How Apartment Marketers Are Putting AI to Work

Ever since OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public in 2022, apartment marketers have embraced the artificial intelligence platform as a way to create quality content quickly and efficiently. Artificial intelligence can draft an apartment listing in seconds, generate a month’s worth of social media posts with the push of a button and even produce lifestyle videos you can post on community websites—tasks that would previously have taken hours, if not days.

But using AI is one thing. Managing it is another. Which platform is best? Should employees have unfettered access to AI platforms, or should there be strict limitations to protect the security of the enterprise? And what’s the true cost of AI? (Spoiler alert: It’s way more than the $20 per month that OpenAI charges for an individual ChatGPT Plus plan.)

“Apartment marketers should think of AI as a coworker that they can delegate tasks to,” said Ellen Thompson, co-founder & CEO of Respage, which provides AI multifamily marketing and leasing solutions. “But AI still isn’t reliable enough to work without oversight. To use it effectively, marketers must carefully manage both the inputs to and the outputs from AI systems.”

What Should You Be Doing With AI?

You’re probably already using your favorite AI platform to create website content, social media posts and email campaigns. But what about video?

Thompson recently built a system to help her create videos, using Base44, a no-code AI platform. “I’m not a coder, but I just explained in English what I wanted, and it built a video-generation tool,” she explained. “I built it in an hour. It’s really easy, but very advanced.”

Christine Gustafson, vice president of marketing and public relations for The Breeden Co., shared that her marketing team used Microsoft Copilot to create cartoons of staff members to use in humorous reminder posts for residents at Avant at Huntington Pointe, an apartment community in Newport News, Va. “The art is hysterical,” she said. “It’s that grassroots, organic, fun type of post … and it’s generated more responses from residents.”

Apartment marketers also use AI to engage with prospective residents and to nurture leads through the entire leasing process, from the prospect’s first visit to the community website to scheduling a tour, filling out an application and executing a lease.

Apartment marketers should think of AI as a coworker that they can delegate tasks to.

—Ellen Thompson, co-founder & CEO, Respage

Carly Shepherd, senior vice president of sales and marketing for CRG, explained she has successfully used EliseAI to improve the operating efficiency of some of the smaller properties she’s marketed over the course of her career. “We had a lot of boutique properties that were small and basically a one-man show, where the general manager was the property manager, leasing manager, assistant manager and leasing agent,” she said. “In those communities, (the product) helped tremendously with the speed-to-lead by responding immediately to questions, emails, work orders and delinquency collections.”

Shepherd said she’s primarily using AI for two functions: data analysis, including market surveys and competitive intelligence, and reputation management—to see what people are saying about her communities on Reddit, Google and Facebook.

Don’t leave out the humans

AI can be a fantastic tool that can help you become more productive. But it’s not ready to be on its own yet.

“A human in the loop is absolutely still the best and preferred operating method for leveraging AI,” recommended Kyle Jones, a search manager at REACH by RentCafe. “It still has to be vetted and verified because it gets stuff wrong all the time, even basic things.”

If AI drafts an apartment description, then a human needs to verify every detail. If it creates an image, someone needs to determine whether the image accurately reflects the property. This is particularly important when it comes to Fair Housing issues, where AI-generated content can—and does—run afoul of the law. That’s why Gustafson doesn’t believe in using AI for social media posts, because it “was producing content and creating images that would violate Fair Housing rules.”

Companies should limit their employees’ access to AI platforms, particularly platforms where they can upload company data. “If you are uploading data into free versions of ChatGPT or Claude, you’re handing that information over to those companies,” commented Jones. “You don’t know what these companies are going to do with that data, so it’s important to understand whether your data is protected or not.”

But which AI platform is best?

There are numerous AI platforms to choose from: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and more. But experts say there’s no single best platform. Many people start with ChatGPT, but Jonathan Starzyk, director of marketing for Bonaventure, shared that he prefers Claude. “As a firm, we’re all-in on Claude,” he said. “Every person at the company uses it.”

Starzyk prefers Claude because it gives him helpful pushback, rather than just agreeing with him. “It gives me thoughtful output that I consider to be well-rounded.”

For graphics, many apartment marketers use ChatGPT, especially for social media posts. But some executives note that the output often looks similar. “With social media, you want to stop people from scrolling, so I wish people would stop using ChatGPT to create graphics,” Shepherd said. “They all look the same.” That’s why some marketers are gravitating toward other platforms for graphics, such as Claude and Adobe Firefly.

Thompson noted that user preferences, and the products themselves, are evolving so quickly that users who prefer a certain platform today will likely not be using it in six months.

The true cost of AI: What to expect

The true cost of AI far exceeds the monthly subscription costs. There are integration costs—Shepherd said that the implementation of EliseAI involved 32 staff members over a two-and-a-half-week period a few years ago.

A human in the loop is absolutely still the best and preferred operating method for leveraging AI.

—Kyle Jones, Search Manager, REACH by RentCafe

There are also costs involved with data preparation (AI is only as useful as the information it receives) and the cost of human oversight—someone to fact-check the AI’s output, correct errors, update property information and monitor compliance.

Jones explained that there’s a societal cost to AI as well: the hidden environmental expense of AI data centers, which can strain power grids, deplete the water supply and pollute the air around them.

So, while AI makes humans far more effective—Thompson calls it “expanding your job description”—the irony is that humans remain integral to the process and are more, not less, important in managing its role. Not only are humans needed to train and oversee the AI but we also need to set clear rules about what AI is allowed to do and not to do, and, of course, conduct tests to confirm that the investment of time and money is actually yielding the results we want.

Read the October 2026 issue of MHN.