AI has the potential to reshape many aspects of multifamily operations, from engaging with prospects to automating employee workflows to even identifying trends in maintenance issues. But when evaluating how to implement the technology in existing communities, it’s crucial to look beyond vendor hype, and instead carefully find the best applications for AI in certain scenarios.
The above is how to best realize the benefits of AI in multifamily, according to panelists at an October 21 Multi-Housing News webinar moderated by Multi-Housing News Editorial Director Suzann Silverman. industry experts described their approach to deploying AI in their communities and speculated how the next steps of the AI revolution could change multifamily housing.
The “multi-layer cake” strategy
Pratik Dhebri, vice president of product management & head of digital product at AvalonBay Communities, described in the webinar a multi-faceted approach for defining an AI strategy that he compared to a “multi-layer cake.”
“The top layer of the cake, which is the icing, is: Are you able to engage with your customers meaningfully in a timely fashion?” Dhebri asked.
Dhebri described how his firm uses a tool called Sydney to handle 85 percent of prospect queries. Sydney answers routine questions, such as if a community allows pets or how close a property is to public transit.
This is an early example of agentic AI, a type of the tech that mostly acts independent of human input, which more and more firms are adopting to communicate with prospects and free up leasing agents.
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The next layer of the cake, Dhebri said, is enabling employees to be more productive. This could include using a generative AI tool like Microsoft CoPilot or ChatGPT to handle certain tasks, but an even more powerful example is automating a complete end-to-end business practice involving multiple employees.
This is followed by using AI to assist executives and managers with making business decisions, such as picking specific sites to invest in or determining the makeup of floor plans for a community.
Finally, the base of the cake is ensuring that a firm has quality data that is centralized, according to Dhebri. “At AvalonBay what we have done is we have tried to build single source of truth systems, so we know everything about a customer in one single place, we know everything about our inventory or assets in one single place.”
Strategic deployments
Cindy Clare, COO at Bell Partners, noted how some companies may be tempted to quickly start using AI tools, without thinking deeply about how best to use them.
“Don’t put AI in to put AI in,” Clare advised. “Look for problems you need to solve.”
Examples of good targets include processes that “don’t work well because they’re handed off to four or five different people,” Clare added.
One key to effectively choosing AI tools is to involve all those who will use them – whether they are tenants or employees – in the process, said Tim Kramer, vice president and director of operations for Draper and Kramer. This helps to make sure that the tool is solving a real workflow issue, rather than just changing things unnecessarily.
“There are a lot of solutions out there in search of problems,” Kramer quipped. “So you want to make sure that they’re involved very early on in the implementation process and going in a direction that will be meaningful.”
Arjun Rao, vice president at Yardi, said he believes the multifamily sector is better suited than other industries to see through hype and make informed decisions.
“What I like about real estate companies is it’s a pragmatic point of view,” Rao noted. “Generally, people want the ROI. They’re not just sort of chasing things. They have to be grounded in what’s providing value to (their) customers.”
Where are we headed?
The advancement of AI in leasing and operations may leave some worrying: What about the human touch?
It will not go away, according to Clare, who reasoned that the best approach is to “meet our customers where they want to be met.” If a prospect wants to work with a human to go through the leasing process, they should be able to, just as someone who wants a more streamlined, interaction-free process should have that opportunity as well.
Aaron Bracken, vice president of technology strategy at Real Property Management, commented that while there should always be a an “off-ramp” for a customer to speak with a human, the goal should be to make the automated experience as attractive as possible.
“If that experience is good – if that experience is better than what they’ve had in the past – they will adopt it and they will appreciate it,” Bracken concluded.
