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How To Identify AI Leasing Products Worth Using

How To Identify AI Leasing Products Worth Using

Breaking news, but not really. AI Leasing products continue to sweep the world and...! change our lives for the better? Sometimes, but usually not. AI is EVERYWHERE these days. It comes preloaded on your new cell phone, your email provider keeps prompting you to enable the newest AI features, and one day, in the not too distant future, "Google it" will be replaced with "Ask ChatGPT".

When we say AI these days we mean Generative AI. Generative AI is sweeping the world and multifamily is not immune to this tidal wave of innovation seen by the influx of AI Leasing tools and platforms. Which is GREAT! But as Uncle Ben says, "With great power comes great responsibility" 

In an effort to focus our post here a bit, let's get specific. Let's talk about AI in multifamily and how it affects 1) our professional lives 2) the lives of our prospective renters and 3) the lives of our residents.

AI Leasing & ChatBots In Our Professional Lives

Before we can get into what "good" and "not so good" AI is, we have to briefly touch on the 2 main ways we see AI show up in our everyday *professional lives. Leasing AI falls under the same "usefulness" criteria as all AI, so let's start with AI ChatBots.

Think of the ChatGPT app on your phone. You can ask it anything! In my experience there is always an evolution of ChatGPT use that we all go through. The first evolution is when we treat ChatGPT like Google. This is actually one of the things that gets us in the most trouble. The second evolution is when we start treating ChatGPT like our own personal assistant that knows how to do A LOT of things.

Treating ChatGPT Like Google

Let's ask ChatGPT an AI Leasing question

"What are the average rent prices in the Phoenix Metro market for apartment homes?"

Here is what we got back (asked and answered on January 10th 2025): "As of January 2025, the median rent for all apartment types in the Phoenix, AZ metro area is approximately $1,900 per month..."

Okay on face value, this seems great. ChatGPT even shows me all of the sources it used to get this answer. On the surface it looks reliable: Zillow, Zumper, Apartments.com, Redfin, RentCafe. I mean these are some reliable reporters of data. But lets dig in a little.

This article it used by Apartments.com lists the average rent as $1,325/month

This article it used by Zillow says the median rent is $1,900/month

This article from Rent.com lists average rent for Studio, 1 Bedroom, and 2 Bedroom as $1,193, $1,380, and $1,599 respectively.

There are a few major issues here. First of all, some of these articles discuss averages while others discuss median. Which one did you want? And which one did ChatGPT use? It looks like ChatGPT just went with the Zillow number, is this right? Maybe, maybe not.

This is a simple example of the dangers of leveraging AI to answer questions that seem simple on the surface but are actually deeply complex. If you work at a property management company and a client is asking you to help price rent for a new building, heaven forbid you ask ChatGPT... There is a reason market surveys exist and companies like ApartmentIQ and Radix are loved by many professionals in the multifamily space.

Now, allowing ChatGPT to summarize a series of Google searches for you can be a fine thing. The key here is that the summarization doesn't require in-depth industry specific knowledge. So what is a good example of a ChatGPT question. Here are a few examples:

  • "Create a clever name for my Taco Tuesday resident event"
  • "Rewrite my email to sound more professional"
  • "Give me some ideas I can use to improve my property website"

Helpful? Sure. Life changing? No.

Treating ChatGPT Like Our Own In House Expert "Do-er"

The "Do-er" part of this is critical. We start peeking into this realm when we ask ChatGPT to rewrite our emails. Let's give our AI Leasing tool a task that would normally take us a large amount of time, and get it done quickly and probably better than we would have done it ourselves.

As we transition away from asking ChatGPT questions and transition more into assigning ChatGPT tasks, we are moving closer to the world of improving our professional lives and finding powerful uses for AI.

Let's give an example here: Let's say you sent a survey to all your residents. You asked them what residents events they'd like to see most. You want to use these 540 responses to create a resident event calendar for the year. This could take a lot of time, but it doesn't have to! Let's upload the results into ChatGPT, ask ChatGPT to group responses into similar categories, and use the data to create monthly resident events for 2025 that the majority of residents will like.

Voilà!

Helpful? Yes. Life Changing? We are getting there!

Moving Away From Tasks and Toward Outcomes with AI

In our last example above we started getting A LOT closer to making a real impact on our professional lives by using AI. However, we can do even better. The first step toward reaching the next level of AI implementation is switching our thinking. We need to move away from thinking of "tasks" we can use AI to do and start thinking of "outcomes" we want AI to drive.

This is critical.

We must focus on outcomes not tasks to truly evolve to the next stage of AI implementation.

So let's continue without example from above. We used AI to complete the task of analyzing a survey to generate a community event calendar. How would we look at this from an outcome lens instead of a task lens? The outcome we want is to increase resident satisfaction and resident retention.

Finally we have arrived at the title of this article: "How To Identify AI Products Worth Using". To do this, we find products that drive outcomes, from A to Z our AI products should do ALL the steps to drive toward the outcome we need.

Here is how we at Nurture Boss think about solving this problem. The technology we implement should be capable of gathering the data it needs, making decisions on action steps, orchestrate and execute that action, and surface results and outcomes to the user.

  1. Robust integrations that allow the AI technology the access it needs to resident data
  2. An understanding of the resident lifecycle and the stages that make it up
  3. Start from day one by communicating and building relationships with each resident
  4. Creating open lines of communication to ensure residents have access to AI at all times to facilitate tasks and answer questions
  5. Identifying what is going well and not going well for each resident
  6. Proactively address pain points (important note here: AI knows when it is time to tag in a human!)
  7. Alter communication cadence, content, and channel based on ongoing assessment of resident satisfaction on the "per resident" level
  8. Drive more reviews from happy residents and more hands of communication for unhappy residents
  9. Report back to management, on a regular basis, the status of resident satisfaction and flag any high priority items

Now we're talking. How far we've come from asking ChatGPT to write us a poem...

This kind of robust environment and outcome focused mission is what separates clever AI products from the life changing ones.

AI Leasing Summary

AI Leasing tools and AI in general is here and it is here to stay. Molding AI into something that changes our professional lives, and the lives of our residents for the better is our responsibility. Here are a few tips and tricks that may help you along the journey!

  • Don't treat AI like Google
  • Don't ask general AI models (e.g. ChatGPT) questions that require detailed industry knowledge
  • It's OK to start your journey by using AI for task completion
  • Push yourself to start thinking about outcomes AI can help drive
  • When identify AI products to use at your properties, dig in to the lifecycle of the software and ensure outcomes are the primary focus and goal