Whether we’re ready or not, AI has taken the property management world by storm. Operators across all asset classes, from multifamily to SFR to affordable and more, are being forced to adapt as consumer expectations shift and wave after wave of AI solutions hit the market. But, as is the case with any emerging technology, trying to integrate AI into your operations isn’t always straightforward. 

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At EliseAI, we’ve seen operators have the most success implementing AI by piloting new AI solutions at a few select communities rather than trying to implement it everywhere all at once. So what should you keep in mind when piloting AI in your communities? We asked Jacob Kosior, Vice President of Client Strategy at EliseAI and Jordan Ross, Manager Strategic Initiatives at Brookfield Properties, to share some insights from their experiences piloting AI in their communities. Here’s what they had to share. 

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Increase Buy-In with Clear Messaging and Strategy

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When implementing AI, it’s important that you establish crystal clear messaging about what your team envisions the role of AI to be when it’s fully rolled out across your portfolio. Making it clear whether an AI tool is coming in to enhance, replace, or supplement existing operations gives team members clarity about how the rollout of this new technology will impact them, rather than leaving it vague and causing them anxiety about the potential impact on their role. Leadership should reiterate that AI is coming in to help support and optimize human efforts rather than replace them.

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It’s also crucial that you delineate the scope of the AI pilot before committing to a full rollout. One key piece of that is identifying specific tasks or functions and timelines where AI will be integrated. If you don’t establish clear guardrails, timelines, and expected outcomes from the pilot, members of your team may become confused about the intended scope of AI deployment or the timeframe, causing certain tasks to get missed. 

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In addition, it’s important to set the context with your team that successful AI adoption isn’t the responsibility of one team but rather that it is a collective responsibility that spans departments from operations to marketing to IT and more. When email became the prevalent means of workplace communication teams didn’t say to themselves “I don’t have to worry about that, marketing is in charge of email”—they went out and learned to send emails. But unfortunately the mindset of “AI is another team’s responsibility” is a reality many operators face during the AI pilot period. Let’s break down some team by team talking points to help us get out in front of this mindset. 

Operations and Marketing

Operations and marketing are often thought of as the AI power users, or early adopters, in the property management industry. They’re often involved in the initial rollout, as functions like leasing are usually the first to be augmented with AI, giving them a unique perspective as they witness day-to-day AI interactions and are capable of providing valuable insights on where AI can add the most value. These teams do a lot of the heavy lifting for AI implementation, but still need support from other functions.

HR & People Operations

As you implement AI into your communities it’s only natural that the roles and responsibilities of your team members will change to reflect the current needs of the business. With that in mind, HR and people operations have a role to play in the AI pilot by updating job roles and descriptions to reflect changes in responsibilities with AI implementation. If your roles are scoped incorrectly it could lead to personnel related issues that could have a negative impact on both your team members’ and portfolio’s performance.

Systems & IT Teams: 

Adding new technology into your existing stack could cause existing solutions to break, making it key for your systems and IT teams to be on top of their collective game during AI piloting. Making sure there’s a smooth integration between your new AI tools and existing PMS/CRM platforms, where your AI is pulling information like unit prices, amenities, availability and more from, is pivotal for the pilot to go well. These teams should also get prepared for potential technical collaborations that may require accessing property management software APIs.

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Engage Emerging Leaders

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Beyond serving as an opportunity to test the capabilities of new technology, AI implementation can also serve as an opportunity to test the capabilities of your team. The period of transition as operations are realigned following AI implementation gives you a chance to evaluate the leadership potential of tech-savvy team members who naturally take to working alongside AI. You can use the AI pilot as an opportunity to give up-and-coming members of the organization a chance to step up and be involved in this process, allowing you to evaluate their decision making, critical thinking, and ability to thrive during a period of transition. 

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Define Your Success Metrics

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As we’ve discussed in some of our other centralization content, measuring success with data-driven metrics during your AI pilot is arguably the only concrete way to justify continued rollout of these tools. Positive feedback can provide anecdotal support for AI, but demonstrating a financial impact on community performance is what is going to move the needle and convince property owners to spend money on AI. We’ve seen operators have success during their AI pilots tracking metrics like total staff hours saved, total work orders created, increased lead to lease conversion rates, and reduced outstanding bad debt to get a clear picture of the impact of AI. It’s easy for operators who are piloting EliseAI products to measure the impact of AI on their operations, as EliseCRM serves as a central source of truth for all AI related performance data and statistics. 

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Let’s dive deeper into a few key performance indicators, or KPIs, to track based on what we’ve seen some of our most successful customers do when it comes to measuring AI performance during a pilot. 

Time Efficiency

One of the largest value propositions of AI is that it can handle monotonous, low effort work exponentially faster than humans can, giving them time back to handle more strategic tasks and in-person experiences that aren’t suited for AI. If you want to paint a clear picture of the impact your AI is having on reducing manual work for your team and are piloting EliseAI’s solutions, all of the time saving data you need is available directly within EliseCRM. If you’re piloting a different AI solution, you will have to calculate hours saved by AI manually. 

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Cost Savings

The most expensive part of the current property management model is the cost of labor, which is only exacerbated by the cost of backfilling roles as a result of the property management industry’s sky high turnover rate. Fortunately, AI can significantly enhance payroll savings by streamlining workloads and optimizing bandwidth. It enables one to realign responsibilities, often eliminating the need to backfill every vacated role. With AI handling a high volume of repetitive tasks that otherwise might have been handled by the team member who left their role you can directly trace the impact of AI on your communities’ bottom lines, allowing you to do more with less staff.

Improved Resident Experience

While resident experience is a softer metric than cost or time savings, there’s certain key indicators that directly correlate to community performance you can measure to help support further AI deployment. Average response times, speed of maintenance request completions, and renewal velocity (if your AI handles renewals) are all good indicators of how well your AI is performing. If maintenance requests and messages are being handled quicker, and residents are committing to renew proactively and earlier than before, you can begin to draw a line between your AI’s performance and the overall satisfaction of your residents.

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Have Centralized Teams? AI Can Help

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When piloting AI it’s also important to consider how your current operating model will suit the new technology you’re implementing. While the property management model of today can be enabled by AI, the centralized property management model pioneered by forward thinking operators like the Cardinal Group is particularly well suited to implementing AI. That’s because the centralized model is designed around the efficiency gains enabled by AI, allowing specialized offsite teams to deliver services across multiple communities by automating 90% of the routine tasks that would otherwise bog them down.

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Instead of a dedicated offsite leasing team member having to answer the same matter of fact leasing questions over and over, like “what is your pet policy?” or “what is the security deposit?”, AI can manage those questions and only loop in the offsite team member when it encounters a question it doesn’t have the answer to. This scales beyond just text and email as well, as AI solutions like EliseAI’s Call Center makes it easy to manage the phones for multiple communities at once by immediately populating resident guest cards directly on the screen your centralized team is answering the call from. The specialized nature of these AI tools directly supports a centralized model, so it might also be worth considering piloting a centralized model for your portfolio while implementing AI.

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How to Select Pilot Communities

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For Jordan Ross, Manager Strategic Initiatives at Brookfield Properties, the key to leading a successful pilot of new technology is balancing strategic risk with the need for increased operational insights. His approach prioritizes keeping the pilot manageable yet impactful, ensuring the pilot is both controlled and representative. Leading a team dedicated to innovation and operational advancement, Jordan takes a hands-on role in overseeing strategic initiatives guided by a proven and carefully tested framework. At Brookfield Properties, pilot programs typically involve five meticulously selected communities, each chosen for unique criteria that position them as ideal candidates for meaningful testing and feedback. Here’s what they look like.

Community One: High Performer

Jordan always ensures he has one existing high performing community in the test group in order to test the deployment of new tech or systems in an environment with well established, high functioning processes. Testing pilot technology in a community already operating like a well-oiled machine offers a unique opportunity to measure the tool’s ability to enhance performance further, serving as a strong indicator of its overall efficacy. If the high performing community is slow to adopt the tool, or feels like it doesn’t add value to their existing operations, it could be a red flag. Having a high performer in your set of pilot communities allows you to see the technology at work in an optimized environment, which usually serves as a de facto control group.

Community Two: Opportunity for Improvement

Jordan recommends selecting a community facing some challenges in the areas that the new technology promises to solve as part of your 5 community test group, providing a chance for the new solution to prove its worth by addressing an existing pain point. For example, a community is struggling with high amounts of bad debt and below average collections rates would be an ideal location to pilot delinquency reduction technology. When selecting this community however it’s important to be diplomatic and strategic with how you loop them into the pilot. Framing the pilot as an opportunity for the community to be at the forefront of innovation by tackling a portfolio-wide challenge can be a more effective and positive approach than highlighting their difficulties.

Community Three: Early Adopters

For the early adopter community, Jordan looks for teams that like to be ahead of the curve when it comes to everything technology, from both new enterprise software to personal device adoption preferences. If you have one community where every onsite team member has the newest iPhone the month it comes out, you may have found your early adopters! This community’s enthusiasm for innovation and willingness to embrace new technology makes them ideal for delivering insights from a team genuinely excited to explore new tools. With their proactive mindset and eagerness to succeed, you can rely on them to give 100%, making them a perfect test group for achieving the fastest possible implementation and rollout. With this group, you know they’ll give it their all, meaning that you can use them as a test group for the quickest possible implementation and rollout possible. Plus, you know that any technological shortcomings will come out quickly as they get hands on and up to speed on the new solution.

Community Four: Careful Adopters

The “careful adopter” community provides a lot of the inverse insights that the early adopter community reveals. In general, this community will come into most technological rollouts with an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality, preferring to stick to tried and true methods. For Jordan and the Brookfield Properties team, this community provides crucial insights into how to handle obstacles to technology rollouts, mitigate potential objections, and implement effective change management strategies. Testing a new tool in a change adverse community can give you some of the real world stress testing you need for widespread adoption, making them a key member of the 5 community pilot group. 

Community Five: Local Community

The final community Jordan recommends selecting for your pilot is one close enough to your primary office location where you can go and see the team using the new technology in person. Being able to be onsite with teams using the new solution gives you first hand insights into its effectiveness and how well it fits in your teams’ day to day operations. Being physically present also gives you an opportunity to see how team members are interacting with the pilot, enabling you to respond quickly to any questions or comments that arise and allowing you to ask your own questions to make real-time adjustments as needed. 

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Pre-Pilot Expectation Setting

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One critical operational consideration Jordan emphasizes is having a well-defined succession plan for transitioning a pilot into full implementation. For Jordan, this means starting pilots with a clear understanding of whether the goal is to innovate and pass the initiative off to another team or to maintain the program within their oversight moving forward. It’s essential to have this honest internal discussion with your team when piloting AI. In an ideal scenario, which team will own the initiative, and which team will manage the technology once it’s fully rolled out? Approaching your pilot with a clear vision of responsibilities post-rollout can help prevent missteps during the transition and ensure a seamless handoff.

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Beyond AI Piloting

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Designing a strong pilot group of diverse communities, setting clear expectations, and being laser focused on your goals and success metrics are three key components of running a successful AI pilot in your portfolio. But having success with AI goes beyond just piloting—there’s a ton of additional organizational considerations around role scoping, new operating models, revenue creation through centralized services, and more to keep in mind. Stay up to date with our blog for more insightful content on getting the most out of AI in your day to day property management operations, and join Jacob Kosior and guests for informational AI and centralization webinars to stay up to date with the latest trends in the multifamily industry. 

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