Whether we’re ready or not, artificial intelligence is forcing multifamily teams to rethink even the most fundamental parts of their day to day operations. From automating resident communication to providing increased visibility into the efficacy of marketing efforts, AI-powered tools like ChatGPT are helping property managers, leasing teams, and marketing professionals work more efficiently by automating high-volume, low-value tasks. But while almost everyone has heard of ChatGPT by now, many multifamily leaders are still unsure of the best way to transition generative AI tools from “novelty” to “need to have” in their tech stacks. Fortunately, EliseAI is here to help demystify AI for the multifamily industry.
In our most recent webinar, “Introduction to ChatGPT for Multifamily Leaders,” Evan Lee, Strategy and Business Operations Manager at EliseAI, walked through the fundamentals of ChatGPT, broke down some top multifamily use cases and shared practical strategies for maximizing the impact of generative AI tools. Here are key takeaways from the session, including actionable ways to use ChatGPT to save time, increase operational consistency, and enhance efficiency across both onsite and corporate teams. Let’s dive in.
.svg)
The Fundamentals of ChatGPT for Multifamily: What You Need to Know
At its core, ChatGPT is a powerful AI model that generates human-like text in response to user prompts. The technology behind it, called a Generative Pre-trained Transformer (or GPT, in case you’re wondering how they came up with “ChatGPT”), allows the AI to recognize patterns in language and produce relevant, contextual responses. While most ChatGPT users leverage it for simple tasks like answering simple questions or drafting professional emails, they’re only scratching the surface of the potential uses of generative AI.
Understanding how ChatGPT processes prompts, or user instructions, and tokens, or the units of text it analyzes, is critical for optimizing its output. A vague prompt will yield a generic response, while a specific, well-structured prompt can generate tailored, high-quality content. For multifamily professionals, this means both learning how to specifically ask ChatGPT the right questions, and what context you need to provide in order to get the best possible outputs. As the old expression goes, “garbage in, garbage out,” and it’s no different with generative AI.
How Multifamily Leaders Can Use ChatGPT to Work Smarter, Not Harder
Multifamily professionals are used to juggling a high volume of tasks every day, whether responding to resident inquiries, following up with prospects after tours, or sending renewal offers. ChatGPT has a huge amount of potential to lighten the load by automating the routine, low-value tasks that eat up many a property manager’s day, while also accelerating the pace at which you’re able to generate new content. Here’s four key use cases we see multifamily professionals leveraging generative AI for in their day to day roles:
- Generating Documents & Text: Generative AI can help you draft property listings, SOPs, marketing emails, social media content, and resident newsletters while maintaining a consistent brand voice through effective prompting.
- Brainstorming & Idea Generation: Generative AI can quickly generate creative event ideas, marketing strategies, and resident engagement initiatives with just a few prompts.
- Data Analysis & Research: Uploading spreadsheets with leasing and conversion data to ChatGPT can help you quickly extract actionable insights and analyze trends for reporting purposes and performance optimization.
- Automating Manual Workflows: Leveraging new tools like OpenAI’s Operator model can reduce the time you have to spend handling low value administrative tasks, freeing team members up to focus on high value work like touring or assisting with move-ins.
Multifamily professionals who successfully leverage ChatGPT in their daily roles can expect to see significant time savings, particularly in regards to drafting, researching, and organizing information that otherwise would have been painstakingly manual and repetitive.
ChatGPT’s Advanced Features: Going Beyond Basic Chat
If you ask most multifamily professionals what ChatGPT is, they’d probably be able to tell you about the basics of GPT-4 and the fact it’s a text-based generative AI tool. However, OpenAI is more than a one trick pony, and has continued to develop new tools and capabilities that have myriad applications for the multifamily industry. Some of the most notable features or new tools OpenAI has released include:
- Canvas: A newly released document-editing tool that allows users to refine and revise text with in-line suggestions. This ability to draft and work directly within the ChatGPT platform is ideal for drafting SOPs, resident communications, and marketing copy.
- Projects: Projects is OpenAI’s version of a workspace for organizing large-scale initiatives. Multifamily teams can upload documents, provide detailed instructions, and manage multiple related chats for more effective collaborative work with AI, rather than working across multiple platforms.
- Deep Research: One of OpenAI’s newest tools, Deep Research is a high-level research tool that scans the internet and synthesizes information to build comprehensive reports. Potential applications of Deep Research include researching market trends, analyzing competitor positioning and market share, and staying up to date with regulatory updates.
- Operator: Another of OpenAI’s newest releases, Operator is a powerful automation agent that can execute web-based tasks on behalf of the user. The potential applications for Operator are endless, so whether you want to connect with industry contacts on LinkedIn en masse, compile data from online sources, mystery shop your communities, or scrape competitor websites, Operator can do it.
By leveraging these advanced features and tools beyond just the basic ChatGPT, multifamily leaders can progress past basic AI-generated content and start using AI as an operational force-multiplying tool that enables you to make better decisions, get more done faster, and automate the most tedious parts of your day to day.
Prompting Best Practices: How to Get the Best Responses from ChatGPT for Multifamily
One of the most important skills when using ChatGPT is effective prompting. Depending on how you frame your requests, you could either receive precise, actionable, accurate content or a paragraph of generic AI word soup. Here are four key techniques we recommend multifamily professionals try to utilize if you’re looking to improve the quality of your ChatGPT responses:
- Role-Based Prompting: Asking ChatGPT to respond as a specific stakeholder (e.g., “Act as a leasing manager at a Class A property in New York City”) helps generate more relevant and contextual answers.
- Few-Shot Learning: Providing examples, either by uploading files or within the prompt itself, can help ChatGPT to mirror a specific tone, format, or structure.
- Step-by-Step Reasoning: Requesting a detailed breakdown of ChatGPT’s thought process ensures clarity and allows users to validate the AI’s logic before using the AI’s outputs. Newer ChatGPT models like o1 and o3-mini openly share their reasoning at the beginning of their output.
- Format Enforcement: Directing ChatGPT to structure responses in tables, bulleted lists, or reports can make the outputs more digestible and actionable, depending on the use case you’re looking to solve.
By implementing these prompting strategies, multifamily leaders can ensure they’re getting the most valuable and relevant responses from ChatGPT every time.
ChatGPT for Multifamily vs. Conversational AI: What’s the Difference?
While ChatGPT is a powerful content creation and automation tool, it’s important to recognize that it’s not the same as conversational AI solutions purpose built for the multifamily industry. ChatGPT provides general AI assistance, but it does not integrate with property management software (PMS) or customer relationship management (CRM) systems.
EliseAI’s multifamily-specific conversational AI is built with direct PMS and CRM integration, enabling automated responses to leads and residents based on real-time property data. Unlike generic AI models, EliseAI leverages specific multifamily datasets to ensure our responses are accurate and actionable, eliminating the need for manual oversight and automating communication workflows across every touchpoint in the resident journey. With that in mind, multifamily teams looking to automate actual resident and leasing conversations should look for a purpose built multifamily AI solution like EliseAI’s products.
Improving Operational Efficiency with AI and Automation
Using ChatGPT is a great start for multifamily teams looking to improve their operating efficiency, automate tedious communications, and automate time-consuming tasks. But at EliseAI we’re taking AI even further for the multifamily industry, building advanced conversational AI that’s designed specifically for the workflows, organizational models, and pain points of fee managers and owner/operators alike. Our AI-powered leasing and resident automation tools handle communication at every stage of the customer journey, freeing your teams from the hamster wheel of high volume, low value tasks and enabling them to pursue meaningful strategic work. If you’re ready to see how AI can transform your operations, get in touch with the EliseAI team today.