Manager Of 9,000 Apartments Testing New AI Tool To Find Tenants

While multifamily trends are always shifting, one thing will never change: Landlords will always need to find tenants to fill units.

As artificial intelligence spreads to every corner of commercial real estate, it is now poised to help apartment owners with that never-ending effort. 

Alexandria, Virginia-based Bonaventure, a company with $2.8B in assets under management, is partnering with a new AI startup to help it more accurately and effectively market its properties to prospective tenants.

CorridorIQ, a startup that was founded in November by two University of Virginia students, aims to determine where people are moving to and from. 

Then, armed with that information, it allows a company like Bonaventure to zero in on targeted advertising across platforms like social media and search engines. 

“What we want to do is capture the people that want to buy our products and make that cost per lead go down,” Bonaventure CEO Dwight Dunton told Bisnow.

For example, he said, after New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani won his election in November, there was “an influx of people's desire to move.”

“And that's super important if you're in businesses [where] clients increase their demand when they want to move,” Dunton said.

Bonaventure has 9,001 units under management across the mid-Atlantic and Southeast. It is CorridorIQ’s first multifamily client, although the startup has a handful of single-family residential agents using the technology. 

CorridorIQ uses 15 to 20 inputs to gather trend analysis, said Zave Greene, one of the startup’s co-founders. Those include building permits, search trends, new mortgage applications, labor and housing market comparatives.

In the case of its partnership with Bonaventure, the company will layer in property-specific data from its assets. 

“We're combining all these data sources, and then our internal AI model is able to learn and predict based on what's happened in the past of how these indicators have typically correlated with real, tangible migration patterns,” Greene said.

Bonaventure currently uses measures like conversion ratios, marketing term effectiveness and employment data to determine where it should put its marketing dollars, Dunton said.

“So it's less dynamic and it's more programmatic than we expect in the future when we are applying AI and we're applying tools like Corridor, where it can be self-learning,” he said.  

CorridorIQ is set to conduct a test with the Bonaventure portfolio over the next few months, rolling the technology out to a subset of communities and locations. The company should have information about the efficacy of the trial period by the end of the summer. 

For Bonaventure, success with CorridorIQ looks like stronger marketing results at lower costs.

“The easy measurement is, were we able to increase leads at a particular targeted community compared to one where we weren't doing anything, and were we able to drive down the cost per lead and the cost per lease at those targeted communities?” Dunton said. 

At this point, the company doesn’t have plans to use the technology to inform development, investment or hiring. Its focus right now is on using the technology as a marketing tool. 

CorridorIQ’s Greene and his co-founder, Luke Anderson, who is also Greene’s cousin, are students at Dunton’s alma mater. When the pair reached out to the CEO to see what he thought about their business, the partnership was born, a collaboration that provides them a chance to learn from one another.

“And so I said to them, ‘I will help you figure out how to take this technology you've built and make it an amazing product that the multifamily industry needs to have,’” Dunton said. “‘And I'd like your assistance and how you embed the perspective of an AI-native business and transform our legacy business.’”

Although CorridorIQ was first conceived as a real estate tool, Greene and Anderson envision that the tracking technology could have many uses for different kinds of businesses, like insurance, mortgage underwriting, and digital and advertising agencies. The company hasn’t yet raised any money. 

In recent years, the multifamily sector has been rapidly adopting AI tools for leasing and management, but the models are mostly targeted at capabilities like answering tenant questions, scheduling tours, facilitating maintenance requests and collecting rent. 

And like other CRE sectors, there are also AI models that help with underwriting, architectural and construction analysis, and dynamic pricing. 

In addition to its partnership with CorridorIQ, Bonaventure is integrating other AI tools into its business. One that it is building right now is a tool that interviews employees on the most effective ways to lease apartments, analyzes the data, connects the dots and distills them into best practices.

Dunton said the company is looking at the bottom line when analyzing how to deploy AI. His target is adding $100 of net operating income per unit per month.

“That really is how we're going to focus our energies, because there's an unlimited number of things you can do with this technology, and how do we focus it on things that have real business impact?” he said. “And the best business impact we can identify today is adding NOI at properties.”