AI can mean a lot of different things, so rather than discuss AI in general, generic terms, it is often much better to dissect how AI tangibly impacts property operations. I had the pleasure of talking with Nishant Phadnis, Chief Product Officer at Rent, to discuss how they identified key areas they can utilize AI to impact the prospect/resident journey, as well as tools to improve operations at the site level.

Nishant was an Elite demo presenter at our past Multifamily Demo Day event, with our next event launching in February 2025.

Brent Williams: Hey everybody, and thank you for joining me again today. I get to talk with Nishant Phadnis who is the Chief Product Officer at Rent. I've been looking forward to this for a long time because over the last several years, I suddenly saw Rent all over the place. They did a big rebrand, and next thing you know, everybody was talking about Rent.

I think it's interesting because you don't see companies that are that established suddenly feel like they're being shot out of a cannon.Usually that's reserved for startups in the world. And suddenly I saw it with a very big established company. I thought that was fascinating. So I was really curious about how they viewed the market, what challenges they saw, how they evolved their service to tackle those challenges in multifamily.

So I am very lucky enough to have Nishant here to go through that all with me today. Nishant, thank you so much for joining me today.

Nishant Phadnis: Oh, I appreciate it, Brent. Thanks for having me.

Brent Williams: Nishant, let's start with that shift that Rent had and what you all were seeing in the market. What did you see onsite teams struggling with and how did you approach it? How did you evolve your services and introduce new services to to combat that or help them out on that front.

Nishant Phadnis: Yeah, I think, part of our thesis when we rebranded in 2022 was this notion of being a solutions company and not just an ILS, which is a traditional acronym that you hear in our industry, Internet Listing Service, which is arguably just a website. And we were more than just a website, or just an app.

We had pretty robust marketing solutions that expanded beyond a website, like Search, PPC, Social, Reputation Management, a virtual leasing office. And when we spoke to a lot of marketing professionals in the multifamily industry, what we identified is that their needs and their unmet needs, arguably, to help service their properties and help make them shine, expanded well beyond just marketing on a website. And the evolution of marketing, the technology, where renters are going, evolved so aggressively, arguably in the past five to six years that we wanted to capture that we did capture that.

And we then ultimately repositioned ourselves in the market to ensure that the multifamily industry knew who we were as a company and as a brand. And that's what we saw and what we heard and then ultimately what we did in 2022. And it's been a great year since.

Brent Williams: On site, you're talking about you offer solutions to get leads and that sort of thing.But there's so many things that the onsite team still has to do to make that happen.

I remember when social media first really gained traction in multifamily and I was astonished with how much we were asking the onsite teams to do. To actually accomplish and be experts in. Like, how are they supposed to know exactly how to use all the different social media tools?

How are they expected to use them effectively and engage people? Because that's a whole different skill set. And they're still supposed to lease apartments. How are they supposed to accomplish all those things? So I think that there's so many things that we ask of the on site team in the marketing realm that really they're not trained for or don't even have the capacity for it seems like.

So tell me about what you saw as far as their pain points go and what you did to roll out solutions for that.

Nishant Phadnis: Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more. I think a lot of folks, typically, when you think about our industry, really think about the top players, right?

The large corporations that have the resources to have dedicated marketers. That cover maybe just one site or many, many sites, but that actually is the minority. The majority of our industry are small players and they have leasing agents that have to figure out marketing, but also have to figure out maintenance and package pickup and, lawn care and all of these things that they have purview over.

And one of the things that we learned is, we're not going to be able to solve their lawn care needs or their package pickup needs. But as owners start asking about, hey, how do I get on Meta or Instagram and Facebook, or even TikTok, like we wanted to be able to provide them a one stop solution where they can arguably say, oh, Rent has that covered.

They not only have a strong brand and a strong website, they have amazing complimentary solutions. And as we started packaging that and understanding the one place solution. It was a kind of a relief, a burden was removed from these individuals at the site that were responsible for so many different things.

And it gave them confidence to say, okay, yes, marketing, Rent has that covered. I can focus on retention as an example, where there might be other challenges they have to face. And so we spoke to a lot of folks, that don't have the resources nor the capital, but are still expected to operate within tight budgets, right? That's a really common nomenclature we heard that "we have a tight budget, what can you do for us?" And and I think we solve some of that pain.

Brent Williams: Obviously, AI is a big story in there's all sorts of different use cases, but marketing is especially one that AI can make a huge dent in.

So let's walk through that now, because that's a big focus for you all right now, as far as creating these tools then, like you were talking about, take things off their plate, ease the burden. So tell me how you all are approaching AI in the marketing realm.

Nishant Phadnis: Yeah, that's a great question. So let me start by communicating what we heard, right?

Because over the past two years, arguably the word AI has been used, maybe in some cases, overused. And then the theater behind AI, right? This notion that every now company is an AI company, right? And we wanted to understand how multifamily industry experts are interpreting AI and then how they're going to use it.

And what we learned through speaking to them and through qualitative surveys was that industry professionals want to use more AI in 2025. However, only 35 percent report feeling confident in using it in marketing, which spoke loudly to me, which is there's a desire, but probably a lack of education, understanding of how to use it.

So there's this solution trying to look for a problem, right? And what we did was we said, "Hey, how can we make it simple to understand?" How can we make using AI in marketing work together very effectively, and last year we launched a big campaign called Conversion AI, which was a byproduct of many different use cases of AI.

I'll go through a couple examples. For example, a lot of these new buildings that are popping up, we have a lot of new supply coming on the market, new construction. And when it comes to marketing new construction, we identify that a lot of these buildings are actually just empty, not yet staged, not yet visually appealing if you literally took it on it's face value.

And we leaned in on that and we used AI to virtually stage these bedrooms, or these amenity rooms, or the outdoor area. And we have these different mechanisms to help introduce virtual staging, which was never used before at scale. And it really helped new construction buildings.

Another good example is being able to use photo optimization. So when a renter comes to our site, we basically send or share a simple photo with them. But not every renter really is excited about a kitchen. Maybe they're not a good cook. They really want to look at the bedroom or maybe the family room.

And so we've used artificial intelligence to dynamically showcase specific photos within the property based on the user's behavior. So if you love pools, you're an outdoor person, we will show a pool photo first before we show maybe the kitchen photo or maybe the bathroom photo as an example. There's other use cases around virtual staging, voice AI is another one that we've been using for social media content generation.

A lot of these marketers are trying to figure out, how do I develop content to post on my social media pages. There's a lot of great AI that we've introduced for those marketing teams that help them dynamically create FHA compliant content, right? That's the key thing here in our industry.

Everything's FHA compliant. And those are just a couple of use cases that we we published and released last year and we're really excited to bring to market in 2025.

Brent Williams: Yeah, I think the ultra personalized search approach within the platform, like if you know that they care about these different things, then, we talk about that on site tours all the time.

We talk to them as as we're getting to know them and understand what their needs are. And then we don't always take them on the same tour every time, but we're trained as leasing consultants to show them the things that they care about most and really personalize that experience for them.

And so it's the same concept, but doing it automatically via AI, which I think is fascinating. So tell me, by doing these types of things you're making this a bit easier, like social media marketing. We talked about that before. It's difficult for them to understand what to post and how to post it in a way that's going to be most engaging, taking it off their hands.

I really think that's interesting. So where do you see the next phase going? Like, how do you all continue to push forward?

Nishant Phadnis: Yeah, I think It's still unknown, right? I think we are still in the early innings of artificial intelligence. And I think it's not just our industry, by the way, you look at other industries that are still trying to leverage this technology.

As an example, the financial service industry, there's a lot of automation around order form intake and paper. You have the healthcare industry around using AI to help their customer service and using voice AI. You could even take to the extreme in Hollywood. Are we going to start seeing AI generated movies, right?

And like these imaginations of what this technology can provide is still untapped and still unknown. So let's say that out loud, right? And then we start thinking about, okay, what are the use cases that could help? I think about content duration. You mentioned that, right?

I think that's still early innings. Review management. We've been using AI to help our clients aggregate all their thousands of reviews and simplify, and say, what are the key themes that these thousand reviews have indicated around this one property or multiple properties. Are there specific things that I can do to improve the property just simply by using artificial technology to aggregate and simplify what data has been given to individuals?

That's another good use case. That's a simple one. But then you have other ones around, is there opportunity to automate through agents? This AI agents is still pretty new, right? Is this going to help leasing agents literally manage their day to day using quote unquote virtual agents, and I'm not saying that outsourcing-wise because you have a lot of like virtual EAs out there, but they're just individuals out in, other countries.

I'm literally saying an AI agent that is trained to know who you are, your tone, your behaviors, and then start doing those remedial tasks. I do think there's an opportunity there that goes beyond marketing. It really goes around productivity of your workforce.

Brent Williams: Taco Bell just used AI for my drive through experience which I thought was fascinating.

I was like, I was sitting there going, this is amazing they actually rolled it out already. I like what you're saying about there's nothing bugs me more about AI than talking about AI in this generalistic approach where it's let's talk about AI. Well, AI, in my opinion, is very use case focused.

It's how is it actually going to be used in specific ways to do specific functions? Unless you're talking about AI from a purely technical perspective when you're saying about how are we designing AI.In reality, we're talking about how we're taking existing challenges or existing opportunities and leveraging AI to do them better, not just talking about AI in itself.

So I love that kind of approach of let's use it in a very thoughtful way to solve real world challenges or real world opportunities.

Nishant Phadnis: A hundred percent. And then the navigation, I think, is a responsibility of myself and the company to make sure that we simplify it, we introduce it in a way that is understandable, and that is practical.

Right? Because I think once you do that, usage will expand. And understanding will expand and then the clarity just comes naturally. And I think 2025 is probably going to be the year where that kind of aha understanding moment happens and then usage will explode, I think. In our industry and in many other industries, personally.

Brent Williams: So you're saying AGI, can we get AGI in 2025? That's what Sam says, right?

Nishant Phadnis: I don't know, maybe if Sam opened, guys at OpenAI, but you know, there is a lot of companies out there that are catching up. I think some of the things that, as a company at, for ourselves, like we use Google.We're a Google shop and some of the things that Google's doing to introduce AI and like Word documents and Google Sheets and email crafting and, I think it's pretty remarkable the speed of which this particular technology has evolved.

I can't even keep up. I'll be honest. And I can think of my peers.

And I'm in the space, right? It's my job to keep up and I can't even keep up. So I think there is a lot of good application that is still to be unknown and understood. And I think I'm really excited about the future.

Brent Williams: Absolutely. Well, Nishant, thank you so much for joining me today. It's been a pleasure talking with you.

Every time I see you, I just enjoy talking with you. So thank you for joining me and have a great one and cheers to a wonderful 2025.

Nishant Phadnis: Yeah, same to you Brent. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. Congrats on all your success.

Brent Williams: Thank you. Take care.