

Reedy further explains that the AI platform also has a resident component.

“It responds to resident needs, including maintenance requests and policy questions. They recently added a delinquency product so AI can reach out to residents behind on rent payments and help support collections,” Reedy adds.

Reedy says their resident AI is named Penny. Penny will first text someone who is behind on rent, then move to email and later will call if the tenant still has not paid.

“She’ll say ‘Hi. This is Penny with such and such community, letting you know you have an outstanding balance of this amount.’ Then she gives them an online payment link,” says Reedy. “It will try to manage it without having to hand it off to an actual person.”

AI Won’t Replace Human Interactions but Could Enhance Them
Johnson, of Dominium, says that when AI was first deployed in the housing industry—and basically all industries—the “resounding sentiment was that it would take human jobs away.” Johnson does not believe that will happen.

“AI is a supplement to human interaction. It is not a replacement,” Johnson says.

Dominium has deployed Zuma, a chatbot leasing assistant that uses the persona Kelsey to interact with people making leasing queries. Dominium is getting ready to deploy EliseAI as its customer relations manager (CRM) system. Johnson says she likes the fact that ZUMA has humans monitoring interactions, so if people get caught in a loop where the AI is not answering a question, a human will step in.

“Zuma has humans who review and watch the AI, and if the loop happens, the human will step in and help AI do a better job,” explains Johnson.

Johnson says that since COVID, it has been hard to find employees to work in the property management industry. AI and other software tools have helped to keep the industry nimble.

“Property management is not a complicated business, but it is a lot of work, and it is hard,” she says. “We are leveraging all kinds of software, not just AI, that makes our business nimbler.”

Johnson says AI and other software tools free up staff at properties to be more present when a customer walks into the office.

“They are not on the phone, or emailing, so when a customer walks in the door, they are present,” she says. “They can look you in the eye and be present for that interaction.”

Reedy says her company’s goals for AI include improving customer communication to reduce the number of false emergency maintenance requests, faster collection of rent and gathering better-qualified applicants.

“If you are not integrating AI into your business, you need to,” says Reedy.