The Truth About AI in Property Management (From Someone Who’s Actually Using It)

All right, let's talk about AI. And I've kind of avoided talking about this for a while because there's so much noise around AI and everyone seems to have an opinion. And I don't like talking about things I don't really know about or have experience with. But I think I've gathered enough of my thoughts here that I want to jump into some of my feelings and thoughts and observations about property management and AI. So the first thing is, if you're not running a property management company, I don't know that I really care to hear from you on what you think property managers should be doing with AI in their business. It's not intended as a slam or a dunk on somebody specific. It's just that from the perspective of someone who's running a property management business day to day, it can come off as a little tone deaf. And so my goal today is to speak directly from my own experiences running a management company about my perceptions of where we are with AI today And bear in mind, ChatGPT came out, I think, 3 years ago now. So it's been a while. I'm going to talk through how we're actually using it in my business and where we're actually not using it and kind of where I think we're headed here. So the first thing is, as a property management owner or operator, you need to focus on real-world problems. There's a lot of, we could do this and we could do that. And what about this? Kind of a shiny object thing that goes on with AI. It really lends itself to that kind of speculation, and I need to encourage you as an owner-operator, focus on the actual problems that you're experiencing right now and how to solve them. If that includes AI, great. If it doesn't, don't worry about it. Just focus on solving the issue. And this is something I have to keep coming back to and coming back to in my own company is there's only ever one constraint in a business. There's only ever one bottleneck. That's preventing you from hitting your growth goal or your profitability goal or whatever your goal is for the business, whatever you're trying to do more of, there exists one and only one thing that's preventing that from happening right now. It might be lead flow. It might be your, your closing rate. It might be your operations. It might be your customer support or your churn. But what you really need to figure out before you just start jumping around from tool to tool, whether they have AI or not, is What is the current constraint and how can I solve for that? There's a whole body of literature around this. I just recorded a podcast on my other show called Lazy Leverage, all about this topic if you want to learn more. But if you are working on anything other than your business's current constraint, you are wasting time. Picture a 6-lane highway that necks down to a toll booth that only has 1 lane. If you are working on improving and expanding the lanes on the highway, that is not going to increase the throughput of that highway. What you need to focus on is the toll booth because there's only one lane. So that's the analogy for what I mean by the theory of constraints or working on the current constraint or bottleneck in your business. If there are AI tools that are going to help you unlock that bottleneck, you should definitely look into those and you should experiment and play around with the solutions that are out there. But I wouldn't necessarily default to assuming that AI is going to solve that problem for you better than a non-AI solution. In fact, businesses are often making the mistake of solving process problems or even policy problems with technology. And that technology may include AI, but if you don't have a good process, the best AI solution in the world is not going to solve a thing for you. And your process really is informed by your company's policies. So you really need to start a click or two above what's actually happening day to day in your business and understand What's the problem we're trying to solve here? What are the policies that I'm going to put in place for our team and for our company and for our tools that are going to define the boundaries of how we can solve it? An example of a policy might be, we get back to every customer within 2 business hours, right? That's a policy. If your policy is we get back to every customer within 5 minutes, I don't know that any technology is going to solve that for you. You have a policy problem. So once you've got the policy defined, now you can pull in process. And that's a plain English description of how are we solving this? How do we solve it? What are the steps? What are the specifics? And once you have that clearly defined in plain English, just in a Word document or something, now you can pull tools in and look at the world of point solutions, built-in tools to your property management software, startups, AI tools, and everything else to figure out what's the best way to implement the process that aligns with our policy. Okay. So let's kind of get down to brass tacks. I want to talk about where and how we're using AI in my management company, because I know a lot of people ask me about this. So I've just kind of put together a list and I'll go through sort of in random order where and how we're using AI. And these are the tools and technologies that I have found to be worth us messing with. So the first one is a tool called RentEngine. They have an AI product built in. So RentEngine helps you respond to incoming tenant leads. It helps you schedule showings and just deal with everything having to do with your, your rental listings and your showings and your inquiries. They have a new, newer AI tool that basically responds to the incoming requests for you using kind of a predetermined set of rules and guidelines. They've really been working on this product and it's gotten phenomenal. There's a phone component and then there's a text message component. I think they're working on email, but I've been very impressed. I jump in there from time to time. I look at what the AI is responding to and how it's responding to the incoming requests and inquiries. And the nice thing is this tool can respond 24/7. So even when your team isn't working, and RentEngine actually just released some research showing that something like 40% of tenant leads come in after hours. So their AI can obviously respond to that 24/7, which is a huge advantage. Next one is ChatGPT. That's obvious. I think almost everyone is using ChatGPT at this point. I see a lot of people using it for emails. I wanna talk about that in a second, but I wanna mention where I'm using ChatGPT for things other than just, hey, rewrite this email to an owner for me. So I use it for research quite a bit. They have some newer modes now that are getting really good at going out onto the web and researching things for you. So any type of a project or a question that you have where you're like, man, I really wish I had like a team of researchers to answer this question for me. Try popping that in ChatGPT, you might be surprised. The other thing I really like using it for is data analysis. Anytime I have a bunch of data from, you know, whether it's a rent roll or my owner leads dumped outta my CRM, or I have an Airtable where I just did some analysis on our customer average lifetimes, anything like that, I pop it in ChatGPT and I say, hey, I'm trying to do some analysis on this data. You can even just ask it something like, take a look at the data and gimme 5 interesting conclusions I might not have thought of. I really like doing that because I may go in there with an idea of how I want to slice and dice the data, but often there's some interesting angles and perspectives I wouldn't have thought of that ChatGPT is able to surface. We also use Riverside. So Riverside is what I'm recording this in right now. That's actually a podcast platform. It's where I record all the episodes of my podcast as well. They have a really great AI tool that's used for creating and editing shorts. And captioning and transcriptions. And if you're watching the Shorts that I produce, most of those are coming out of Riverside's AI tool for creating Shorts. So it's pretty cool. So we're on Buildium and we are using an AI bill scanning tool, and that's been really interesting. You basically shove a bunch of bills at it, identify the vendor, identify the dollar amount, identify the description, and then it just automatically appears in your list of bills. I mean, that, that's a game changer. We used to spend hundreds of hours a month scanning and entering bills into Buildium. So that technology is fairly proven and is going to help you out there. Of course, we're using the meeting recording tools, whether it's Fathom, there's a bunch of these, but have these running in your Zooms or your Google Meets. And I find that for me, I don't use them that much, but when I do need them, I really need them. And I'm really thankful that I had that recording, you know, running in the background all the time. Some more specifics here. We use PropertyMeld to handle all of our maintenance coordination and scheduling. And their Max AI has gotten really good. It is handling a lot of the incoming triage and initial diagnosis for us. And it's making sure that when we do sit down and look at a maintenance request from a resident, we have all the information we need to make a decision on whether we need to send a vendor or not, or what exactly is happening at the property. Max does a great job of pulling out from the resident all of the information. How many of you have gotten a maintenance request that's like, Sink doesn't work. You're like, okay, like, is it the spigot? Is it the drain? Is it leaking? Is the hot water not working? Like what's going on here? Max, make sure that when you do get that maintenance request, you have everything you need to actually solve the problem. We're also using AI at RL for the occasional webpage or web tool design. I think we're using Lovable for that. If you go on our website and you click on the rent versus sell calculator, That was made using AI and it turned out awesome. I love playing around with Lovable and Replit for simple internal tools, not necessarily web tools, but just tools for you or your company to use internally. For example, I created one with Replit where you export your building and rent roll and then you upload it to this tool and it gives you a really cool visual analysis of things like your lease time remaining and when your lease is up for renewal, your occupancy rate, your eviction rate, your rent collection rate, basically all the data that you could get out of a rent roll, I was able to pull out and visualize in a really slick way. I think I actually made that public. I'll, I'll try and find the link if I can and include it. And the last one I'll mention as a specific is what we call PeterBot. So I took everything I've ever written and said, we loaded that into an AI. It basically takes everything, turns it into like a ChatGPT type interface. And you can go now on my website and click on PeterBot. And you can basically talk to me. There's a voice feature or there's a text feature where you can just type to it. And instead of getting generic property management advice from who knows where on the internet, you're getting advice from me and anyone I've ever had on my podcast. And we're seeing that a lot of property managers and even vendors in our space are using this on a weekly basis to get more insight or have a conversation around something that I've talked about on a podcast from 3 years ago, but you can't remember it. And It's pretty cool. And actually the, you can tweak and tune the voice design, which we did a little bit. It sounds eerily like me. So check that out if you haven't already. It's just kind of a fun thing to play with. All right, let me try and wrap up here. So I'll mention briefly a couple areas that we're specifically not using AI. The first one is we need to be really careful when we're communicating with property owners. I've seen a couple times where team members have sent out an email to a property owner that was clearly written with ChatGPT, and I mean dead giveaway. It's not that we can't use ChatGPT to help us with writing, but what our owners are expecting from us is our own opinions and perspectives on what's happening. They don't want generic advice from ChatGPT. They want to know, hey, what's your opinion on what we should do with this rent or what we should do about this tenant? That's what they're paying us for is our expertise. And so we need to be careful when we're communicating with our customers to not give them the sense that we just took their question, popped it into ChatGPT, and gave them the answer that came back. That's a horrible impression to leave with somebody who's paying you hundreds of dollars a month. So we need to be careful there. I also, like, for people who have asked me, I don't use ChatGPT to write my articles in the newsletter. Some of like the podcast summaries and stuff, yeah, we're using ChatGPT to help punch those up a little bit and give us something to start with to summarize a 60-minute podcast. That's actually pretty hard to do if you've ever tried to do it. But for that like first article that you see in the newsletter, that is me. I write those 100% every time. I can't say that I've ever used ChatGPT, not even to like tune it up. I actually just straight up freeform write that. I don't use ChatGPT to start. I don't use ChatGPT to check it. I try and keep my own personal authentic self coming through. I mean, I think that's some of what people are tuning in for with the newsletter is what, what does, what does Peter actually think about this? Not, you know, what is the generic advice that I could get anywhere? So to wrap up, if you're going to pitch an AI solution as a vendor, you just need to proceed a little carefully. And if you're a property management business owner, focus on what's the current bottleneck in my business and how can I solve that? If an AI tool is available to help you with that, great. If not, don't stress about it. Just go solve the problem. See you next time.