Why do people set out to become community managers? Maybe it’s the prospect of a hands-on, people-focused career that allows you to put your social skills to work. Or maybe it’s opportunities for advancement in an in-demand industry. One reason that certainly doesn’t drive people to be community managers is the endless amount of repetitive administrative work. Whether responding to prospect inquiries, drafting communications for residents, or following up after a tour, one thing is clear—the world of a community manager is one filled with transactional communication. Fortunately, AI is ushering in a seismic shift in property management, allowing community managers to transition from administrators to strategists.
AI enables community managers to take the next step in their careers by automating the menial work that weighs them down, letting community managers hop off the hamster wheel of transactional communication and into the strategy seat. With this transition from administrator to strategist comes a whole new host of opportunities for strategic initiatives and improvements that can help improve resident satisfaction, leasing performance, and competitive positioning. Let’s dive into some of these new strategic opportunities that AI is unlocking for community managers, offering them new chances for career development and new ways they can add value onsite.
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Generating Operational and Competitive Insights Via Mystery Shopping
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Instead of spending the whole day responding to repetitive prospect and resident messages, community managers who use AI to automate these conversations now have an opportunity to put the shoe on the other foot and mystery shop both their own communities and their competitive set for insights and improvements. By measuring average response times and quality of answers from both their management company and other fee managers in the area, strategic community managers can work their learnings and insights into upskilling opportunities for their agents as well as into their competitive positioning. Beyond the valuable information you’re gathering, delegating mystery shopping to community managers also allows operators to terminate their pricey mystery shopping contracts with third-party vendors (which can easily stretch into six figures, depending on portfolio size) as part of a further AI-driven tech stack reduction effort.
In the meantime, if you’re looking for free VoiceAI-powered mystery shopping services, just reach out to EliseAI.
Competitive Pricing Intelligence and Analysis
With deliberations over the potentially anti-competitive nature of algorithmic pricing software ongoing, many operators are keeping an eye on the validity of using tools for pricing recommendations. Keeping that in mind, this represents a new opportunity for community managers to move from admin to strategist when it comes to competitive pricing and analysis. Strategy-focused community managers can spend time evaluating the way comparatively positioned communities are priced in the area, analyzing amenities, asset class, availability, and cost to identify opportunities for competitive repositioning or repricing. Depending on these factors, you may find certain units are underpriced, overpriced, or need to be refreshed to stay up to par in the market. Now that AI handles day to day menial tasks at your communities, community managers have the chance to expand their gaze outward to get a better understanding of overall market trends and conditions, rather than staying bogged down in transactional communications.
Mapping and Improving the Customer Journey
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How many touch points does the average prospect receive at your communities once they’ve been on a tour? What’s the frequency of your outreach? Where are leads falling out of your leasing funnel, and how can you stop it?
Instead of wondering the answer to these questions while they send hundreds of emails a day, AI gives community managers time back to actually deep dive into the customer journey and uncover the answers to these questions. Going a step beyond mystery shopping, community managers can stress test the tour scheduling, touring, and application processes at your communities, identifying blockers that could lead to prospect drop offs that hurt conversion rates and negatively impact NOI. Mapping the entire customer journey, from first touchpoint to move-in, gives you insights into prospects that you can then leverage to improve conversion rates, in conjunction with AI lead nurturing.
Your learnings from auditing the customer journey can also help you optimize the performance of your AI leasing assistant. By consistently testing your AI across the leasing journey, you identify opportunities to add new information into your AI’s knowledge bank to allow it to better serve residents and prospects alike. If, for example, you ask your AI about the newly installed EV chargers in your garage and see it hasn’t ingested that information yet, you can add it in to ensure the next time a prospect asks about EV chargers that it can reply accurately.
Conducting Site Walks and Boosting Curb Appeal
In a perfect world, community managers would conduct a site walk first thing every morning when they arrive at the community they manage to make sure the property is in great shape to be shown. The sad reality is that most community managers spend the first hour of their day cleaning out their inboxes, rather than cleaning up their communities. Deploying AI to automate prospect and resident communications 24 hours a day allows you to flip the script, giving your community managers time back to conduct those all important site walks that can boost curb appeal and make sure your community is putting its best foot forward. Now that they come into a calendar full of tours rather than an inbox full of emails, the strategy-oriented community manager can focus on doing everything they can to close deals, rather than wasting the early hours of every day on manual follow-ups. A savvy operator could also in theory have their community managers come in an hour later, saving payroll without negatively impacting service quality.
AI Auditing, Management, and Improvement
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A lot of operators assume deploying AI is as easy as flipping a switch, but Jacob Kosior, VP of Client Services at EliseAI and former VP of Centralized Services at Cardinal Group Management, urges property management teams to resist falling into that mindset. Instead, Jacob encourages operators to think about AI products as small, motivated college students who still need coaching to improve over time. The best people to train your AI? Those strategy-minded community managers who no longer have to spend their days in the transactional communication loop.
As AI allows community managers to shift from administrators to strategists, adding AI management and support to their new roles and responsibilities is a perfect fit. For experienced community managers who know their communities well, reviewing your AI’s responses for coaching and development opportunities can help your AI get up to speed quickly. AI products typically won’t be absolutely perfect at the start, with certain knowledge gaps and missing community-level details, but having an attentive, strategic PM audit AI communications can ensure your AI gets to where it needs to be sooner rather than later.
Strategic Move-In/Move-Out Support
Moving is widely considered to be one of the most stressful life events, ranking up there with life-altering events like the death of a loved one, divorce or being fired from work. So what better opportunity does a community manager have to make a great first (or final) impression than being incredibly helpful and supportive during move-ins and move-outs? With AI handling the tedious manual work that currently eats up a community manager’s day, they now have more time to be hands-on during the moving process, streamlining the move and coordinating effectively with other onsite staff to ensure everything goes smoothly. Plus, your community manager can now be laser focused on document review, like certificates of insurance, to ensure your community is protected from any insurance risk.
The Strategic Community Manager of The Future Is Here Today
With AI helping community managers get out of an endless loop of transactional communications, there’s a whole new world of strategic roles and responsibilities that they can begin to handle. All of these new assignments stem from the need to deliver both improved customer experiences and community operating performance, blending the need for qualitative resident support with strategic, data-driven decision making skills. The new community manager will have to not only be a people-person, but also willing to think bigger and take ownership over outcomes to help analyze and improve asset performance. As the industry continues to shift with the further expansion of AI, expect to see the role of the community manager continue to shift alongside it.