Industry
Multifamily
Challenge
Madison Property Management manages 2,800+ residential units in Madison, WI, including 1,000 campus-area housing for students. With a high volume of maintenance tickets across their large portfolio, inefficiencies in their process were costing their team time and money, especially as maintenance technicians were regularly dispatched on site visits that could have been avoided with clearer ticket intake or better upfront troubleshooting.
Results
With ApartmentAdvisor ASSIST, MPM improved ticket response time, reduced unnecessary site visits, and eased the administrative burden on its maintenance team. ASSIST automates resident maintenance communication through a trained AI agent, enhances tickets with important diagnostic details, and in some cases, resolves issues without the help of a team member. Within just 2 months of implementation, unnecessary site visits declined, first-time fix rates improved, and residents reported higher satisfaction.
Product
ApartmentAdvisor ASSIST for Maintenance
Background
MPM’s managed portfolio includes 2,800+ residential apartment units in Madison, WI. Their operations team includes more than a dozen property managers, a dozen in-house maintenance technicians, as well as carpenters, painters, cleaners, among other maintenance team members. We spoke with Tracy Deal, residential operations manager at MPM, to learn more about her experience with ApartmentAdvisor ASSIST.
The Challenge
For several years, Madison Property Management dealt with the same issues: maintenance tickets were being submitted after business hours, incomplete tickets that lacked necessary information were being passed along as work orders, and maintenance technicians were making unnecessary or unsuccessful site visits to units. Residents were frustrated, the maintenance team was frustrated, and management was on the hunt for a solution.
"Our management team had been really pushing for a more robust troubleshooting system," Tracy Deal, lead property representative at MPM, says. "We found that technicians were regularly showing up at jobs with incomplete information, occasionally finding out once they were already at the site that the tenants could have resolved these issues on their own and not wasted the technician's time. We'd been talking about finding a solution for years now."
They had two goals for an AI solution: to get as much relevant information to their technicians as possible so that they could be more prepared when going into a work order, and to reduce technician site visits overall by identifying cases where a tenant could resolve an issue on their own.
The Solution
Deal led the implementation of Maintenance ASSIST into MPM's operations, guiding her team through a fast rollout. Because MPM was using Rent Manager to log tickets and communicate with residents, they were able to integrate ASSIST as a seamless plug in, with no major system overhaul required. Onboarding with their dedicated ASSIST Customer Success Manager only took a few sessions, and the benefits became clear early on.
As the team began working with ASSIST, any early hesitation about AI quickly faded. Staff saw firsthand how the ASSIST AI augmented their workflows and made their jobs easier.
"The team adopted it at on property management side pretty quickly," Deal says. "Even maintenance technicians that use it have been giving us ideas on how to better configure the AI agent."
The Results
The impact of ASSIST was felt quickly. Within weeks, MPM saw fewer unnecessary dispatches, faster resolutions, and better experiences for both residents and staff.
Faster Response Times
Prior to implementing ASSIST, MPM’s average response time to incoming tickets was 2 to 3 business hours. This created communication breakdowns between their maintenance team and their residents, who often weren’t available to answer follow up questions several hours after submitting tickets. Now, ASSIST responds to residents within seconds of a ticket being submitted — and residents regularly send a thank you message, noting the quick response time.
Enhanced Ticketing
When submitting a maintenance ticket, a resident may not know all the necessary information that needs to be included. Prior to ASSIST, MPM relied on their maintenance staff to ask residents follow-up questions before creating a work order for their technicians. However, if residents weren’t available to answer more questions or send photos, incomplete work orders would be created and technicians would be dispatched without having necessary information.
ASSIST now enhances nearly all of the tickets (86%) that are submitted by residents. The AI agent asks their residents clear follow-up questions, offers easy steps they can take to help solve the issue, and instructs them to send clear photos. Technicians are armed with the information they need to complete a repair on the first site visit, and work orders are being resolved faster.
Less Maintenance Dispatches
Not all maintenance tickets require a visit from a professional — but before MPM began working with ASSIST, they were constantly dispatching their technicians to fix issues that residents could easily resolve themselves. Because tickets often lacked necessary details, technicians wasted valuable time on resolutions that were as simple as flipping a circuit breaker.
By offering clear, step-by-step instructions to residents during ticket triage, ASSIST AI has helped MPM reduce unnecessary maintenance dispatches. Now, technicians no longer need to visit a unit just to reset a garbage disposal, unclog a toilet, or flip a breaker, among other common issues. Residents are also pleased with the speed of resolution, even when they are making the fixes themselves. The median time it takes for ASSIST to resolve a ticket that does not require a technician is just over 23 minutes.
This is a real interaction between a MPM resident and ASSIST. Names have been removed for privacy.
The Future of AI & Automation at MPM
After their positive experience with ASSIST, the team at Madison is more eager than ever to incorporate AI and automation into their business.
"Tenant expectations are continuously rising," Deal says. "If we're still relying on email and one-to-two business day responses, we are lagging and we have to do more to keep up with our competitors."
Ready to get started?
