AI: AN EFFECTIVE SUBSTITUTE FOR HUMANS IN PROPERTY MANAGEMENT?
From agriculture to transportation, artificial intelligence may very well be taking over all facets of human life as we know it. This array of applications shows no sign of becoming static and has even wormed its way into surprising fields. One such example would be property management.
Now, we haven’t yet reached the level of AI which can flawlessly mimic human behavior, but we have crossed a lot of milestones in the field with the application of machine learning, deep learning, and computer vision among others. With these achievements, AI has developed to a reliable enough stage and has even begun to replace humans in some areas.
What is Property Management?
To see the ways in which AI can and has revolutionized the industry, we need to understand what exactly we’re dealing with here. Not to be confused with the closely related real estate, property management is involved with not just the sale, but everything else you can consider when dealing with a housing property.
A property manager takes charge of all aspects of your house including plumbing, security, and managing tenants. The essential take control of all the nitty-gritty aspects of home management, while the homeowners can kick back and relax.
While property management is distinctly different from real estate, they are both so intertwined that it would be impossible to speak about the breakthroughs in one without mentioning the other.
From the explanation above, it might seem like intimate human interaction is necessary for a successful venture. But this may not be the case after all.
As with all other walks of life, AI rears its nosy head here to provide alternatives in security, touring, or customer service.
Here are various ways in which AI has proven to be helpful with real estate, particularly property management.
Smart Response Systems
To get the most obvious out of the way, artificial intelligence can be used to aid tenants in their inquires or complaints. At any time of any day, said tenants can lay out their complaints and get a solution almost immediately. This is certainly an advantage over dealing with human agents who aren’t certain to be always available.
One such solution available here is Booking Ninjas PMS. The BookingNinjas application is a unique solution. It offers the above assistance and does much more. It assists in performing highly intelligent tasks like data analysis, spotting of business trends and opportunities, assisting in improved communications, and helping in marketing campaigns and customer engagement. We have developed useful partnerships with reputable brands such as Salesforce and Twilio in order to provide improved functionalities for our application users. One of such functionalities is the Einstein Analytics, an AI-powered tool that assists businesses in highly intelligent operations and analyzes data to ensure efficiency boost.
A good property management application should give its users high-level functionalities in line with the 4th industrial revolution. This means that a PMS should think intelligently for itself, providing real-time value to a business and not just generic programmable functions. It should be more than just an online calculator, or a task scheduler – it should scrutinize your data, perform intelligent analysis for effective business operations. It should also assist in customer handling and communications through various channels and also provide marketing advice to the publicity team. A good PMS should provide features that would help the user perform various functions without having to move from one application to another. For achieving that, it could provide a platform wherein users can integrate other applications from a reliable source into one big system. Such a reliable source should be one that hosts a lot of useful applications; one reliable source could be the AppExchange store, which you may be familiar with already.
AI-Based Tours
Another aspect which has begun to experience the replacement of humans by AI is the use of autonomous robots to perform the roles of agents on a house tour. This has been brought into fruition with Zenplace robots. Equipped with a mounted, movable display, these robots act as a point of contact between the to-be renters and the remote agents who are also capable of controlling the robot’s movement. Independently from the human operator, the robot is capable of rendering information like prices and neighborhood details.
In the coming years, you should expect more companies to employ such droids.
Then there’ are virtual tours. Ever wanted to explore all the corners of your soon to be residence without taking a step from your current home?
Well, this is now a dream of the past. Zillow 3D Home is a unique mix of AI and VR technologies to create and render virtual representations of houses. All that’s needed is an iOS device. The software stitches together captured images to generated the 3D environment. With this, homeowners are able to share the experience of exploring their houses to potential customers all over the world, and interested parties can also have the chance to immersively check out new houses without leaving the comfort of their homes. It’s a win-win for both ends, really.
Perhaps we may soon see the combination of both technologies. Imagine being able to explore your next home in virtual reality with your very own robot guide.
Buffing up Security
Human guards may soon become a relic as artificial intelligence makes its way into the security of households.
From the most recent available statistics, about 20% of American households use security cameras.
But with the advent of AI assistants in the home, it is estimated that the number of households with fully automated AI systems will be just under 50%.
FrontPoint and Simplisafe are two companies at the forefront of home security that have begun to implement AI into their systems. With these systems, you’ll be able to monitor all that’s going on in your home while you’re away, and the authorities can also be alerted autonomously if any intrusion is detected. They can also be integrated with other AI platforms such as Alexa and Google Home to provide a more effective experience.
Beyond the specialized security systems, even general-purpose home AIs such as Apple’s Siri and the aforementioned Alexa and Google Home can be used to tighten up security in the household.
Despite the current use of AI in home security, they are still a lot of untapped potentials. It has been predicted that smart homes in the future will be able to remember the behaviors of legitimate residents and detect intruders based on anomalous habits such as a variation in footsteps. This can even be employed further to save the lives of the occupants when strange behavior is noticed by alerting emergency services.
Challenges Faced by AI in the Industry
There is currently no truly complete AI package for property management. Rather, various aspects are performed by different services. This may either be seen as a pro or a con. For those who want a true all-in-one solution, I’m afraid AI won’t be able to solve your needs yet.
On the flip side, the existence of different services ensures there are different points of failure as the shortcoming of one doesn’t affect the others greatly. This creates a distributed system of sorts.
Probably the greatest challenge against AI in any field, and by extension property management is the reluctance of the current workforce to accept it. Some feel the old ways are the best and computers should never replace humans.
So is AI Ready to Usurp Humans Yet?
Evidently, AI has accomplished quite a lot in such little time, but it still has a long way to go before it can completely outperform humans.
At its current state, AI seems to be best suited as a middleman or at most, a complement to human agents. It’s useful for the trivial and repetitive tasks, yet it is no match for now in the areas which require that human touch.
If you ever need someone to charm that potential new tenant, a good old-fashioned human being would be your best bet.
At the end of the day, there still remains a world for humans and AI to coexist.
About us
The Booking Ninjas system combines a property management system (PMS) and a customer relationship management (CRM) system to give our users the ability to have a complete experience in one platform. Such a system can only be successful if built on the appropriately powerful platform fit for it.
With that in mind, we can genuinely assure you of the best digital management experience available. We plan to move in ways that guarantee our vision, which is to be the leading provider of guest targeted digital solutions in the hospitality industry. The only to get there is to provide long-term beneficial digital solutions to all our users.
