Why Your Property Management CRM Needs to be AI First

Clay Walsh

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October 29, 2024

For the amount of time various teams at property management companies spend working in customer relationship management, or CRM, platforms, they really haven’t changed much since the earliest property management CRMs were released in the 2000s. Fundamentally, CRMs are there to help your team members effectively manage all the tasks and responsibilities on their plate to keep your communities running smoothly. But while they may be good at helping keep people on track, they don’t necessarily remove work from team members’ plates in the way that modern AI solutions have been able to. Fortunately there’s a new class of AI-first property management CRMs on the market designed specifically to harness the power of AI, eliminating busy work, automating workflows, and learning from every interaction. Let’s dive into four reasons why you should consider switching to an AI-first property management CRM.

An AI-First Property Management CRM Eliminates Busywork

Traditional property management CRMs are built to enable team members to more efficiently sift through the mountain of tasks that end up on their plates. Whether through well organized task lists, notifications and alerts, scheduled reminders, or optimized workflows, the traditional CRM does its best to surface relevant information to the right member of your team at the right time. But the unfortunate reality is that these CRMs don’t actually take work off the plates of your team members, instead making them more efficient in managing the busywork like responding to prospect inquiries that eats up most of their day to day.

Unlike traditional property management CRMs that focus on making it easier to do busywork, an AI-first CRM is specifically designed to eliminate as much busywork as possible. By automating up to 90% of traditional property management workflows you can significantly reduce the amount of manual, tedious tasks your teams have to handle on a daily basis, and free up time for them to focus on differentiating your communities through excellent in-person experiences. With AI handling things like tour scheduling, prospect follow-ups, and guest card management, your onsite teams can spend less time working in your CRM and more time interacting with residents and prospects. 

An AI-First Property Management CRM Handles After Hours Messages

Leasing team members are all too familiar with the feeling of sitting down first thing in the morning and logging into their CRM just to be bombarded with missed calls and messages from the night before. They might have to spend the first few hours of their day every day just playing catchup from the night before, and that’s to say nothing about the Monday morning deluge of missed inquiries from prospects over the weekend. There’s a bigger issue here than just a messy to-do list for your leasing agents, however. 

Even if your leasing agents get to those inquiries first thing in the morning, there’s a decent chance they’ve already gotten in touch with and scheduled a tour at another community in the area. For modern renters, always-on communications and round the clock tour scheduling is a must have, and you are actively losing prospects when you are not able to meet those expectations but someone else does. What if your CRM could handle after hours communications and schedule tours even when your agents aren’t working?

With an AI-first CRM like EliseCRM, your AI is able to communicate with prospects, schedule tours, and answer questions across voice, webchat, email, and SMS 24/7, making sure a lead never slips through the cracks. Instead of relying on a CRM that makes it easier for your leasing agents to wade through piles of unanswered questions from prospects who have already looked elsewhere, why not rely on an AI-first CRM that can book tours overnight? Now, your leasing agents can come back to a calendar full of booked tours rather than a “to-do” list with 50 unread messages.

An AI-First Property Management CRM Can Reduce Your Tech Stack

Layering new point solutions on top of your CRM can lead to an expensive, bloated tech stack that forces your team to work out of multiple systems, requires them to remember multiple passwords, and results in data not being shared properly from solution to solution. If the legacy CRMs out there had more basic functionality around making and receiving calls, you wouldn’t need to onboard so many expensive vendors just to operate the way you want to. But with AI-first property management CRMs, reducing total software spend is a very achievable goal. 

An AI-first property management CRM like EliseCRM packs a wide variety of features into one concise package that eliminates the need for point solutions like call scoring, after hours answering services, VoIP providers, experience management software, and multimedia messaging platforms. For example, we’ve seen operators use EliseCRM’s Call Center to enable their teams to quickly and seamlessly make and receive calls that otherwise would have to be routed through an external call center. Deploying VoiceAI in conjunction with EliseCRM to answer calls around the clock can completely eliminate the need to hire expensive after hours answering services, further reducing the size of your tech stack and helping consolidate expenses.

An AI-First Property Management CRM Gets Better Over Time

Legacy property management CRMs may receive gradual updates and quality of life fixes like all other software, but they have no capacity to improve over time based on interactions with your residents and prospects. If a leasing agent answers an obscure prospect inquiry today that can’t be found in your PMS or CRM that information won’t be retained in either system. If another prospect comes back with the same question tomorrow, the leasing agent will again have to manually provide that information.

An AI-first CRM learns from interactions with residents and prospects and incorporates that information into subsequent conversations. EliseCRM serves as the nervous center for everything EliseAI’s products “know,” adding relevant information scraped from agent intervention in conversations into its Knowledge Base in order to consistently deliver better results for future conversations with residents and prospects. In this way, an AI-first property management CRM actually improves over time through a self-learning loop as they handle more and more inquiries, incorporating community and portfolio specific information into its Knowledge Base. With this self-learning feedback loop in place, your AI-first CRM reduces your team members’ workload and gradually allowing your CRM to handle more and more inquiries. 

Looking to Onboard an AI-First Property Management CRM?

Switching CRMs can be a lengthy process, but the efficiency gains, cost savings, and performance improvement you can expect from switching to an AI-first CRM makes the process worth it. Whether switching to a centralized model or sticking with the model of onsite teams, an AI-first CRM can make a massive difference in both the day-to-day of your team members as well as in your resident and prospect experiences. Switching from a conventional property management CRM to an AI-first one could be one of the best decisions you make for your portfolio this year.

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