Best AI Chatbot for Your Apartment Community

Everything you need to know before investing in an apartment leasing chatbot.

Automation and instant gratification. Those are the two demands that have been driving consumer buying behavior in the last decade. Wherever you go online, it’s no surprise that most businesses have an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot pop up to help assist you when shopping. Even services like your phone or the internet have an AI chatbot to help answer questions before sending you to a specialist.

You can Google AI Chatbot and get thousands of articles, think pieces, and dozens of vendors with promises that sound too good to be true. With many businesses going in this direction, and consumers expecting it, multifamily property management companies (PMCs) have begun entering the world of leasing AI chatbots. Leasing AI has really taken off in the last year, but with many vendors, it’s become a battle of the bots.

Who has the best AI chatbot for a website specific to multifamily?

On this page, we will go through what to look for in an AI chatbot so when the time comes to pick a technology solution to invest in, you can feel confident about your choice. Not all chatbots are the same, some have prompts while others don’t. Some might have responses programmed that don’t fit the tone of your property while others do. Some are available on your website and others do your website, SMS, and email. We’ll also dive deep into complete AI automation platforms for multifamily that include a chatbot and how this kind of solution extends the power of an AI chatbot by incorporating it into an AI lead management system that engages, nurtures, and converts every lead, improving the multifamily leasing journey for everyone.

Let’s dive into what to look for in a multifamily technology investment, including AI chatbots

All Things Apartment Leasing Chatbot

Study after study shows there has been a dramatic increase in online leads and traffic for multifamily properties that isn’t slowing down. What should an AI Chatbot do to help? Let’s start with the property website.

PERQ bot answering questions on website

Typically, apartment leasing chatbots are packaged as part of some sort of AI Leasing Assistant Solution. The purpose of the AI Leasing Assistant is to engage with and collect leads, and maybe do some follow-up efforts.

But not all of these “leads” are worth the leasing teams’ time, yet. In the words of Dalia Kalgreen, Director of Marketing at Unified Residential, they’re just “looky-loos”. Casual online shoppers that aren’t going to be moving within the next month. However, those leads are still important because they are the renters of the future. PERQ data has found that nearly 40% of renters look 3+ months out, with half of those looking 6+ months ahead of their planned move.

PERQ has a better way. The PERQ AI Lead Management platform with the best chatbot for multifamily included, integrates with your existing website and lead sources to engage, nurture, and convert every lead, improving conversion to tour and conversion to lease and giving your casual shoppers exactly what they need with required work from your team.

To make leasing teams more effective, leasing AI should be able to filter through those casual “looky-loo” leads and only hand off agent-ready leads to your onsite team. PERQ’s approach takes that a step further by handling the nurturing of your leads effectively through automation. After all, technology should be helping your onsite teams with the immense workload casual online viewers have created and not creating more work for them.

Now that we understand what an AI chatbot should be doing on your site and how it can be coupled with an AI automation platform to create a personalized and engaged path for renters…let’s get into one of the most obvious aspects of an AI chatbot, talking to the chatbot.

Chatbot Platform Comparison

What are the best chatbots to talk to? How does a chatbot even respond? This is where the concept of rule-based versus natural language processing (NLP) comes into play. Some chatbots operate on a rule-based system. This means the user must go through prompts to get the answers to pre-programmed questions while an NLP chatbot allows the user to directly message the bot using natural written language and it messages back.

With rule-based bots, it takes so much longer for the user to get the answer they are looking for. It can be a frustrating experience. An experience that all of us have had. Have you ever called customer service and gotten a robot menu? “Press 1 for x department, 2 for y department…” etc. This is exactly what a rule-based chatbot does. That frustration of going through the menu that a lot of the time doesn’t have the option for what you’re looking for isn’t the kind of experience you want your online viewers to go through.

Natural language processing bots are much quicker at getting to the point and answering prospect questions. Instead of selecting from a menu, the user is typing their question to the bot who then answers back with a written response, not a prompt. When the AI chatbot is part of a complete solution, like PERQ’s AI leasing automation platform, it keeps those messages in the prospect’s guest card so that onsite teams can see the conversations the prospect has already had when it comes to what they are looking for at the property. A more efficient AI chatbot that is easy for prospects to use and gives the onsite team insightful data has shown to dramatically impact lead to lease conversion.

Improving Lead-to-Lease Conversion with AI

How does all of this improve your lead to lease conversion rate? An AI leasing automation platform that creates a more engaging website means that prospects are staying on it longer and viewing more pages. This allows for it to collect insightful and valuable data to hold onto for when it’s time to hand off the lead to a leasing agent.

illustration of Contract Signed

Along with better data comes better lead nurturing. PERQ’s platform leverages the data it collects to personalize nurturing outreach to prospects who are not yet ready to speak with the onsite team. You can customize your lead nurture to be branded in your company colors and use your brand voice. Leveraging AI, PERQ also knows when to send a message and when to pull back.

PERQ sends its nurture messages on a cadence that is fit to each renter, so that your property is kept top of mind on the timeline that fits the prospect’s move-in dates. Since only qualified, agent-ready leads are handed off, onsite teams have more time to work on those relationships and can personalize the tour and their conversations using the data the AI Assistant provides.

Unified Residential, a PMC with multifamily properties in the Midwest and the South, saw their website traffic conversion increase by 3X and their lead to tour by over 83% in the first 60 days of using PERQ’s leasing AI automation platform. Before this, Dalia Kalgreen, Director of Marketing at Unified, noted that they were only able to convert 2% of their website traffic.

PERQ keeps online visitors engaged and nurtured through their journey using content that is relevant to them. This means that the onsite teams at Unified see more qualified, agent-ready leads and tours with less distractions. They are even able to spend time on keeping current residents happy and work on resident retention as PERQ can handle their influx of online leads.

Why Choose PERQ’s Leasing AI

The best chatbot software is one that gives you insightful data, is easy to talk to from a user perspective, and is part of a complete solution that can handle nurturing leads and hand off the ones that are agent-ready. PERQ’s AI Lead Management platform can do all of this, and the proof is in the results. Jamin Harkness, EVP at The Management Group, says, “PERQ has supercharged our tech stack, driving conversions up and costs per lead down. PERQ’s blend of website experiences, chatbots and nurture touches get prospects ready to talk to my team. And, since all the information PERQ collects goes into our CRM, we’re better equipped for our in-person conversations.”

Along with personalized lead nurture and a more engaging website, the leasing AI that PERQ’s platform is powered by also allows for direct experience links from other marketing channels like an internet listing service (ILS). It’s important to know the journey of a lead and if they came from an ILS or directly from the property website. PERQ’s platform can track lead source attribution and help you understand which lead sources perform best for you, so you can right-size your marketing spends.

Basically put, PERQ delivers unmatched prospect experiences that give each prospect what they need when they need it. Using interactive website experiences, natural-language conversations via email, chat and text, and automated SMS and email nurture touches, PERQ’s AI brain powers unmatched automated and personalized engagement with renters. And, when a renter is ready to talk to a person, PERQ smoothly transitions them to the onsite team.

Interested in seeing what PERQ’s leasing AI automation platform can do for your properties?

See PERQ’s AI Chatbot in Action