The Challenge
When Matteo first connected with ApartmentAdvisor, he was focused on two priorities: delivering a great experience for his residents and streamlining operations so he could spend more time growing the business. However, his team is small: He operates the portfolio with the help of one property manager and one full-time maintenance technician. When tasked with managing a Class A experience across 6 buildings, the team sometimes felt stretched thin.
For example, the maintenance technician is responsible for turning over units, monitoring routine tasks, resolving low- and high-priority maintenance requests (often within a day of ticket submission), and communicating with tenants about the status of their requests.
“Say our maintenance technician receives a non-urgent maintenance request about a broken garbage disposal. Actually fixing that disposal will only take six or seven minutes, but the round trip to communicate entry with tenants, get to that unit, find parking, fix the disposal, and then return to the office may take up to an hour,” Matteo says. “So, any problems that we can solve without him having to make the trip to a unit will mean that he can be more efficient.”
The Solution
Matteo is tech savvy with a mind towards constant innovation in his own business, so he was immediately intrigued by ApartmentAdvisor Assist’s AI-native approach to property management software — especially knowing that the AI could be trained on his own data to improve his resident communications and maintenance workflows.
His office was already using Buildium to log tickets and communicate with residents, and he was able to easily integrate Assist “side car” with Buildium. The benefits of using the Resident AI agent in resident communications were apparent immediately.
The Results
Matteo saw firsthand how an immediate AI response can help a resident avoid disaster in their unit.
One of the first requests a resident submitted after onboarding described a clogged toilet overflowing in their unit. Immediately, the Resident AI agent instructed them to shut the water off. Once the water valve was turned off, the agent asked the residents if they had a plunger that they could use to unclog the toilet. Within 10 minutes, the residents messaged the Resident AI agent to let it know that a maintenance technician did not need to come and that they had solved the problem.
We have found that tenants are most likely to troubleshoot and solve their maintenance problems when they put the request in. That is where we see the huge benefit of AI. The bot reaches out immediately, gets additional info and provides troubleshooting. If you wait 30 minutes to start asking them questions about the issue, they may not even respond.
“If I had one of those resolutions happen once every three months, I'd say it's worth whatever I'm paying for it.”
