The property management industry is in the midst of a period of rapid change. Operators around the country are in the process of exploring new operational models to better serve residents and more effectively leverage staff in response to rising consumer expectations and new technological developments. Many companies have shifted towards a centralized resident service model—where administrative and resident-related tasks are shifted to specialized offsite teams—to better serve resident needs and improve financial performance in a tight economic climate.
Jacob Kosior, VP of Client Strategy at Elise AI, recently conducted a webinar on effectively spinning up and scaling a centralized resident services team. Drawing on his expertise building centralized teams for operators like BH Management and the Cardinal Group, Jacob shared strategies and actionable insights for creating centralized resident services teams that improve operational efficiency, remove tedious admin work from onsite teams, and deliver consistent resident experiences. Let’s dive into key takeaways from his session.
What Is Centralized Resident Services?
Centralized resident services involve moving administrative and resident-facing responsibilities from individual property teams to specialized offsite teams. This offsite unit handles tasks such as rent collection, work order coordination, and resident communications, allowing onsite staff to focus on face-to-face interactions and direct community oversight. In general, prospects have a wide variety of needs: help with lease renewals, maintenance requests, billing inquiries, and the organization of community events, to name a few. Centralizing these tasks under the purview of a specialized offsite team ensures consistency and responsiveness, regardless of a resident’s location or the complexity of their request.
Common responsibilities handled by centralized resident services teams include processing rent payments, managing maintenance tickets, handling escalations, scheduling resident events, and issuing proactive outreach or reminders. By transferring these tasks offsite, property management companies can reduce their reliance on onsite teams to manage their operations while simultaneously delivering a consistent service experience, regardless of community.
Why Centralize Your Resident Services Function?
There’s a wide variety of pertinent reasons to centralize your resident services, including heightened resident satisfaction, improved community financial performance, and reduced delinquency rates. With specialized offsite teams focused on managing resident requests, communication is consistently faster, more helpful, and easier to track. In general, residents love receiving quicker resolutions to their questions and problems, which can help improve community reputation and drive increased retention rates.
Building centralized offsite teams also allows team members to develop specialized capabilities, like delinquency management or vendor credentialing, rather than forcing onsite teams to juggle a wide array of diverse and unconnected roles. This results in higher-quality outputs, fewer errors, and more reliable service. By delegating repetitive administrative tasks like monthly statements or financial reporting to a centralized team, onsite teams have the capacity to focus on improving resident engagement, running excellent tours, and community-building activities. Operators also benefit from greater transparency into rent collection, maintenance performance, and renewal rates.
Getting Started: Centralizing the Assistant Manager Position
In Jacob’s experience, centralizing the assistant manager position is a solid starting place when it comes to building a centralized resident services team. This is because, in general, assistant managers typically oversee routine financial and administrative processes like rent posting, account audits, invoice processing, and delinquency follow-ups that do not usually require face-to-face interaction. These administrative tasks are well suited for delegation to a centralized team member who can make them their primary priority for a large number of communities.
Jacob follows a three step process to centralize the assistant manager role: review existing job descriptions, complete a RACI chart, and identify opportunities for AI and automation. Here’s what it looks like in practice.
Step One: Review Existing Job Descriptions
First, determine which assistant manager tasks are site-dependent, and which could feasibly be moved off site without detracting from resident satisfaction.
Step Two: Complete a RACI Chart
Use a Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed (RACI) matrix to assign responsibilities and clarify who is accountable for what in both the old model and the new one.
Step Three: Identify Opportunities for AI and Automation
Pinpoint repetitive duties, like posting late notices, sending reminder emails, and scanning checks, that can be streamlined with technology like a multifamily AI assistant. Automating these repetitive tasks with AI can free your centralized staff up for tasks requiring human judgment.
Centralizing the assistant manager position can make an immediate impact on several key business areas. Most operators see rent collection rates increase as a result of the efforts of a dedicated off-site team that effectively and consistently pursue payments. In addition, operators have also reported higher satisfaction for onsite staff, as they are enabled to engage more deeply with residents instead of spending hours on bookkeeping and routine administrative work. Finally, having standardized financial processes ensures owners and investors receive uniform, accurate reports across the portfolio, increasing overall community performance.
One Step Further: Expanding Centralized Resident Services
Beyond managing the work that was formerly delegated to onsite assistant managers, centralized resident services teams can handle work order follow-ups, solicit community reviews from residents, coordinate events, and proactively engage with residents about topics like lease renewal and reputation management. Delegating this work to offsite specialists ensures these activities don’t slip through the cracks when onsite teams are busy, as they tend to do when urgent onsite responsibilities crop up.
Taking a proactive, centralized approach to communication boosts resident confidence. Well-timed reminders and helpful resources—like self-service maintenance tips—make the community feel more responsive and modern. Similarly, organized event planning led by an offsite coordinator can help build a strong sense of community.
There’s also room for further expansion of designated offsite resident services roles. Creating roles like “Customer Accounts Specialist” or “Resident Experience Manager” who concentrate on tasks like maintaining mobile resident apps, sending corporate announcements, or overseeing vendor management can continue to improve communication quality and drive higher retention and satisfaction rates. Just ensure you’ve established clear KPIs for your centralized teams, like average response time or resident satisfaction scores, in order to keep everyone aligned and focused on providing tangible value to your residents.
Enabling Centralization by Leveraging Technology and AI
While process change is at the heart of centralization, it wouldn’t be possible to effectively centralize without new technological solutions that have entered the multifamily playing field over the last few years. Cloud-based platforms, messaging tools, and AI-driven conversation engines enable centralized teams to handle volumes of resident interactions that would otherwise be unmanageable. Only by using AI to automate follow-up to common inquiries and digitizing existing workflows can operators actually reduce the burden on their onsite staff and improve response times.
In general, Jacob recommends that a centralized resident services team have a few key tools in place in order to effectively help residents at scale.
Voice Hub
As centralized teams have to manage phone lines for a wide variety of communities, it’s imperative that residents are able to get in touch with the right team at the right time to resolve any issues. That means centralized teams need AI-driven call-routing that seamlessly asks callers about their needs and directs them to the right department, without complicated phone trees or IVR.
AI Delinquency Tool
Operators can decrease their ratio of staff to residents when centralizing, provided they have automation in place to ensure residents can still get what they need. That means having an AI-driven solution in place to handle automated messaging for rent reminders and late notices, including immediate ledger checks and payment confirmations.
AI Maintenance Tool
Centralized resident services teams benefit from having AI support while managing maintenance requests. AI can handle maintenance interactions via text or chat, offering self-service solutions and troubleshooting for minor issues, plus quick escalation to the appropriate team member for major concerns.
AI Renewals Tool
Proactively managing renewals is easier for centralized resident services teams when they have an AI assistant to manage follow up. AI can conduct automated lease renewal outreach, while looping in the correct member of the centralized team for inquiries on terms, rent, or other concerns.
Having the proper AI solutions in place to enable your centralized resident services team to operate efficiently at scale is crucial. Otherwise, you run the risk of encountering the same issues concerning slow response times and missed follow-ups that you do with onsite teams.
Getting Started: How to Implement a Centralized Resident Services Model
As we’ve covered in some of our earlier content, centralization is more complicated than just telling your onsite teams to start reporting to an offsite location. Proper change management, upskilling, and communication of the value of centralization is key. Ensure that leadership clearly outlines how roles will shift, train both offsite and onsite teams on new processes, and continue to reassure your team that these changes will enhance, rather than replace, the human touch residents value. Without clear messaging and buy-in you run the risk of alienating team members, irritating residents, and creating confusion.
In order to ensure you’re receiving value and improved performance from centralization, re-establish specific KPIs like average response time or percentage of delinquent accounts and measure them regularly. Continue to solicit feedback from both residents and onsite teams to identify areas for improvement, ensuring continuous evolution of centralized services. Keep an eye open for other opportunities centralized resident services can open up, like upselling insurance programs or rolling out corporate-wide community initiatives, as residents and team members alike begin to become comfortable with this new way of working.
Centralized Resident Services, Powered by EliseAI
Centralized resident services represent a transformation strategy for modern property management, allowing companies to deliver fast, specialized support while freeing onsite staff to focus on high-value, face-to-face interactions. By leveraging technology and specialized offsite roles, operators can improve the resident experience, reduce response times, and continue to gain community-level insights that foster continuous improvement of your centralized model.
However, it’s important to remember that centralization needs more than just process change—it needs transformative technology designed specifically to enable a new model of working. If you’re looking for an AI solution built to enable your centralized teams, look no farther than EliseAI. Get in touch with us today to learn more about how EliseAI’s best-in-class conversational AI helps leading operators effectively support their portfolios with centralized teams.