From social media to electric toothbrushes and smartphones, AI is quickly finding its way into our daily lives. Even more impressive is the way that automation and generative AI is changing the way we work and making people more productive than ever before.
Amidst these changes, you may be asking yourself: Could AI work for my property management business? The short answer is yes—but in ways that you might not expect.
From tenant management to reporting, here are some practical, real-world applications of generative AI in property management.
How AI Is (and Isn’t) Changing the Industry
Artificial intelligence isn’t new. It’s existed for decades. In fact, deep learning and machine learning algorithms started to become incorporated into technology in the 2010s and entered the cultural zeitgeist when IBM Watson defeated two human Jeopardy champions.
Generative AI is a game changer for a few key reasons. It’s accessible to everyone with a computer and internet connection. It allows you to create images, text, audio, and videos from plain language without the need for specific software or coding skills. Simply type your prompts into a chat box, and it’ll generate an answer tailored to your needs.
Generative AI is changing how property managers operate, but it’s not a magic bullet. Property managers’ core role and skill set remain the same. You’ll still need to strategize with owners and your team, give all AI-generated work a close, critical eye, lead your team effectively, nurture new leads, and provide personalized service.
While AI won’t be replacing your job anytime soon, it is making operations more efficient by automating day-to-day tasks such as communicating with tenants, filing reports, and bookkeeping. Generative AI’s output is most effective when vetted by your own business expertise. For example, AI tools can generate complex financial reports, but the operator needs to know what to ask for and how to put that data to use.
Generative AI also lacks the nuance required to help resolve the human aspects of running a property management business. While it can improve communication, it cannot replace the importance of building relationships with your tenants and owners. Additionally, it cannot effectively solve large disputes that require human empathy and context.
Practical Use Cases for AI in Property Management
Keeping these limitations in mind, let’s delve into specific use cases of AI and how it can be applied to your business today.
Improve Communication with Tenants and Property Owners
One of generative AI’s best applications is its ability to streamline communication. For example, you can utilize property management prompts to write property listing descriptions, respond to tenant inquiries, and create newsletters. Whether it’s ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Meta AI, or any other product, you can do all this without having to become an expert business writer.
Chatbots can also assist in routing messages to the appropriate individuals. Although the technology is still in its early stages of fully outsourcing communications, they can help address general inquiries from potential leads about maintenance requests for your property and tenants.
Generate More Leads Automatically
Attracting new, high-quality leads can be achieved by syndicating your listing to major listing sites. In the past, this was a manual process, but now generative AI can automatically create detailed and engaging property descriptions that you combine with other technology to upload listings all at once, eliminating the need to manage each one individually.
AI can also improve your advertising. If you are currently investing in paid ads, such as Google Ads or Instagram, generative AI can help create intuitive content and design for each ad. Major advertising platforms offer testing tools that enable you to modify your ads with the help of AI and test them against each other, eliminating the need to manually create numerous small variations.
AI tools like RealPage AI screening can also help determine which leads would be the best fit for your rental unit. With a database of over 30 million leases, the tool can help minimize risk, while remaining compliant with fair housing laws.
Keep Your Books Clean and Organized
AI can transform a business’s cash flow. Instead of hunting down late rent payments or lease renewals, AI-powered systems can help automate the most important part of your business: managing your money. AI integrated into payment platforms can automatically collect rent and send gentle reminders while processing payments and recording every transaction in your accounting system in real-time.
Many of the popular accounting software have adopted generative AI, too. For example, Xero automates data entry, bank reconciliation, spend tracking, and forecasting. They are also launching Just Ask Xero® (JAX), a generative AI assistant that provides personalized insights. Similarly, for property management businesses, Clyr® and AvidXchange® offer AI-powered AP automation solutions like invoice scanning, personalized assistants, and data capture to streamline invoice processing.
Make Better Decisions (Securely) with AI-Powered Reports
There is an abundance of data property managers gather on a regular basis, but not everyone effectively utilizes it for making business decisions. AI has the capability to merge financial data with market trends and historical performance data to identify patterns and forecast future performance without having to hire a data scientist. AI can also automatically detect errors and deduplicate data that may come from human error.
Property managers can use AI tools such as RealPage’s® Market Analytics to produce customized reports tailored to each stakeholder’s unique needs. For instance, investors might require comprehensive summaries of overall portfolio performance to assess returns and trends, while property owners may seek detailed financial breakdowns for specific periods to track their property’s profitability and operational efficiency. AI-powered reporting provides a level of customization that enhances transparency and communication, fostering stronger relationships with stakeholders and driving growth.
Tools such as Celeri® can also help you grow your business more confidently by automatically detecting falsified income documents and fraudulent documents. Their AI-powered detection engine helps pinpoint any anomalies, which is particularly powerful when about 50 percent of evictions stem from applicants who falsify their proof of income.
AI Tools That Property Managers Should Know
There are several AI services that are quickly building popularity for business operations. Here’s an overview of several effective options, starting with more general tools you probably already know, then moving into software with capabilities that are more specifically tailored to property management.
Keep in mind that these are just some of the services out there. New tools are constantly being launched and refined, so it’s always recommended to do your own research to find the right fit.
ChatGPT: Popular and Accessible Capabilities
OpenAI’s ChatGPT is the most popular generative AI tool in the world, powered by an advanced language model that can help generate images, engage in conversations, provide recommendations, and even code on its own. Open AI reports that it’s used by more than 92 percent of Fortune 500 companies today.
ChatGPT currently runs on GPT-4, which is the most advanced AI model on the market right now, making it faster and more accurate than its competitors. Additionally, its open API enables easy integration with various tech tools, which explains why it receives 3.0 billion monthly website visits.
Property managers can use these AI prompts to craft property descriptions for listings, write automated scripts to communicate with tenants and property owners, build checklists, and generate applications.
Microsoft Copilot: AI for Familiar Business Software
If you are currently using Microsoft software, Copilot seamlessly integrates with all of its products, particularly Microsoft Office. It utilizes Microsoft Graph, which retrieves the data you are working with on Excel Sheets or PowerPoint to aid your workflow. Since it can look at other files you have saved in Microsoft OneDrive, Copilot makes it easier to summarize, find key details, and create new documents that match the style of the original. Plus, it keeps everything secure, so your private information stays safe. Unlike ChatGPT, which uses what you enter to train its AI, Copilot keeps your sensitive info private.
Property managers using Microsoft software already can use Copilot to analyze spreadsheet data, edit copy in presentations for board meetings, and summarize key details of contracts.
Meta AI: Social Media Marketing Tools
Meta AI is an advanced machine learning algorithm from Facebook’s parent company, Meta, that focuses on social media and advertising. Its current AI offerings help property managers tweak their social media copy, summarize notes in group chats, and improve their digital advertising campaigns. They are slowly rolling out generative AI-powered features such as generating backgrounds, expanding images, and automatically generating multiple versions of ad copy to test.
Buildium: Integrated AI and Automation Tools Built for Property Managers
Buildium has AI and automation baked into existing tools to help level up your day-to-day operations, so you can utilize AI without leaving the platform. For example, Buildium’s Enhanced Tenant Screening combines rental applications with RealPage’s vast database of rental history to match tenants with their rental history. To take things even further, Buildium also offers seamless integrations through its partner Marketplace, with software partners that utilize AI, including features like automated showings, lead generation, chatbots, and more. Many of these, we’ve already mentioned earlier, including:
- AvidXChange: AP automation tools powered by AI including personalized assistants
- Celeri: AI-powered fraud detection engine that identifies falsified income documents
- Clyr: AI-driven expense management and AP automation platform
AI in Property Management: Emerging Trends to Watch
The pandemic accelerated technology adoption for property businesses, with 95 percent of rental owners comfortable doing business online with their property managers. While most of the adopted technology revolves around payments, document signing, and communication, AI will continue to play a larger role in powering each of these tasks in more subtle ways.
For instance, AI can automatically send personalized messages for payment reminders. AI-generated prompts and chatbots can streamline communication, and AI can manage bookkeeping and automatically reconcile bank accounts.
Here are a few other emerging trends to look out for.
Fully Automated Assistants
AI-powered virtual assistants and chatbots are assisting property managers in maintaining prompt and consistent communication. The existing technology is capable of routing messages and requests more quickly and generating automatic responses to queries.
However, human input is still necessary to operate these systems. We can anticipate fully automated systems in the near future that can address the individual needs of each tenant, such as managing maintenance requests and making payments autonomously.
Portfolio Optimization
Property managers, owners, and investors aim to grow their properties efficiently using the best available technology to make sense of the abundance of data available to them. We predict AI will be able to analyze past performance data, market trends, risk profiles, and industry benchmarks to assess the performance of each property they own or manage. This will aid in risk management and enable stakeholders to be more adaptable and flexible in adjusting their portfolios, thus increasing their competitiveness in the market.
Getting the Most Long-Term Value Out of AI in Property Management
There’s so much potential for AI to continue to impact the property management business. From streamlining communication to fully automating tedious tasks that used to take days to complete, AI offers practical solutions to empower teams to do more with less. The end result is a better tenant experience, more efficient property management, and more opportunities to grow the business.
As AI evolves, so will the tools that make property managers more effective. While there may be a learning curve, purpose-built solutions such as Buildium, with integrated AI features and partner solutions, make it easier for property managers to plug the technology into their existing workflows.
The good news is that it’s easy to get started. With Buildium’s free, 14-day trial, you can get an idea of how the right technology can help you grow your property business without even having to put your credit card down.
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