While the capabilities of AI seem limitless, there are four key areas where McKinsey and Company, a leading consulting firm, suggests multifamily businesses focus on first. They call them the four Cs, customer engagement, creation, concision, and coding solutions.

In McKinsey’s work with AI, they have “seen real estate companies gain 10 percent or more in net operating income through more efficient operating models, stronger customer experience, tenant retention, new revenue streams, and smarter asset selection.”

All of the four C’s might not be ready to use in all environments right now, but we’ll give you a little context on what McKinsey means.

• Customer engagement: Conversational, AI powered chatbots
• Creation: Generative AI creating net-new content
• Concision: Using generative AI to tighten/improve something you’ve written
• Coding solutions: Using AI to generate new code

For the most part, we will be focusing our discussion in this guide mostly on the first two of the Four C’s, while lightly touching on the third. At this point, using AI to aid in coding solutions is not something that most multifamily businesses would make use of.

Generative AI use cases

Currently, there are a number of generative AI use cases that can be applied to the multifamily industry. Below we highlight the low hanging fruit that most businesses should be able to take advantage of.

Social media. AI can be used to write abstracts or one-liners for social posts based on press releases or other content you’ve produced.

Review response. Make sure that every review you receive, whether positive or negative, receives a quality, detailed response.

Chatbots. Generative AI chatbots act as the first point of contact for prospects and guide them through the leasing process and in some cases can identify when human intervention is needed to respond to more complex leasing questions.

Create virtual reality tours. Generative AI has the ability to create virtual reality tours of units and show what they would look like with different finishes, furniture, or appliances. This also opens up the opportunity for ancillary revenue by partnering with home goods stores for purchase from within the tour.

Run market analysis. Have generative AI run a market analysis to target potential acquisitions or markets to consider expanding into. For example, instead of having to conduct macroanalysis to identify which markets will be the best fit for you and then doing time consuming, granular work of identifying potential properties that are or could be available in those markets, you can just type a prompt into the generative AI tool and ask a question like, “Which markets in Texas have the highest probability for growth in the multifamily industry and what are the top 10 properties in those markets that are currently available?”

How Entrata is building AI across its entire product set

Entrata has had its eyes trained on AI for some time, recognizing early how important it would become. This can be seen in the features that have already been added and some that are planned for future releases, these include:

Entrata REDD: REDD is Entrata’s AI chatbot that acts as your leasing team’s assistant. It can answer basic leasing questions, confirm pricing and availability, and schedule apartment tours, saving site teams countless hours per year that can be used to focus on delivering a better experience to residents.

Generative AI: Whether you need to draft emails to residents or prospects or create content that can be used in social media, drip campaigns, and the message center about what’s going on in your community, all you need to do is provide a prompt for what you’re wanting to write, how long you want it to be, the tone, etc. and the content will be created instantly. One of the biggest benefits of this, beyond the time savings, is it will ensure consistency in voice, no matter who is responsible for entering the prompt. And because this tool is built by Entrata and not a more broad based tool like ChatGPT, it will talk like a property manager that is familiar with the ins and outs and jargon of the multifamily industry.

Automated review response: Whenever you receive a new review, it will be ingested into Entrata and with the push of a button, you can create a response to that review. Responding to reviews both negative and positive is a good way to show potential residents that you care about the experience you’re delivering and are willing to take feedback seriously.

Learn more

To learn more about how to implement generative AI at your properties, check out our latest ebook, Generative AI 101.