Using AI to Enhance the Renter Journey

Multifamily teams know their customer service efforts are working well when a happy resident stops by the office to say “thank you.” If they bring homemade cookies for Max the digital agent, that’s a sign that AI is working even better than expected.

“When that happened at our community, it was lovely. It made our day. It’s clear that Max is an AI tool, but his conversations go so well. People get involved with Max and they leave great reviews. That’s how good this can be,” said Jamie Gorski, founder of Gorski Consulting Group during a presentation about the benefits of AI with Kate Good, senior vice president at Hunington Properties at NAHB’s International Builders’ Show in Las Vegas.

Delivering an exceptional customer journey at all stages is essential to standing out and driving multifamily investor success. AI is quickly becoming an essential part of the mix with powerful tools like predictive AI to analyze data to anticipate future outcomes or trends; limited memory AI to store knowledge so chatbots can learn from it to perform new tasks; natural language processing, which enables virtual assistants to understand, interpret and generate human language; and generative AI to create new content like text, images, music or videos, based on patterns learned from existing data. 

AI can help in the beginning when the prospect is first looking at the community—and then when they’re in the leasing process and when they’re a resident. “Even when they leave the community, there’s so much we can do with AI (to understand why they left). This is one of the most exciting times in our industry, because I think AI will provide a better customer and associate experience, and we will do better financially,” said Gorski.

Getting to leads faster

It’s no secret that 34 percent of all leads come in after hours or on the weekend. “I know you’d rather have a leasing agent 24/7; you’d rather always have that human touch,” said Good. However, prospects expect 24/7 service, because that’s the type of experience they get elsewhere. When your team isn’t available after hours, AI can help. And it also can attend to the calls and leads that go unanswered when the team is out of office touring an apartment or handling a resident. AI can speak any language and can even switch back and forth effortlessly to accommodate the prospect.

“This is all about speed to the lead,” added Good. “Slow response comes at a high cost. If you respond within minutes, you have as much as a 65 percent chance that that person is going to respond back—and that’s when the volley begins. It goes back and forth at that point, but you’ve got to hook them right away. If you don’t, they may not come back in your direction to book that tour.”

AI can respond much faster than a human and it can personalize. It sends back information that’s going to be relevant to what a particular customer is looking for. It also learns which channels a community’s prospects use and it reacts and responds across all of them. “By the way, text messaging is the preferred way that customers would like to interact with us,” said Gorski. “So if you don’t use text messaging today, I would highly suggest that that becomes part of your channels.”

Beyond leasing

Gorski also suggested that operators have an AI-first mindset. “Look at every part of your business … Leasing is a great place to start, but think about all the other ways that you can use this. AI will help you scale, and you want to make sure that the AI tools you choose will scale as well. Choose something that’s going to grow as your business grows too,” added Gorski.

Operators can use AI for move-ins, rent payments, renewal reminders, maintenance requests, resident surveys and more. “I was just attending an AI conference and they suggested that you brand your main AI that delivers wonderful news or helps you with leasing as one person,” noted Good. Then, another AI persona with a different name can do delinquencies. AI doesn’t have emotion, so it’s also super effective for renewal communications.

Hunington recently built a community with a bowling alley, yoga rooms, coworking stations, a sky lounge and podcast studio. “That’s a lot of scheduling,” said Good. “The AI tool does something pretty brilliant. We enabled it to route a message to our housekeeper, giving them a one- to two-hour heads-up that that room is going to be used by one of our customers. So the housekeeper then knows to go in and freshen up, make sure nothing was left behind and it’s ready for the next customer. This all happens very seamlessly, and we believe it makes us more efficient.”

Analyzing and predicting

AI can also enable phenomenal preventive maintenance by predicting ahead of time whether heating or air conditioning units will need to be replaced. The work can be done off-season for a better customer experience. Or, when a resident emails a service request, the AI tool drops it in the property management software and already starts that process. Also, AI can deescalate situations and help with nonemergency calls on weekends and after hours by providing self-help videos and instructions for simple fixes like how to turn off the water, how to locate the fuse box or how to reset the garbage disposal.

“There are so many things we can learn from our customers. With AI, we can more easily look at the data that we’ve gathered during their stay with us, and those insights can predict traffic trends, it can help with the marketing spend, predict move-outs, non-renewals and more,” said Gorski.

When AI indicates that a customer is likely to leave, the team has a heads-up to reach out to find out what’s going on—or more easily re-rent that apartment and minimize vacancy loss. “There’s a lot that can be done with data that’s predictive,” Gorski added. “It’s almost like having your own AI data scientist.”

The timing couldn’t be better. Insurance costs, property taxes and staffing expenses are all going up; meanwhile, rents aren’t going as high as they were. AI is already helping any companies operate better, serve residents better and handling busy work so associates can have more impact in their positions.