Automating the Routine to Elevate the Human Experience: AI Success with Arthur Kosmider and Brent Camp

And now a message from our sponsor, Flamingo. Every multifamily marketer wants to know what the next big thing will be. At the apartment department, we think that resident retention is the next big thing, which is why we're excited to have Flamingo as our podcast sponsor. Flamingo, founded by Jude Chai, is an all-in-one resident retention platform used by some of the top-performing communities in the country. And here's a fun little secret. If you see a community with 300+ online reviews and 65% plus retention, there's a good chance they're using Flamingo. From automated renewal management and resident events to amenity bookings and even an AI concierge, Flamingo brings everything together in one sleek gap that residents actually use. Learn more at gitflamingo.com. Hi, everyone, and welcome to the apartment department part two at Zillow Rentals Unlock. I'm Ann Baum, and with me as always is my co-host, Chris Johnson. And instead of one special guest, we have two special guests with us for this episode. First, we have Brent Camp. He is the vice president of leasing at Asset Living. And then we have Arthur Cozmitter, who is the head of marketing and customer experience at La Frac. So thank you both for joining us. This is so exciting because we are going to talk about something that's on everyone's minds, and that is how AI is being implemented into organizations, both from a marketing and operations standpoint. And it's really great because, you know, when we were planning this episode, both of you have very different experiences in how you've implemented AI tools at your organization. So if you guys each want to just do a little brief introduction about yourself, and then I'll go ahead and jump into questions. Absolutely. So my name is Arthur Cozmitter. I oversee a portfolio of 20,000 units between New York Metro as well as Florida, Miami. A-class assets, heavily reliant on technology, and our adventure with AI began simply by identifying a need for a more efficient, more automated process. And we've been very successful at implementing AI from the resident services side of things, focused heavily around the renewal processes, delinquency, and maintenance. And it actually helped us streamline our portfolio. That's awesome. I can't wait to dive into that more. Brent, tell us a little bit about yourself. Yeah, absolutely. I am Brent Camp, Vice President of Leasing with Asset Living. Asset Living is a third-party manager. We support 450,000 units across the nation. We started our journey in AI about four years ago, invested heavily in the lead nurturing products. And to Arthur's point, we were looking to create efficiencies. Post-COVID, I think that we've really seen a lot of uptick in lead volume on sites, expectations of site teams, and we really wanted to create efficiencies around how can we prevent burnout of our site teams, how can we automate some of the more mundane processes. So that's kind of where we started our AI journey at Asset. All right, that sounds great. Tell me a little bit about specifically, so there's a lot of talk, like we implemented AI, but specifically what does that mean? Like what processes did you automate or where were you really looking to gain efficiencies? And Arthur, you can go first. So, you know, we, as an organization, we never really jump into technology just because everybody else is doing this, right? For us, the journey to start with AI was based on the fact that there's a ton of repeatable processes that our teams are doing every day, things that we consider to be low value that could be automated, that could be created in a way that we free up our bandwidth for all of our regional and property teams to do other things. So the philosophy behind automating the routine and humanizing the exception kicked in, where we actually want our property managers and our property teams to be focused on providing the most excellent resident experience rather than dealing with tasks like following up on unpaid rent or checking in on the status of a ticket on maintenance. So that's why we really leaned into the technology piece into AI and automation, not to reduce the staff, not to make dramatic changes to our portfolios, but simply to really reprioritize what's important to the property operations. And I think that's becoming a really big theme now is, originally, I think the conversation around AI was like, oh, we can automate things to reduce headcount. And I think the story is rapidly changing to, no, we can implement AI to allow our workforce to do the right thing and really make our organizations better. So, Brent, what about you? When you say you implemented AI, what were some of the specific examples within your organization? Yeah, so we, again, started with lead nurturing and we were looking to do the same. We wanted to really figure out how can we elevate the resident experience. We weren't really looking to reduce headcount. We were just looking to really reimagine what an office site team can be capable of and really what their focus should be. And the focus should always be the resident. So, you know, we're in a time now where everyone has an expectation of that Amazon level convenience. You have to have that 24/7 customer support functionality. So that's what we're looking to solve for is just continuing to stay innovative, continuing to really stay ahead of our competition and make sure that when people are reaching out to us, we're meeting them where they're at and we're meeting that demand. And you need to add to Brent's point and I absolutely agree with you with this. One of the biggest slippery slopes you can have when you're implementing AI is this concept of like, I'm going to implement AI and because of it, I'll reduce staff by X. You're creating this unrealistic expectation that puts pressure on you and your operating teams creates this sense of me versus the machine for your property teams. And it has to be an environment in which it's collaborative and the team needs to feel that the AI coming in is not coming in to replace them, but to actually enhance their processes and make their job better. Because none of our property teams want to be the ones following up with the residents about the delinquent rent, right? They would rather have an interaction that deepens the connection to a resident. So, they actually welcome that ability of saying, "Hey, you know what? I don't need to worry about this because AI has that part covered. And let me focus on the high impact." Absolutely. What results have you seen with your teams and being able to take some of that off their plate to refocus maybe on events or the move-in process or the things that actually matter to us to actually retain our residents, which is so huge, right? Like, retention is so big. What results are you seeing? I would say it's exactly that. We brought events back. You know, during COVID, everyone kind of shuttered their doors. They quit having events. And in a few of our markets, it was kind of slow to roll that back out because everyone got used to that type of expectation of, "Well, you know, we're just here to lease apartments." No. We are doing one of the most important things that we can do, which is providing homes. And these are real humans, and we have to meet them at a human level. So, exactly that. We went back to, "Let's host resident events. Let's ensure that we're communicating timely with our residents. We're being proactive. We're delivering the best experience that they want to come back. They want to renew. They want to refer their friends." And by doing so, we created a ton of efficiencies with our entire organization. If we can increase retention, increase reputation, increase referral traffic, well, that directly impacts me as a marketer. Now, I can lean back off of having to be so reliant on advertising spin. I can reallocate that advertising spin into more resident focused events. And again, it's just perpetually increasing that reputation, perpetually increasing that retention score has helped us create and identify a lot of efficiencies. It's a great question, Chris. You know, I divide the deliverables and the KPIs of it into two categories, right? You have the hard KPIs that you can very easily measure as in the lift in delinquency collection or the reduction of the balances at the end of the month, NPS scores and quality scores on your customer service side of things, which are very easy to measure, right? You see the reporting, you see how it operates. But there's a tremendous amount of side effects, positive side effects to the introduction of a technology like AI, where all of a sudden your team has that bandwidth to do that extra walk through the property to identify conditions and improve them, right? Identify that maybe, you know what, we need to repaint certain aspects of the community. They have the time to put the reporting together, to be really thoughtful about their interaction, maybe spend that extra five minutes talking to the resident that is on the verge of renewing or not renewing, right? And create this avalanche of a side effect that's harder to measure, but actually exist and can be correlated to the rollout of AI and even internal satisfaction of the teams themselves. They actually, see I was concerned about that going into this, that they will feel threatened by the technology around them, but they actually embraced it. When we briefly suspended it for a couple of weeks, they asked, when is it coming back? Because they like it. It's part of their workflow now. That's the thing that actually makes their job easier. Right. It's much better to be working warm leads than working a mountain of cold leads. And, you know, same with delinquency. None of us like doing delinquency calls. You know, so being able to automate some of those things that aren't your favorite part of the job, so you can focus on those parts of the job that really make an impact with not only your residents, but your employees, that's, you know, it was a paramount moment for us. It was very pivotable. No, that's amazing. I mean, I can think if someone could automate me coding my credit card statement every month, like, that thing takes me like a day. It is my worst nightmare. And we hate it. And it is such a workflow that we can automate. So that's really what, again, we're looking to do is identify those efficiencies so we can focus on what matters, which is our residents. So I want to share another story with you guys. When I visit properties, I usually try to spend as much of the time that I can in the actual leasing and management offices, right? Because that gives you a little bit of an insight into how the property operates on a daily basis. You know, what's going on, how's the dynamic with the residents and such. So one of my visits down to Florida, I spent an entire day sitting in that leasing office. The amount of interruptions my property team had every five minutes. And the worst part is the residents come in for five minutes just to chat with you for a small little thing, asking you what the password to the lounge Wi-Fi is. And then by the time the team was able to reset back into the routine, they lost another 10, 15 minutes. Right. AI removed 80% of these interactions because now they have a convenient way of texting the chatbot, texting the agent and saying, "Hey, what is the Wi-Fi password for the lounge? What are the hours of opening?" So those visits to the leasing office, which are such a disruption to their workflow, reduced significantly, right? It's another of those side effects where like you could actually put a monetary value to their time on productivity, on focus, on the fact that they can actually tackle more complex tasks because they're not getting interrupted every five minutes. Absolutely. And I think it makes the site teams more accessible because as much as you have residents that are willing to go into an office and ask the questions about Wi-Fi password, you also have a set of residents that don't want to be a bother, right? And they don't want to go in the office and they don't want to ask the questions, but maybe something's bothering them. Gen Z and millennials, they want to text. They want to tell me through text what's going on. Exactly. I'm the same, there's a, I can't, I forget what hotel I just stayed at in Vegas, but I literally was able to like text them. It was amazing because there's no way I want to go down like 20 floors, go the, you know, whatever. But anyway, so I think that that's an interesting side effect too, is now you're opening yourself up to maybe a group of folks who might have, to be dramatic, suffered silently, you know, because they didn't want to be a bother. But I think that's what we're always trying to do, is just make it easy for our prospects and residents to communicate with us in their way. And AI is one of those ways that they can do it where we make it easy. And then there are some, you can't get away from it, that are going to come in and talk about their dog and their life story, and that's going to happen. But we can take some of that mundane task, even the cold leads. I mean, I think all of us as marketers want to send the best leads we can, and you just don't know when that thing comes in. It's always better to work a warm than a cold. Well, those are the conversations I want my team having. I want them to be talking about our residents pets and their family life, building rapport, building community. You know, that's the difference between four walls and a roof being an apartment complex and being a community, is being able to build that rapport. And if all we're ever communicating with them is their delinquency, work order, follow-up, the things that we can automate, then we're not having that opportunity to build that rapport. And also think about it this way, right? Like, you brought the example of Amazon before, right? The new generations that are becoming a renters, right? The 20 X years old at this point, are a completely different audience than the generations before. They don't necessarily want to talk to you in person as much. They want to be able to text you. They expect this instant gratification of like getting their answers done. And I don't think a single human can be faster than the AI answering these questions. Check in on your maintenance ticket, check in on your package status, telling you where to pay rent for the fifth time, even though you lived here for six months, right? Like, all of these things are just on the palm of your hand, right? And there's this benefit to it, where I don't want to say that the resident portals are an old technology, but they start to feel very antiquated, where now you can just text a number, text your building, and the building will tell you how much rent you own without downloading an app, logging in or clicking through links, right? It's the removal of the friction in communication that actually creates this highway, speedway of communication to our residents. We're looking for that and leasing on the front end with prospects. We absolutely should embrace this on the resident side as well. 100%, that was well put and well said. So, I agree. I have a question. When you were thinking about going back to the implementation and where to implement AI, how did you do that? I mean, did you sit down, you talked about removing friction. So, did you sit down and look at your existing workflows and processes and kind of data sets to see what might have an offer, like where friction might exist? Okay. Will you talk a little bit more about that? Yeah. So, we're a pretty large organization in that set. And when you are trying to implement a pretty complicated tech stack at scale, you really need specialists that understand that software. You need executive leadership bought into the advocacy of that. One of the biggest cruxes I see when it comes to AI implementation or really any marketing technology implementation is when it's under optimized, underutilized, it seems to always have poor performance. Well, that's relative to the implementation. If you don't have the buy-in, if you haven't built the resources to train the team on it to manage the product, to optimize the product, you're going to have an inferior product. And that's not to say the product itself is inferior. It was the implementation's make or break. So, at Asset, we restructured our marketing department about four years ago and we really focused in on the idea of creating specialists that were specialists. So, we have a dedicated marketing implementation team now that just focuses on the management implementation optimization of our marketing technology. They train our site teams. They ensure that we're monitoring, we're auditing that software stack. We're ensuring things don't disconnect because that is the reality when you're not using a proprietary tech stack. When you're plugging in all of these various platforms, things are going to break. And when they do, you have to be agile. You have to be quick to repair them. So, that's how we kind of took it on was let's invest in this by building a team that can support this. Want more from the apartment department? Find us on substack for episodes and articles delivered straight to your inbox. The educational piece resonates a lot with me because you have to remember that AI is a transformational force. It's not you're not rolling out another ILS. You're not rolling out a display screen. You're essentially undermining an entire operational workflow of communication, of technology workflow, of information flowing in. It requires a tremendous amount of thought through and planning because one of the fastest way to really take the wind of the sail of something like this is if people don't fully understand how it's going to work, how it's going to impact their day-to-day processes, if it's not integrated fully and when it's actually just kind of let go into the wild to fend for itself. We ran into this issue very early in the process where our operational team because of the nature of AI is that it runs in the background a lot. So the team doesn't really see the impact on a day-to-day because they don't know about the thousands of messages that get sent behind closed doors, behind the veil of AI. So when asked about the impact of AI they're like well you know I don't really feel it's that different. Meanwhile us on the corporate side we obviously saw right away that thousands of messages going up, the delinquency being collected faster. So there's an important component to not only initially educate but continuously show the impact, continuously bring everybody to the table, to the stakeholders and say hey here's what we've done, here's why it's working, here are the new things we've implemented because of it and that process never stops because those initiatives cannot run on autopilot. Yeah that's awesome. Yeah it's the old adage you know I mean it's not the tool it's the carpenter and when the carpenter doesn't educate themselves on how to use the tool, the tool can be ineffective but it's because of the carpenter. Yeah this hammer's broken. Yeah well you need a wrench right now. Yeah I wouldn't use a hammer where you need a wrench, I wouldn't use a hammer where you need a screwdriver. So understanding your technology and being able to train on it again it's make or break for our marketing technology. We have to understand it, we have to be able to train on it. It's the only way that you're going to get full utilization of the product. I have a question for y'all. So you've implemented, you've been running it, sounds like you have some good success. Do you notice that the lead quality has gotten better, you've gotten better, at least more people showing up for the tours because you've nurtured them better on one side and then on the resident side you just see a better resident satisfaction because they're getting answered quicker too. Can you talk about some of those KPIs that you've seen? I think that our industry overall has this bias of focusing a lot of attention on the prospect side of things. What happens is like we court them along the way, we follow up, we nurture them which is super important because we want them to get in and then they move in and we blast them with 10 different solutions, sign up for all these portals and download all of these apps. You're late on your rent. Yeah, figure it all out right along the way. And this is like the biggest miss because the residents who already are out of your property are your prime candidate to renew because nobody wants to move. No, they build communities to your point right like they create a livelihood around the places that they live in and it's so much easier for us to keep them happy and keep them going yet our industry just focuses on the next person. So what we found with a rollout of AI was because of that mundane part of the job got automated our teams are able to spend more time building these quality relationships and by result of it our customer service scores are higher, the surveys click higher, review scores are going up. I mean RAI technology actually solicits reviews and solicit is a bad word for it but like encourages reviews along the way all of a sudden you get random 2030 reviews on Google because guess what we asked right and we didn't have to force our team to ask we just yeah I reached out automatically after the service ticket that automation of like hey I'm sensing that we had a good time at the maintenance ticket level you're happy with the way we fixed it let me just slide it in there and say hey could you write a review right it's a no-brainer right like it just feels natural and AI just repeats it hundreds and hundreds of time and that's where that consistency comes in so yes I'm a true believer that technology like that actually increases your satisfaction as a resident and that will lead to a higher chance of renewal 100% no emotions with AI no I know I was just thinking like in your example like then you previously you would have to rely on a human to decipher the experience based on and they don't want to ask for reviews the same way they don't like doing collection calls of course yeah it's one of those things that make people inherently nervous to do you know it's asking someone out on a date when you're asking for a route did I do a good job did I satisfy you so yes when we can when we can generate additional reviews through AI it's incredible and I love the question that you ask because we get it all the time especially as it relates to lead nurturing do you see more leases through this product inherently the answer if I'm going to be short about it is it depends lead to tour I've seen exponentially grow when we when we implement Elise AI that is a KPI that I feel with conviction I can say pre AI to post AI we see a very large increase in lead to tour lead to lease though again it comes back down to that human element my team still got to close my team still got to provide a good experience and you know Arthur you made the point earlier when we can cut out the mundane they can be on the property more they can be at the door opening and greeting that door they can be walking the property to ensure that tour path is immaculate making sure we create a good first impression that inherently leads to the higher lease conversion but you have to have a team that has the right focus to be able to to see that lease increase I agree the other thing I just want to touch on this with AI as I envision it being able to prepare for the tour and take the prospect on the tour that they want to see we're starting to think about do we actually need to have the same tour path or can we think about you don't think about maybe they don't know so much conviction and I'm not yeah but I'm just saying like you don't maybe they don't care about the poor the gym right you ask those questions and it's not I'm not trying to get into the fair housing legal piece of it right I'm just saying what does this person actually care about when they come here do they want to see the balcony do they want to see all the amenities maybe they only care about the parking because they have qualifying their interests exactly and then you show them that and that's where the AI can help you need more time for that exactly and that's what the AI is you're giving that extra five minutes that the person doesn't frantically run from one tour to the other and to send an email to make a phone call you're creating this bandwidth in this little room for the person where they can connect to be able to connect well I have one comment on the leasing piece even though we're not utilizing AI today which we're working on you know I think one of the best experiences you can do to really see the impact on of AI in leasing is to get into a market where some properties will have AI and some of them will not and try to shop them just try to reach out to every single one of them through an ILS one of the biggest determinant of success in leasing process is how quickly you get back to the process yep yep you know our industry benchmark for my team is around 35 40 minutes to get back to every single prospect which is relatively good AI will do this in under two minutes under five minutes right and in a lot of cases in urban markets where there's a lot of competition the first three communities that get back to a prospect usually get the tour absolutely but if you waste if you wait an hour or an hour and a half the chances are that they will not even consider it because they already scheduled their tours for the day they're already going to the properties so having an AI engine to handle this initial interaction hey let me get you through the door can I answer any questions can I nurture this a little right creates this environment that shows that one the property is organized the property has their stack together and they care about the prospects to provide that experience opens the door for them to create a hot qualified lead right away and even even if it does if it doesn't become a scheduled tour at least they created that interactions for the team to sweep sweep in and start communicating so it absolutely contributes to it but to Grand's point the actual closing conversion is still with the team people that's your tour that's your visit that's the experience you'll have but you're increasing your chances of actually getting those doors step yeah you're getting someone in the door and they know more people more people in the door helps it's good more people in the door higher you're so right about that stat though you need to be in that top three high intent mindset because in 2025 moving into 2026 people are not touring five or six communities they have too many marketplaces they have too many ways to discover communities online you have to be in that top three consideration because they are going to choose between those they're not going to continue to tour and tour and tour they're going to narrow down their search they're going to go make sure the messaging they saw online through our listings through our website aligns with what they're seeing in person then they're going to make that decision or they're going to use an AI search engine and you might not even show up I mean that's because it would might become even more competitive and so you're right like that window is shrinking because more and more information is is available absolutely did you have the has your partner so when I think about implementing AI or technology did you take suggestions from your AI partner in terms of maybe shifting some of your best practices and what I mean by that is maybe from a delinquency reach out maybe they recommended changing the time frame with in which you reached out or does that make sense like did they allow you to kind of change your best practices for the better yes so what we you know I'm a big fan of on one hand customizing things along the way but on the other hand actually learning from the best experiences in the industry right like we don't have a monopoly of always having the right way sometimes we get in our own way of like you know creating something super custom that ends up being super complicated so one of the first questions I've asked to my to the partner of ours on AI was teach me your ways show me your gold standards and tell me if my process today is inefficient and I'm willing to change it so we've actually overhauled our renewal process where we used to generate them significantly less optimized and significantly less batched and when we worked with with at least AI they ended up providing us with the best practice on how to do this in the system the way they would recommend that it actually resulted in a very automated process so I strongly encourage you when you begin your journeys on AI when you start thinking about these processes to be open minded that even though you've done something one way for the last x number of years there's probably some efficiency that you can learn so ask those questions yeah I would agree but I'd like to offer a counterpoint too I mean we when we first started implementing lead nurturing the way that we were being trained on how to implement the software and utilize the software was don't take over this lead until they scheduled the tour that's the handoff point for your site teams we actually worked with our AI provider at least I had to say hey we actually don't like our site teams being trained on that we would love for this product to you know be doing follow-up in the evenings be doing follow-up on the weekends when we're closed but if I see activity happening overnight the first thing I want my site team to do is pick up that phone in the morning confirm what they were saying in that conversation confirm that tour whatever the case but that's what I really loved about our relationship with Elise is they listened to that and they actually changed their structure in the way that they trained and implemented their product with our site team so I think it works both ways we did learn some valuable lessons from them but we were also able to give them some critical feedback of how we would like to see the product work for our site teams and in our best practices that's amazing I think that they've been very transparent about that as a as a partner that that's something that they do is they're they're learning from from their operators just as much as we're learning from them we are almost out of time which I can't believe I know it's unbelievable I'm so sad again I always say that I'm like I think we have to just we have to do this again can't we just get on quarterly like we can do it on zoom friends no um but Arthur Brent if you can just leave us with any last thoughts for marketers who are thinking about implementing AI starting their AI journey anything that you want to leave our listeners with so look AI is here to stay AI is a technology that just like internet revolutionized the way we used to advertise apartments in apartment booklets in supermarkets all of a sudden it became all online AI inevitably will be part of our journey so if you're a marketer thinking about AI or you're considering AI today hone in on your skills learn more there's different ways and different processes of AI that will be part of it what we've discussed today was the operational side of things there's also AI where I anticipate that in the next two or three years there's going to be a search engine version of AI that we will as marketer have to manage because that's where the younger generation will search for apartments right so that's going to be the next frontier and then there's also the utilization of AI for you as a marketing professional because look I don't think that AI is going to replace our jobs but somebody who was a marketer is skilled in utilizing AI being 10 xing their skills along the way will definitely be a competition to you so I strongly recommend us as marketers as an industry to really embrace it and and and just AI is here to stay I agree I would say as a marketer don't try to silo this into marketing or a technology department within your organization this is impacting every single branch of our organization and you have to get that buy-in and you have to get that advocacy from every single group because it makes that large of an impact so I would say you know make sure you're collaborating with your operational counterparts make sure you're collaborating honestly with legal and compliance to ensure that you're moving in the right direction you're you're you're putting up the proper safety wells that's something we worked early on with alisa is to ensure you know we we understand the safety parameters you put in place we're going to add extra guard rails just to ensure you know we are staying compliant we are doing the right thing by our residents so it's got to be a collaborative effort within your organization you have to have buy-in across the organization but I agree with Arthur's point it's here to stay trend setters trend innovators innovate so you know keep your finger on the pulse keep moving forward and keep that change enthusiasm top of mind with your organization that the sooner you can adopt this the sooner you can master these products the better your communities are going to be off for it I think that sounds wonderful Chris any last thoughts I mean I think I'm just going out like five let's say like five years with the way that it's moving I picture having like a groundskeeper 24/7 robotics with AI yeah things like that that is really going to change our change how we're doing business so we're just at the found date we're just at the found date we're like transforming yeah it's business I think so yeah it's happening so fast and we're going to be the we're not going to adopt it first yeah I mean there's already companies doing it so we're going to you know we kind of fall along but I just I think that we're going to get robotics in there I don't think for everything but on the maintenance side I think there's going to be something there yeah and before long skynet so right you know it's well it's funny you pitched that we were we were I know we're running out of time here but we were having a very lively team chat the other day and I made the comment to my group and said you know I am so tired of being told of all these new AI agents and I'm going to date myself with this reference because it happened like 10 years ago but I want a hologram property manager and I want it to be programmatic I want hologram tupac who's not paying their rent when hologram tupac comes knocking at your door right so maybe that's the next venture is we don't need physical people we're just going to have a hologram that would be a I think hologram property managers would be very very well a hologram tupac was at a couple festivals you know exactly yeah that was a thing for a while we'll remember this when you become famous for hologram you start your own technology hologram company Arthur Brent we can't thank you enough this was such a wonderful conversation we've really enjoyed getting to spend time with both of you it's been really wonderful enlightening inspiring all the things thank you to our audience thank you to Chris of course thank you to Carlos our producer thank you to flamingo our sponsor and until next time this has been the apartment department