The Pros And Cons Of Artificial Intelligence In Property Management

Originally Published in Forbes on May 23rd, 2024

by David Crown

I was in a meeting with our team leaders this week when someone mentioned that we were bringing back an old weekly newsletter that promotes and celebrates one employee whose work stood out during the week. The last author of the newsletter was one of my sons, who wrote up funny, unique and team-oriented newsletters that the staff always enjoyed getting on a Friday afternoon. When I asked who was going to be taking up the newsletter next, the answer wasn’t an employee at all but instead ChatGPT. At first I was skeptical. These were quirky and unique emails built around my son’s specific sense of humor, not something an algorithm could just spit out. Then I read the newsletter written by ChatGPT …

Every day, artificial intelligence (AI) is evolving and inventing incredible new tools and processes to improve businesses. Some of these tools will certainly define the future leaders in each space, while others will never be more than false promises and wasted spend. In property management, so much of our service is dependent on firm protocols and procedures, and we’re constantly looking for ways to increase efficiency without losing the human touch that is at the core of our client and tenant relationships.

If you search for content on the future of AI in real estate or property management, you’ll likely get plenty of articles promising all the great things AI is going to accomplish—but what you won’t likely get is a list of specific tools you can actually use. Most will start with a ChatGPT anecdote (like I just did) and then get into more vague areas of the business that could be improved but fail to mention any concrete examples of tools the authors have successfully implemented into their day-to-day business.

I wanted to write about a few experiences we’ve had experimenting with AI in our business so that other managers can learn how to identify and test these new tools in a way that maximizes their success rate and minimizes dumping time and money into dead ends.

Remember That Integration Is Key

Two years ago, we experimented with an AI phone system that promised several advanced improvements to our phone protocols that would improve efficiency and response time. The product touted the ability to track/measure the emotions of an active call to evaluate customer service experience, transcribe the calls for review and even automate the appropriate action in the system based on the content of the message without the coordinator needing to set things in motion.

In a vacuum, the system worked great. We saw the demonstration of the product’s usefulness and how it could free up time for our coordinators to do more high-value work and less logistical or administrative tasks.

The next step was integrating it into our system and testing it out with a client. We took the time to integrate it into our system and test it with one of our biggest and friendliest clients—and the results were a complete let-down. Basic connections weren’t made, inappropriate actions were taken and small nuances that a human coordinator would catch were just missed.

Experimenting with new protocols like these is essential to being on the cutting edge of business, but if you have to alter the majority of your systems and protocols just on the off chance of improving by a small margin in a certain category, the risk just may not be worth the reward.

Replace Tasks, Not Communication

While the phone monitoring system didn’t work out, it did force us to reevaluate protocols with our system, and we’ve improved since. Another area that we wanted to improve was the scheduling of maintenance repairs.

Maintenance coordinators will know that it takes a great deal of time to coordinate between vendors and tenants, hashing out schedules and matching calendars. We’ve recently started to implement a new AI tool that automates this game of calendar ping-pong, and so far the results have been incredibly promising.

Unlike the system from years back, this product is completely compatible with our management software and has already been tested on hundreds of thousands of doors in other property management portfolios across the country. As you look to automate your own processes, look for tools that will work with your existing systems with proven success in the industry.

We believe once the application is fully integrated across the entire portfolio, experienced coordinators will spend less of their time matching up vendor and tenant calendars via text or email, often in the middle of busy work days where one party or another can take hours to respond.

Any tool you adopt should save employees time and allow them to do deeper, more specialized work, such as analyzing tenant survey responses, improving work order protocols and evaluating technician performance.

Always Be Testing

As your business continues to experiment with new tools like these, you can not only find ways to streamline protocols but also get better at evaluating these new tools and quickly separating the promising from the fool’s gold. Nothing can replace the human touch to customer service, but ironically enough, these new AI tools can sometimes be the very key to freeing up your staff’s time to spend on higher levels of customer and client care.