Part 10: AI in your industry, and on the floor

Where does AI help a real estate or property business?

Written lesson · about 3 minutes to read

The short answer

AI helps a property business with the queue and the calendar: maintenance requests triaged by urgency, lease dates pulled out and watched, and tenant and buyer questions answered from the record. The manager keeps the disputes, the notices and every decision about a tenancy.

Three things to remember

01Read each maintenance message on arrival, sort it by urgency, and send emergencies to a person at once.
02Lease dates read into the system once, with reminders set ahead of the notice period, stop missed renewals.
03Notices, disputes and decisions about a tenancy stay with the manager, under fair housing rules.

Maintenance, triaged

The manager's inbox at eight in the morning has dozens of messages, and one is water coming through a ceiling. An AI reads each message, whatever channel it came by, identifies the unit, classifies the issue (plumbing, electrical, appliance, access, noise) and judges urgency by rules you set. Water, gas, no heat and lockouts go to the top and to a person at once.

Everything else becomes a work order with the tenant's photo attached, ready to assign, and the tenant gets a reply within minutes with a reference and a rough time. The manager chooses the contractor, and notices when a dripping tap is the third in that building this month, which is a different problem. Test the emergency route first, at night, with a real phone.

Leases and dates

A portfolio is a pile of leases with dates hidden in them: renewal windows, notice periods, rent reviews and options to end early. The date nobody saw is the one that costs a month's rent. An AI reads each lease once, pulls out the term, rent, review dates and notice periods with the page cited, and sets each reminder for the start of the notice period, not the day itself.

When a reminder fires, the renewal offer or rent increase notice is drafted from the lease and your template, with the right figures. The manager reads it against the lease page and sends it. A notice has legal effect, so an unusual clause, or a negotiated lease that does not match the template, gets read by a person.

Questions, answered

Is the unit still available, when is rent due, how do I pay, when do the bins go. These are answered from the listing, the lease and the building notes, at any hour, by email or text, with a viewing booked into the calendar. An enquiry that waits until nine the next morning has often booked a viewing elsewhere. Owners' statements can be drafted from the ledger for the manager to review.

The tool is told what always goes to the manager: a complaint, a dispute about money, a request to leave early or change the lease, and anything that could become a legal matter. It hands over on those and says so. Read a sample of its conversations each month for the ones it should have handed over.

What stays with the manager

A manager's value is judgement about people and buildings: the tenant in arrears who has just lost a job, the neighbour dispute, the decision to serve notice, the owner who wants something the law does not allow. The tool takes the sorting, logging, reminding and drafting. The manager sends, and reads what it drafted first.

Fair housing rules apply to anything that answers or screens tenants or buyers. So how you reply to enquiries, and who is offered a tenancy, must be decided by a person, in writing, before any tool is switched on. Rules differ by state and city, so check with a lawyer for your own case.

Where to start this week

Start with the queue. Count this week's maintenance messages and how long each waited to be read, and write down how an emergency reaches someone at night. Give a tool read access first, with a person issuing every work order.

Then get your lease dates out of paper and one person's memory and into the system, which is the real project. Write down the answers to the ten questions your office hears most, since the tool can only read what exists.

Next lessonWhere does AI help a retail or e-commerce business?

More in part 10

Next step

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