Beyond the Rent: How multifamily firms are using AI

Longtime readers of this column, meaning those of you who were around about 100 days ago, may remember that my first stab at this monthly feature was a warning about the risks of artificial intelligence to the apartment industry.

After that column, I received several follow-up emails, mainly from public relations people pitching multifamily tech platforms for my consideration.

Though I found the responses pitching AI-enabled property management platforms slightly puzzling while I was warning about the technology's dangers, since then, I have been talking to multifamily owners and operators about how they’re using artificial intelligence.

What I found wasn’t surprising: Companies of different sizes across the industry are adopting it. But among the executives I’ve spoken with, the goal isn’t to reduce headcount.

In July, Security Properties issued a press release saying it launched FirstPass, a proprietary underwriting application powered by artificial intelligence and developed entirely in-house.

In a March interview with Multifamily Dive — before FirstPass was announced — Security Properties CEO Dan Byrnes said the Seattle-based company had automated its process to analyze deals quickly.

“That [AI] has only enhanced our ability to really look at everything everywhere,” Byrnes said. “And that's going to be very exciting for us, going forward. It used to take a week to build a model. Now it takes five minutes to have the baseline model built, and then we're checking it after that.”

In August, I visited Bonaventure’s headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia, where CFO Stephen Burch told me the firm had built what it called “a company brain,” which everyone in the firm has access to. The AI recording system joins organizational meetings, but it doesn’t just provide transcriptions and summaries of what happened.

“It adds all of that context to my personal brain and into our company brain, and so I can go into my Claude, for instance and say, ‘Prepare a presentation based on everything that I've learned about opportunity zones over the past six months,’” Burch said. “It will go through all the meetings I’ve been in and cite things. We’re really enjoying it and fully embracing it here.”

With five different management companies feeding Bonaventure’s corporate staff reams of data every month, the company uses AI to review everything, run its in-house checklist, put those results in a dashboard for each property and flag issues. In the process, it allows accountants to handle more properties.

Bonaventure also uses an AI tool to find acquisition opportunities with HUD loans in specific submarkets. “It’s not always easy to find the owners of these properties,” Burch said. “It does all of this research and then comes back to us and presents it to us.”

When I spoke with Camden Property Trust CEO Alex Jessett in August, he said he wanted the REIT to lead in embracing AI. “What we are finding is that there are practical applications for AI on every line item of an income statement,” he said.

For instance, AI may help Camden’s leaders understand where property insurance claims are most likely to happen or when a water heater or HVAC system is more likely to need replacement. “If I can be proactive and get on top of that, that's millions of dollars to the bottom line,” Jessett said.

As he spoke, Jessett quickly volunteered that salaries “were the last thing” he would touch on the bottom line as the REIT rolls out AI. Instead, the goal is to make humans more efficient.

That brought me back to my first column. While I was — and still am — wondering about what AI could do to apartment demand, the industry is still figuring out what it can do with the technology.

And, at least for the time being, humans still matter.

“I refer to it [the multifamily business] as a high trust, high touch business,” Jessett said. “And by high trust, what I mean is the most precious thing to a human, other than loved ones, is their home, right? And they want to make sure that there's a human they can talk to.”

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