A new maintenance coordinator at a Dallas apartment complex is getting praised by residents and coworkers for her work ethic and her willingness to work late nights, after the eight staff members managing the building's 814 apartments and townhouses were previously overworked and working longer hours than they wanted.
The new staff at the Cypress Waters complex not only work overtime, but are also available 24/7 to schedule repair calls and don't take days off.
That's because the maintenance coordinator is an artificial intelligence bot that property manager Jason Busboom started using last year, sending text messages under the name Matt to take requests and manage reservations.
The team also has Lisa, a leasing bot that answers questions from prospective tenants, and Hunter, a bot that reminds tenants to pay their rent. Busboom chose the personality he wanted for each AI assistant: Lisa is professional and informed, Matt is friendly and helpful, and Hunter is strict but needs to speak in an authoritative tone when reminding tenants to pay their rent.
Busboom said the technology has freed up valuable staff time and that everyone is now much happier in their jobs. Previously, “if someone took a day off, it was very stressful,” he added.
Chatbots are becoming increasingly common in property management, as are other AI tools that can track common area usage, monitor energy usage, assist with construction management, and perform other tasks. According to a 2023 report by McKinsey Global Institute, the money and time saved by new technologies could create more than $110 billion in value for the real estate industry. But advances in AI and its rapid penetration into the public consciousness also raise questions about whether tenants should be informed when they are interacting with AI bots.
When software programmer Lei Wen was apartment hunting in New York last year, he knew he was dealing with an AI rental agent because agents in two buildings used the same name and gave the same answers to his questions.
“I'd rather deal with a human being,” he said. “Signing a lease is a big responsibility.”
Wen said some of the apartment tours he's been on have been self-guided. “If it's all automated, I feel like I'm less interested in having a live human being talking to me,” he said.
New York-based software company EliseAI, whose virtual assistant serves landlords of about 2.5 million U.S. units, including apartments managed by property management company Greystar, is focused on making its assistant as human as possible, said EliseAI CEO Ming-Na Song. In addition to being available via chat, text and email, the bot can communicate with tenants by voice and speaks a variety of accents.
Song said virtual assistants handling maintenance requests can ask additional questions, such as verifying which sink needs fixing, in case the tenant is away during the repair. Some are also starting to help tenants troubleshoot maintenance issues themselves. For example, a tenant with a leaking toilet could receive a video message showing where the valve is and how to use it while they wait for the plumber.
The technology is so good at carrying on a conversation and asking follow-up questions that tenants often mistake the AI assistant for a human. “We have people who come into the leasing office and call out Ellis’ name,” Song says, adding that tenants have texted the chatbot to get coffee, tell their manager that Ellis deserves a raise, or even deliver gift cards to the chatbot.
Not telling customers they're interacting with a bot is a risk: Some people may lose trust in companies that use the technology, said Duri Long, an assistant professor of communication studies at Northwestern University.
Alex John London, a professor of ethics and computational technology at Carnegie Mellon University, said people could view such deceptive behavior as disrespectful.
“All things considered, it's better for the bot to announce itself as a computer assistant first,” Dr London said.
Song said it's up to each company to monitor changing legal standards and be careful about what they communicate to consumers. Most states don't have laws requiring disclosure of the use of AI to communicate with humans, and the laws that do exist are mostly about influencing votes and sales, so bots used for maintenance scheduling and rent reminders don't have to be disclosed to customers. (The District at Cypress Waters doesn't tell tenants or prospective tenants that they're interacting with an AI bot.)
Another risk has to do with the information that AI generates: “Humans need to be involved to be able to critically analyze the results,” especially for anything other than the most simple and common interactions, said Milena Petrova, an associate professor of real estate and corporate finance at Syracuse University.
Sandeep Dave, chief digital and technology officer at real estate services firm CBRE, said this was unhelpful, saying the AI ”makes itself seem so confident that people tend to believe it.”
Marshall Davis, who runs a real estate and real estate technology consulting firm, monitors an AI system he developed to help two office workers answer the 30 to 50 calls he receives daily at his 160-apartment Houston complex. Davis says the chatbot works well for simple questions like rent procedures and details about available properties. But when it comes to more complex issues, he says the system “doesn't always answer the way you want it to, it answers the way it thinks it will.”
Davis said most calls are recorded and then run through another AI tool to summarize them, and listen to calls that seem problematic (such as “when the AI says, 'A customer has expressed dissatisfaction'”) to understand how to improve the system.
Some tenants aren't entirely convinced yet: Jillian Pendergast interacted with a bot while searching for an apartment in San Diego last year. “It's fine for making reservations,” she said, but interacting with an AI assistant instead of a human can get frustrating when it starts repeating responses.
“I see the potential, but I feel like we're still in the trial and error stage,” Pendergast said.
