Revamping Leasing and Revenue Management at The Ardizzone Group with EliseAI

The Ardizzone Group (TAG) is one of the Midwest’s leading owner/operators. Since the company’s founding in 2011, the TAG team has acquired and renovated over 5,100 apartment homes across 14 communities in the Midwest, with a dedicated team exceeding 100 members. Through strategic acquisitions and value addition to existing communities, TAG delivers both superior living experiences for residents and positive NOI. But, like all multifamily operators in a post-pandemic world, The Ardizzone Group hasn’t been immune to operational inefficiencies caused by changing consumer behaviors.

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By late 2023, TAG’s executive team concluded that its existing call centers, rules-based chatbots, and manual spreadsheets were struggling to handle record inbound volume and heightened resident expectations in an "on-demand" economy. They identified five key pain points that threatened service consistency and community performance:

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• Rules-Based Chatbot Limitations: Nuanced questions went unanswered, pushing messages back to onsite staff and slowing lead follow-up times.
  
  
• Manual Leasing Workflow: Agents spent extensive amounts of time manually following up with leads, limiting tour availability and delaying lease-to-lease conversion timelines.
  
  
• Slow Maintenance Response: High volumes of non-emergency calls flooded technicians, driving median work-order completion times up to 29 hours.
  
  
• Inefficient Collections Process: Staff-led calls kept delinquency and bad-debt levels higher than targets.
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• Fragmented Tech Stack: Separate tools for email, texts, calls, and payment reminders forced staff to bounce between dashboards, frustrating onsite team members.

While they were worried about losing the “human touch” that differentiated them from other real estate companies in the region, they had heard positive things about new, AI-powered automation tools that expedited lead-to-lease rates and decided to look into various options.

TAG formed a cross-functional task force that evaluated more than a dozen AI vendors. Their goal was to find a single, unified platform with humanlike conversational AI capable of spanning leasing, maintenance, and resident tasks. After hearing good reports from industry peers about EliseAI's tools,TAG decided to pilot EliseAI at five communities of varying size, staffing, and community types to stress-test the platform. The impact was immediate.
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EliseAI’s natural-language VoiceAI aced mystery shopping tests, and the EliseAI platform intuitively merged leasing, maintenance, and resident tasks into one interface.

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EliseAI autonomously nurtured leads, handling 7,800 prospect interactions in Q4 2024, while driving a 30% lead-to-tour rate, 5% lead-to-lease conversion rate, 138 leases from after-hours leads, and seven cross-sold prospects kept in-portfolio.

EliseAI's VoiceAI product answered 3,000 maintenance calls and auto-created work orders, cutting median completion from 29 to 17 hours and saving $50k in one quarter. Finally, ResidentAI trimmed delinquency by 20 bps, reduced bad debt by $39k, and collected $3.2M, including $224k via AI outbound calls, while providing real-time analytics on performance improvement.

TAG’s holistic adoption of EliseAI shows how a single conversational-AI platform can elevate service quality, employee productivity, and NOI simultaneously, turning post-pandemic challenges into a blueprint for scalable, high-touch property management. Their strategic and measured pilot, thoughtful testing of the VoiceAI product, and skillful change management during the course of the rollout make TAG's story an excellent playbook for other owner/operators looking to implement AI into their management strategy.

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Read the original deep-dive into The Ardizzone Group's AI success story here.