How Fitch Irick Leverages EliseAI to Deliver Better Affordable Housing Experiences

Fitch Irick Corporation is a vertically integrated real estate investment manager specializing in affordable housing, with over 12,325 apartments under management across the South and Southeast United States. Fitch Irick prides itself on stewarding communities of fairly priced, high-quality apartments, bridging affordability and availability gaps to increase access to housing. As part of this mission Fitch Irick focuses on having high-quality onsite and corporate team members to create impactful resident experiences, in spite of budget constraints.

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Operating in a sector often overlooked by technology providers, Fitch Irick works to tirelessly serve its residents with significantly smaller staff allocations compared to market-rate communities. This unique position requires innovative solutions to maximize per employee efficiency while maintaining the personal touch essential to affordable housing operations. This mindset was what spurred the Fitch Irick team to begin to look for new, AI-powered tools to give time back to their onsite teams while keeping service quality high. 

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Fitch Irick faced multiple common operational challenges that were draining resources and limiting their ability to serve residents effectively. Fundamentally, they broke down into three core buckets: staffing constraints, budget limitations, and delinquency-related issues.

As most affordable housing operators know, having more than one onsite staff member is the exception rather than the rule. That means spending time on redundant tasks—like reviewing application packets that shouldn’t have made it past prequalification—is even more detrimental to onsite operations, as teams have less time to focus on responsibilities like assisting qualified applicants, leading tours, and building relationships with residents. This was a core issue for the Fitch Irick team, particularly around the time spent on review of unqualified applications. 

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Unlike market-rate housing providers who can throw money at ILS platforms and social media ads, Fitch Irick has had to be judicious and measured with its marketing budgets. That means the impact of every lost lead is even more consequential than for a market-rate operator. Every earmarked marketing dollar had to be strategically leveraged to ensure optimal return on investment—something that wasn’t happening when calls to the leasing office went unanswered.

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Finally, the pandemic spurred a rise in problematic payment behaviors across the multifamily industry. Fitch Irick’s team members, like many other affordable housing professionals, found it challenging to make collection calls and be "the bad guy,” particularly when dealing with residents who have limited income and often have difficult extenuating circumstances.

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These three issues drove Doris Gantos, Executive Vice President of Property Management at Fitch Irick, and her team to look into AI solutions that could give teams time back, minimize lead loss, and reduce bad debt. The solution they settled on? EliseAI.

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Using EliseAI’s purpose-built affordable housing tools alongside LeasingAI, VoiceAI, and Delinquency has helped Fitch Irick reduce bad debt, increase lead capture, and save significant time for their onsite teams.

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Today, EliseAI’s affordable housing solution delivers serious time savings for Fitch Irick’s teams by automatically prequalifying prospects, ensuring only candidates who meet the income qualifications are able to submit their applications. Now, instead of reviewing applications that never should have made it that far, Fitch Irick team members can deliver personalized, attentive services to qualified applicants and residents alike. This feature has created hundreds of hours of additional capacity of Fitch Irick’s onsite associates, helping ensure that they’re closely focused on the resident experience and late-stage prospects. 

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With LeasingAI and VoiceAI nurturing 100% of leads around the clock, wasted marketing spend is significantly minimized at Fitch Irick. Even if a call comes in at 3am, or the prospect only speaks Mandarin, it doesn’t make a difference—LeasingAI and VoiceAI will be there to answer and help the prospect with whatever they might need. Now, Fitch Irick’s onsite staff can focus on impactful work, rather than sitting near the phone all day. And with Delinquency removing the burden of bad debt follow up from onsite team members’ plates, collections rates increased by 190bps in Q2 2025 while driving 80% collected several days faster on average.

For Fitch Irick, working closely with the EliseAI team to deploy both EliseAI’s standard products alongside purpose-built affordable housing functionality has driven significant increases in operational efficiency, NOI, and employee satisfaction. Using AI to amplify the capabilities of their thoughtful, motivated, and empathetic onsite staff has given their teams the time back they need to truly make an impact on residents’ lives. Bad debt is down, and marketing ROI is up.

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Today, Fitch Irick can focus on doing what it does best: offering fairly-priced, high-quality accommodations to those that need it most—with a little help from EliseAI.