Artificial intelligence may still sound futuristic, but in reality, it’s all around us. From the controversial testing of self-driving cars to Google AI’s algorithms, which constantly self-evaluate and improve search results, we interact with the technology every day. And while AI is poised to make a splash in transportation, medicine, manufacturing, and consumer tech in coming years, it also has the potential to disrupt the apartment leasing industry.
Here are five ways artificial intelligence could transform your properties in the future:
1. Maintenance
Imagine never having to call Maintenance in the middle of the night again. Artificial intelligence can read environmental cues to suggest preventive maintenance and predict equipment failures. This means you won’t have to keep excess parts on hand in order to fix problems quickly or inconvenience tenants while waiting for parts to be delivered.
2. Energy Efficiency
Similar to automated thermostats that read when individual users are home and adjust temperatures internally, AI systems take it several steps further by tracking and analyzing human presence and movement. Currently in use in some commercial buildings, these systems can take into account occupancy, people’s locations in the building, weather, and time of day to make the most efficient use of energy resources.
3. Property Management
With artificial intelligence, residents may never have to fill out a Web form, call, or come into a leasing office again to report issues, manage energy billing, or pay rent. AI is making these tasks possible for residents to check off their to-do lists from the comfort of their apartment homes using chatbots and devices like Amazon Alexa and Google Home.
4. Advertising and Marketing
Think your marketing efforts and online ads are targeted now? Just wait until artificial intelligence gets involved. Rather than displaying ads for wide groups of people based on demographics or search histories, artificial intelligence can capture and analyze the demographics and IP addresses of people who click on real estate ads and then serve up those same ads to individuals most like them—and, therefore, most likely to also click.
5. Answering Calls and Setting Appointments
With all the technology available today, prospective tenants are still more likely to call your property (75%) versus email (23%) or text (2%) for information, according to a sample of inbound communications from LeaseHawk CRM clients in 2017. Artificial intelligence could answer these calls for you. Google recently demoed what the company is calling an “experiment” in artificial intelligence technology called Duplex, a computerized phone assistant that sounds eerily human.
Never Miss Another Call
One leading company, LeaseHawk, offers a service inspired by artificial intelligence that provides many of the same benefits as AI. ACE (Answer Calls Every time), the multifamily industry’s first conversational automated assistant, takes calls, answers questions, and collects guest card information when leasing agents aren’t available to answer the phone. It can even convert inbound calls to appointments.
City Club Apartments, which uses ACE at 17 properties, has found the technology to be a good investment. In the first half of 2018, ACE answered 1,427 calls from prospects that would have otherwise been missed. Of those calls, it set 640 appointments, a 44.8% conversion rate.
“ACE has been a valuable contribution to our business because it allows us to be available to prospects 24/7 … whether it’s 2 a.m. or 3 p.m. when the office is tied up with a resident or tour,” says Cherise Soulliere, director of organization development for City Club Apartments. “This allows us to take a breath and not stress that we’re missing phone calls, because we can be assured the system picks up anything we can’t take care of right away. It’s particularly beneficial because we have a large market coming from out of the country, and having ACE accommodates any time zone.”
To watch a video about how ACE works, visit leasehawk.com/products#ACE.
Sources: https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/05/duplex-ai-system-for-natural-conversation.html,
https://www.techemergence.com/machine-learning-in-real-estate-trends-and-applications/
