NEW ORLEANS – As apartment operators have encouraged their employees to experiment with artificial intelligence, there have been a lot of wins. And some losses.
For instance, Anne Hollander, vice president of AI and innovation at WinnCompanies, told the attendees at the National Apartment Association’s Apartmentalize conference in New Orleans on June 17 that she is aware of an instance where an employee at one company put a property’s financial information into the free version of ChatGPT.
“We had a case a few years ago now where a lender was basically using ChatGPT, kind of like a Google search, and looking down the list of assets that they had to see if there was any information that they found,” Hollander said. “One of the assets popped up a rent roll, an operating statement, a trial balance – all coming back out to this person — that was accurate based on the data that they were looking at.”
Not only did the property’s lender find that asset’s private information in ChatGPT, but they discovered that some of the data wasn’t matching the reporting they was getting from the property management firm, according to Hollander.
And that was a problem. “What do you think happened with that property manager,” Hollander said. “That was probably not a fun phone call [with the lender].”
But despite some instances of employees oversharing information with AI platforms, the panelists in multiple Apartmentalize sessions pointed to strong practical reasons to incorporate the technology. Here are three ways multifamily firms are incorporating it into their daily and weekly workflows.
Providing weekly reports
Around 2023 or 2024, property management was hitting an inflection point with teams getting leaner and clients wanting more, Jessica Dakin, vice president of performance strategy at BH Management, said at Apartmentalize.
“Our clients were asking for more reporting faster, more data faster, more insights faster,” Dakin said. “What are you going to do about the evolving industry? And we knew we had to pull [up] our sleeves and do something about it.”
BH Management began putting together a team to understand AI. “There's a big pattern across the industry, or across all industries, around forming some sort of specialty groups around AI that help make decisions and help to brainstorm the idea of what's possible,” Dakin said.
The company’s focus on looking for solutions through AI helped lead to, among other things, a weekly report with actionable data that generates insights for each property in its national portfolio.
The report answers questions about who is winning and losing in a particular market and informs decisions for BH Management associates. “They know exactly where their focus should be and they know exactly what changed week over week,” Dakin said.
Writing letters to residents
Not every firm has the scale to use AI to produce weekly, in-depth reports for each property. But there are still ways onsite teams can incorporate it into their daily workflow to become more efficient.
For some companies, a simple entry point has been using AI to help write resident letters. WinnCompanies has a company-licensed tool that can make all of the firm’s templates available and pull policies and procedures directly into letters.
“When I hit enter, it's going to think a little bit when you pull that information together and, in a matter of a few seconds, generate back out what that letter should be from there,” Hollander said.
WinnCompanies’ AI system will ask the user whether the letter should be an email, a printed document, posted in the resident portal or used in some other way. Employees can then edit in real time, if needed.
“I can like the response if it's great, I can copy it directly and I can even say, ’Nope, it's not good enough for me,’” Hollander said.
Preparing for difficult discussions
When there are issues around things like noise violations and sensitive matters, operators often need to have in-person, sometimes uncomfortable, discussions with residents.
When she worked onsite years ago, Crystal O'Brien, vice president of human resources at WinnCompanies, spent hours trying to figure out what she was going to say to a resident who viewed swimwear as optional at the community pool.
If the conversation would have happened today, O’Brien would have gone to AI to prepare and generate the right tone. “If I would have had AI, it would have gotten so much faster,” O’Brien said at Apartmentalize.
Artificial intelligence can also help with difficult discussions with team members as well, according to O’Brien.
“I can tell it that I’m having a difficult conversation with this team member, help draft, help me with some talking points, and it will do the same sort of thing,” O’Brien said.
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