How AI Is Enhancing The Human Touch In Property Management

A typical day for an on-site team member, such as a leasing consultant or community manager, is filled with time-consuming, repetitive tasks like scheduling tours, addressing maintenance requests and collecting rent. This can often detract from what should be the most important part of their job: building stronger relationships.  

Artificial intelligence has transformed the way nearly every job is accomplished. In multifamily, leasing teams can better automate tasks and refocus on tenant satisfaction and retention without losing the human touch that is so crucial to their role.

Zuma has now released Kelsey, an agentic AI that automates and reimagines how prospect engagement can look and feel across the entire leasing process. Kelsey is the prospect’s first touchpoint, handling everything from inbound inquiry to active discovery, selling the unique attributes of the community to booking the tour and more. The platform operates through a hybrid model that includes AI and human agents to handle inquiries, ensuring the conversations feel rich and humanlike, not robotic or canned. 

It’s been a long road to get here. Zuma CEO Shiv Gettu said that he and his co-founder, Kendrick Bradley, originally ran a short-term rental property management company called Astro, starting in 2018. Not long after, the thriving business started to feel the effects of the pandemic, resulting in the company losing $100K monthly.

“Nobody was traveling and we had to completely pivot the business,” Gettu said. “In the spirit of trying to lease all the properties long-term, since nobody was traveling short-term, we decided to sign 12-month leases, and that effectively turned us into a third-party property management company overnight.”

As they were pivoting their business model, Gettu and Bradley began noticing that Astro and other property management firms were running into the same issues regarding day-to-day operations.

“As we continued to have conversations with other property management companies, we realized that this was just a universally painful experience for everyone,” Gettu said. “That evolved into launching our first version of the Kelsey in 2021, where we've been able to flesh out multiple product lines and build one of the strongest and deepest agentic workforces in property management and multifamily.”

Zuma consists of three product lines: an AI leasing agent to handle scheduling, a rent collections tool and a voice AI agent to deal with inbound calls.

Gettu said the AI leasing agent's goal is to automate all the manual work that exists in the leasing process, up to scheduling an apartment tour. 

Meanwhile, the AI collections tool helps rent collectors avoid the complex and potentially hostile situations that can arise when collecting rent.

“The AI collections agent collects more than 99% of rent fully automated and empowers the on-site team to redirect their efforts to the 1% of residents that are having a unique situation that requires human discretion,” Gettu said. “On the corporate side of things, it significantly accelerates cash collections and reduces on-site team effort from 60% to 80% down to roughly 5% of their time.”

All the while, the voice AI agent component handles inbound calls. If a prospective renter is calling a leasing office with a question, the voice AI agent will diagnose the request and assist the prospective renter with whatever they need, Gettu said. If conversations get stuck, a human agent can hop on a call and assist the AI.

Gettu said that this round-the-clock residential support is becoming increasingly necessary in multifamily. He has seen almost 65% of conversations and tours being booked outside of regular business hours, when the leasing office is closed.

“Leasing teams work 9 to 5, from Monday to Saturday, but renters are looking for apartments and figuring out where they're going to live once they're done with the workday,” he said. “This discrepancy makes it important to provide 24/7 support and cover a lot of the conversation that is happening after hours.” 

Gettu said Zuma’s agentic AI features go beyond just a scripted, static bot. The agentic tool is much more context-aware and seeks to find solutions, rather than just reacting to prompts. He said he sees the potential of agentic labor being more than residential preparation but also improving customer satisfaction, maintenance and even reputation management.

“If there's a poor maintenance experience, we often see that reflected in the reviews of a property,” he said. “Being able to actually help residents have great experiences with the property can encourage them to leave a positive review.” 

Gettu said this data-driven experience can lead to more renewals, pricing support, proactive offers and even identifying at-risk residents. From there, Zuma can develop a more proprietary renewal plan for the resident, which helps build deeper relationships that can increase net operating income and asset value. 

Boutique multifamily company Gallery Residential was successful in building leads, but it got to a point where increased demand made it difficult to keep its customer service standards at a high level. This is when the company reached out to Zuma. 

Kelsey stepped in to handle prospective tenants, allowing for nearly 50% more leads during the off-hours period. The client also kept its 27% lead-to-tour conversion rate while reducing its on-site team workload by 70%. Gettu said that thanks to Kelsey’s operational efficiency, this helped Gallery Residential scale its customer service. 

He added that Kelsey can better handle these workloads because agentic labor doesn't face the same constraints as humans. 

“Humans have a certain threshold of work that they can handle,” Gettu said. “One human can't handle 1,000 leads in an hour, but AI agentic labor can. AI is more exponential because the more work it handles, the better it gets at handling and improving that work.”

Even with AI becoming more efficient, Gettu said the human component remains paramount because property management is built on relationships, people, trust and the ability to sell a property and excite a prospective renter. 

The jobs that AI and humans are doing now are just the tip of the iceberg. Gettu said he believes that as technology and AI advance, ​​humans will start focusing on the work that has never been prioritized because we didn’t have the resources.

“My thesis is that humans are actually going to be more necessary and required to do more work,” he said. “As long as we let AI do what it does best, we can redefine the core jobs to be done on-site.”

This article was produced in collaboration between Zuma and Studio B. Bisnow news staff was not involved in the production of this content.

Studio B is Bisnow’s in-house content and design studio. To learn more about how Studio B can help your team, reach out to studio@bisnow.com.