A webinar panel discusses applying artificial intelligence’s (AI) best daily uses for top apartment operators and decision-making for solving “pain points.”
By Richard Berger
Commercial real estate is not trailing the business world when it comes to applying artificial intelligence (AI) to its operations and decision-making.
Companies in all asset classes are discovering and building upon the technology, helping their teams save time, be more productive, and solve pain points. In some cases, AI-driven virtual-leasing assistants and website chatbots have been humanized; Companies are giving these tools actual names, such as Veris Residential’s “Quinn” and “Taylor.”
AI’s growth and implementation were discussed recently during a webinar hosted by executive search firm Jackson Lucas, featuring Nicole Jones, senior vice president for marketing and communications for Veris Residential; Lisa Tully-Lavian, senior vice president for customer experience at Bell Partners, and Chris Urwin, strategic advisor for VARi Knowledge Partners.
Jones mentioned many ways AI helps on a day-to-day basis, including driving qualified leads to her leasing team and being leaned on in a pinch to help craft formal executive letters or marketing copy.
“Early on, many were afraid or nervous about using AI, but now you hear about it at every conference,” Jones said. “As a person so focused on our clearly defined brand and style, I wondered how an AI tool could come into play.
“But we’re using it to solve pain points and it’s helping to modernize the process, and in a branded way,” she said.
Her company started by training the tool, Jones said, giving it two personas. One is “Quinn,” a friendly version used when addressing residents and prospects on basic apartment living. The other is “Taylor,” one that takes on a more executive, authoritative persona, such as when residents are delinquent on their rent.
As for the qualified traffic to the on-site teams, “Before, we had these leads but might not have had time to address them, much less with personalized responses,” Jones said. “Now that we’re using this [product from EliseAI], the results have been astonishing. It took the ‘paper cuts’ off our staff members’ plates and let them focus more on giving better customer service.”
Whereas Veris Residential previously managed its leads through email and Microsoft Outlook, Quinn is helping the teams see and analyze all conversations with the customers.
“Our goal was to deal with our customers in a customizable way and then convert them,” Jones said. “When we launched Quinn, we could address leads that weren’t responded to. Our goal wasn’t to reduce our staff. AI is a member of our team. We integrate Quinn into everything to make sure he serves a purpose. Quinn is a person to us. We humanized him. We give Quinn information multiple times every day.”
Tully-Lavian noted that AI is adept at responding to questions about lease terms and conditions. “It also can more efficiently alert onsite teams about a resident’s lease expiration so that they can address renewals in a timely way,” she added.
Jones said, “It provides us with information about our residents and prospects that would’ve previously been a huge heavy lift for our on-site teams to get done.”
Jones said customers don’t care if they’re interacting with AI if it seems like a human interaction.
Even better, Jones said Veris Residential’s upfront spend on marketing is much more efficient.
‘Nervous Concerns’ about AI are ‘Overblown’
The panel said that implementing AI for apartment operators can be daunting. Urwin acknowledged that real estate people and technology people tend to speak different languages.
“The nervous concerns that you hear about AI, though, are overblown,” Urwin said.
However, gaining trust in each other about using AI and what it’s capable of comes with small wins that can lead to bigger ones, he said. Those small wins will make things “less scary,” he said.
AI processes are fed data that “has to have a single source of truth” on a daily basis, he said. As the AI industry likes to say, “The best AI comes from the best data.”
Solving issues through AI for apartment operators relies on well-crafted prompts (or commands asked of the AI software). Urwin said the best way to write prompts is to provide context about what is needed.
“Give the background,” he said. “Be specific. Don’t be afraid to iterate. You can’t offend these tools – they don’t have emotions – so you can tell them they’re wrong. You can revise their prompt to get a better answer.”
Urwin said companies wanting to delve into AI should identify their questions or problems and proceed from there, tooling their systems to provide answers through a combination of large language models and proprietary data.
“New tools bring new capabilities,” Urwin said. “You can use AI as an end-to-end tool, working with it continuously and teaching it things from the real estate companies’ perspectives.”
Jones said her company is not “big enough” to build an in-house AI tool.
She said, “Find a partner to work with who will communicate with you and figure out how to address your issues. This benefits them, too, because they have other clients who have the same points.”
Urwin said all commercial real estate asset classes could benefit because “they all have pain points they want to solve,” and that, today, AI is being used more on an operations basis rather than for strategy. Having AI involved in strategy is the next frontier.”
The quality of the data is key, as machine learning is only as good as the data being inputted. Tully-Lavian went on to emphasize that data gathering requires a thoughtful process that is not too intrusive, and that cybersecurity should be of paramount importance.
“You have to remember people aren’t numbers, and they aren’t algorithms,” she said.
Specific AI Tools For Apartment Operators
Urwin said certain generative AI tools (such as OpenAI, Copilot, Claude, and Perplexity) are more skilled than others at doing particular tasks.
He said he finds ChatGPT best for data analytics. Claude is better at creative content—it can read and remember PDFs. Perplexity is good for compiling topical research.
Jones is finding other uses for AI, such as using it as a shortcut to draft an executive letter. “I can then clean it up,” she said. “It gives me a good place to start.”
She also uses it to write a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) on her competitive set or write marketing copy in seconds.
AI can analyze and summarize a collection of anecdotal comments from residents, reviews, etc., and categorize them to find the most common words or phrases that indicate what the community needs to improve and what it’s doing well.
“It’s one thing for an on-site staff person to say, ‘Well, everybody has a dog.’ But is that true?” Jones said. “We can look at the comments to either verify or correct that.”
Tully-Lavian summarily said AI is creating a paradigm shift in every industry.
“Companies need to look at it and not be left flat-footed,” she said. “AI does what technology is supposed to do, which is to make it easier for people to do the things that they want to do. We look at our data to help predict behaviors and empower our associates with this information so they may provide quality and personalized service for our residents.”
About the author:
Richard Berger is a freelance journalist who has 20+ years of experience covering commercial real estate for various media sites and CRE-related associations. He lives in Northern Virginia.
