The Future is Automated: Transforming Multifamily Operations with Minna Song

In this episode of The Apartment Department, co-host Chris Johnson sits down with Minna Song, CEO of EliseAI, to discuss how artificial intelligence is transforming multifamily operations. For nearly a decade, EliseAI has helped properties automate leasing, maintenance, and resident communications—cutting lead-to-lease times from 30 days to just 14 and boosting renewal retention by 9%.

Minna shares how EliseAI’s success is rooted in deep partnerships with their 700+ customers. Her team learns directly from on-site staff—observing workflows, conducting time studies, and building bespoke solutions that fit each property’s goals. It’s AI built with the industry, not just for it.

The conversation also explores Elise AI’s new partnership with Zillow, where their AI Assist feature brings 24/7 renter responses directly into listings, and looks ahead to the next frontier: how robotics could soon revolutionize on-site operations.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Alright, everybody, this is Chris Johnson with the apartment department. Anne is not joining me for this podcast, but we're going live from Zillow Unlock, and I'm very excited for our guest, Minna Song, the CEO of Elise AI. Super excited to have you on the pod today. How are you doing?

SPEAKER_01 0:18

Doing well, excited to be here.

SPEAKER_00 0:20

Awesome. Why don't you talk a little bit about Elise AI, give us a little bit of background, and then we'll get into what we really want to talk about.

SPEAKER_01 0:27

Yeah, absolutely. So we are almost about nine years old. We were one of the first AI companies in the industry, and we really believe that AI can transform a lot of the operations that in real estate was not really supported by technology in the way that it was in other industries. And so we we started in New York, we're based in New York, and then we expanded nationally. So we serve almost five million units now across the US. And we serve multifamily housing providers, we serve single-family providers, we cover a bunch of different segments of the market, affordable, student, and we build, what we do is we build AI agents that automate a lot of the manual processes that are done today on site. So you can think about leasing, lead nurturing during the leasing process, answering the questions from new prospect inquiries, scheduling tours. When somebody moves in, we're sort of the resident concierge, so we help them with any maintenance requests that they have. They're coming up on a lease renewal process, the AI can handle all of that, questions about payments, so really automating a lot of the workflows that take up time from your humans and don't allow them to be human. We want automation to be able to make time for them to do really high-value added uh high-value tasks.

SPEAKER_00 1:53

Yeah, it makes sense. I mean, take some of the stuff off the on-site teams, which we know are bogged down with a lot of these questions that you're able to answer and give them time to actually focus on the tours, the move-ins, the residents, the things that matter when somebody moves into a community. I love it. So we've seen AI explode in multifamily this year. Why do you think this year, why are so many companies just jumping to implement AI? What's happening?

SPEAKER_01 2:19

Yeah, I think a lot of people were, I think it's a couple things. I think people wanted to see how did this technology, when it was newer, you know, how did it play out, who adopted it, and then I think people started to realize that it's not it's not going anywhere, right? AI is going to be the future of property management, and if they aren't getting on board right now, they're going to miss out. They're going to lose to competition. So I think there's a bit of that going on. I think in general the the value of the products have increased significantly. Um there's more products out there. We started with leasing AI, but we've expanded to a whole residence suite of products. We've expanded to doing a lot more actually not just conversational workflows where we're communicating with renters, but actually executing on a lot more workflows. So you can do things like generate documentation, you can uh audit leases, and so just the amount of value that people can get out of these tools has increased significantly over the years. Um I think finally it's it's really just continued headwinds in the industry, right? There's massive labor shortages, turnover, which was historically always an industry that had really high turnover, just skyrocketed, especially during COVID. It went from what was uh 33% to over 44%. But even this year, I mean that's a little bit of an outdated stat, I think, because this year I'm hearing customers, just last week, two customers said they have over 75% annualized turnover. And so how do you combat that? How do you keep your businesses operating when your staff is so new or you just don't have the staff that you really need to serve your residents? And automation gives you a really good opportunity to do that. So I think all of those things, you know, increased costs, not just in labor, but insurance, you know, for the past several years, interest rates, uh, supplies, just how do you combat these things? The only really way is technology, and I think fortunately technology is sort of uh accelerating at a pace to help.

SPEAKER_00 4:26

I was just gonna say that just as like a as a side note to this. I mean, you've been doing this a long time, so you have a lot of data, you obviously have five million units plus. What's the data telling you and how are you able to improve or jump on the next big piece of AI? How do you continue to improve when others are now stepping into the industry as well to really be the best out there with the conversation? You know, for me it used to be about speed to lead, now it's more about natural conversation, and the AIs are getting a lot better. I think phone would probably be last. But how do you keep up? What do you what's the what's the key to making sure you're staying on top of it or continuing to offer new products?

SPEAKER_01 5:08

Yeah, we do continue to offer new products. I'd say one value, and I think something that a lot of people in the industry or a lot of customers know us for is having really high product velocity. So a lot of this comes from just the values that our company has. We hire really strong people, we get them extremely close to the customer, we do a lot of on-site visits, our engineers go on-site and watch workflows and we do time studies with what are people spending time on, and then we just try to deliver valuable products as quickly as we can at a really high quality. And so I think because of our focus on making sure that we're we're I think we do focus a lot on creating value, not just staying ahead. That's not, I think I don't think that's the big biggest drive. I think it's it's uh how do you just solve as many of our customers' problems? We have over 700 customers now. You you don't think that every single one of those are coming back with more feature requests? We just have to meet their demands. So um, so yeah, we've delivered a ton of new products, um, we deliver multiple products every year, and um how we determine what we're gonna build is partly which customers, what customers are saying and uh the the pain points and what we think AI can actually solve. And then two, it's a lot of just what, like I said, observing people and and how we've thought about it is chip away at the bottlenecks that happen on site. So, okay, we've solved this problem, what's the next biggest problem? Where are people spending the most amount of time? Because as you know, a lot of people in the industry are looking to centralize, looking to think about how do we take more off of our on-site team's plates. Um, and you really you have to get in the weeds and understand what they are doing if you're gonna start building technology or implementing changes in those.

SPEAKER_00 6:52

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's really interesting. What results are you actually seeing with all of this new technology coming out and all of the features that you're offering both for the residents and for the prospects?

SPEAKER_01 7:05

Yeah, we're seeing really measurable results. So taking lead-to-lease times from 30 days to 14 days, um, getting higher lead quality, higher conversion. Um, on renewals, we're increasing renewal retention by 9% by just having that constant communication, and a lot of these workflows are just not getting the attention that they really need to to have optimal results. Improving delinquency, maintenance, we have a lot of products around the maintenance process because one that is one of the hardest uh that hardest positions to fill right now. Um I think it's gonna only I think that's actually only going to get worse. Not a lot of people are being trained and entering that field of work anymore. Um so how do we combat that? How do we optimize the resources we have there? And we're seeing people, customers having uh maintenance requests that took four to five days on average to fulfill, resolve, come down to less than 48 hours because we're optimizing schedules and being more predictive about what people should be working on to get the best outcomes for their residents.

SPEAKER_00 8:10

That's incredible. Can we talk about the lead quality piece a little bit? Do you think that the lead quality is better because they're being nurtured and so the people that actually come in know what they want, they've they're familiar with the community and they've learned because of the AI?

SPEAKER_01 8:27

I think it's a it's a bunch of different reasons. So, yes, I think making sure people are more educated in the process is really important, but also every property we work with, every company we work with has different staffing models or different things that they're optimizing for. Is this a different class of a building? Student housing is very different from a leasing process for affordable housing, big building, small building, lots of staff, understaffed, and our AI is dynamic to be able to handle these situ these uh you know each of these context contexts. Um if you think about it, if you're a company that wants to centralize their leasing team, right, um you might not want to drive a ton of traffic to your building because you have a centralized team and it's costly to actually send somebody and travel to the property. So actually, maybe you want the AI to qualify more and only send the most and maybe batch, right, the interview. Not the interview, sorry. Um I interview a lot, so I say interviews. Batch the tours together. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:26

That makes sense.

SPEAKER_01 9:27

Uh or you know, maybe you are staffed at the you have staff at the building and you want to increase occupancy because you're low occupancy and your foot traffic is the only thing that matters. Maybe spend less time qualifying up front and just saying, hey, I'm gonna, I'm gonna do that. Or if you're student, maybe you actually don't, everyone doesn't need to tour the property. The AI needs to be optimizing for applications. So you send application links faster. Um and so if you deliver one AI for every property, you customers are just not going to, it's not going to fit their property and their their goals that they have. So I think it's making sure the AI is smart enough to act like your best agent is number one the most important thing that we focus on.

SPEAKER_00 10:12

That's uh that's making me as Ann would say, my head kind of explode a little bit if you've listened to our pod. That's really smart. So you're you're customizing to what the property actually needs, and if you do it that way, uh then your lead quality should go up based on what that property is is trying to do.

SPEAKER_01 10:32

Yeah, and it changes even within the same property, it changes, right?

SPEAKER_00 10:36

Our industry is wild. It's it's a fun industry to be part of because one day is never the same as the next.

SPEAKER_01 10:41

Yeah. These these problems are very hard to solve. And um I think that's what makes them fun for us to you know, we're we're a bunch of builders, um, but keeping up, going to your last question, how do we keep up with all these these requests? Um, because we do serve so many properties, um it's it's really working closely with our customers to make sure we understand these things. And then I've been building a team where a lot of our customers saw us when we were sub-10 people on our team, but we're almost 400 people now. And so growing the engineering team, growing the resources, growing customer success to support these customers has been a big, kind of a big focus of me as the CEO.

SPEAKER_00 11:24

That's incredible, congratulations to be able to do that. And all the data that you've seen in these last eight years and all the changes you've gone through a couple of interesting markets. You know, you talked about a little bit, you've skirted on changing the organization and using AI to do so. Do you think that that is where the industry is headed? Or do you think it's still going to be company specific and maybe clustered in areas like New York where you can cluster some of your buildings versus, you know, places outside of Dallas, you know, where maybe you do still have to drive. How do you see that changing and where do you see the industry going?

SPEAKER_01 11:58

You're talking a little bit like about centralization.

SPEAKER_00 12:01

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 12:02

Yeah. I think there are ways, I think automation can add value at any property. Um I think there are there are sort of property geographical density that allow for certain other types of automation or centralization. But I think that our products have always been built that we can allow customers to centralize functions, because actually, even in 2019 when we start first started rolling out with Avalon Bay and Equity Residential, which were our first really big national customers, they already had a lot of these teams centralized. They were very early to centralization. So we've always built it with centralization in mind as well as on-site operations. Um, and so delinquency, for example, a lot of customers are centralizing, but even if you're not centralizing that function on-site, how much better is someone's life if they don't have to go and and uh you know call and chase a bunch of residents for their rent? That's not a pleasant job to be had.

SPEAKER_00 13:05

Yeah, absolutely. It's not very fun. Um, but also a very important function for us to be able to collect that rent. Obviously, that makes everything uh at the property go. Um you've touched on this a little bit, but your clients seem to be very important to your organization and to being able to make change. How important are they, and how much of it is you guys, you know, being on site and seeing the actual workflows clog, and how much is the clients telling you what we need, and how much of it is just knowing the industry at this point and what we could do next?

SPEAKER_01 13:41

I would not claim to know the industry still. I learn things every single day. I think you have to marry, I mean, I think even people within the industry don't fully understand every aspect. So you have to talk to a lot of people. You have to be in the trenches with people on site, you have to speak at the corporate level to understand their incentives, you have to know the incentives, how they differ for owners versus owner operators versus third-party managers, if you want to be successful, because you have to really align the goals of the company. So we, for example, provide not just not just software, but we provide consulting. It's actually free consulting, but because what we realized early on is that AI is, you know, AI is a big change. This is not this is this is a transformative technology. And it's not you just need a lot of people to understand the capabilities of it. And if you just throw AI products at people without them understanding it, it's not going to be as successful, right? So for example, our consulting, uh, our consulting teams, they work with our customers for getting exec, you know, helping people present to their investors, like why are we making these changes? What does that mean for, you know, how do we articulate the value to investors? Um, how do we get on-site teams to understand why we're making these changes? How do we do change management? Um, we do they're they're part of doing the on-site uh time studies as well. Um and just across the business, we've done we've done uh kind of comp plans and you just name it, it's very custom bespoke to every every customer we work with, but um I think that partnership is is really critical for um making our company successful, making our customers successful. Um because and I and I uh I honestly pushed, not uh I not pushed away from it, but um I don't think I appreciate it as much because to me I'm a software engineer and I was just like, oh, like, you know, you build it and like people will figure it out, and that's just that's just not true for most of the world.

SPEAKER_00 15:48

That's true. Um I have a question. So do prospects know that they're talking to AI, do you think? And do they care?

SPEAKER_01 15:56

Yeah, I think um uh I don't think they care. Um I I think at the end of the day, and and some and and most people uh most people don't know. Um I mean there's you know you have to disclose in some states by regulation, um, lots of customers. You know, it's it's fine. It's it's it's uh either way, I think there's no we've we've actually measured this across um customers or properties where it's very upfront, it says like, hi, I'm your I'm your AI leasing assistant versus just saying, hi, how can I help you? Uh there is no change in engagement, actually. Um so what's I think that's really interesting, and I think it really comes down to people just want their problems solved in the fastest way, right? Uh I think I talk about this um often, but what is the transition that banks went through, right? You used to have to go in and speak to a bank teller and stand in line to get your money or to deposit checks, right? And I'm sure they were wonderful, you know, bank tellers, but at the end of the day, convenience trumped that. So now you do you you go to an ATM or you do everything online. And you know, I'm sure that was a big investment, right? Think about that change. It's like ATMs, you know, are new, expensive, unknown. Are people going to trust a machine to handle their money? And now it's sort of like this is status quo, right? And and you can't be a bank if you don't have ATMs, or you can't be a bank if you don't offer a mobile app where people can do everything online.

SPEAKER_00 17:25

You're right. I mean that's a really good comparison. So we're getting towards the end of our discussion, it's gone so fast, I can't believe it. What's next in AI? What do you think? And these can be fun predictions, it doesn't have to be an industry. Um, you can have fun with it, but what do you think is gonna be the next problem that we have to solve, or where do you think AI is gonna take us next?

SPEAKER_01 17:47

Yeah, I think in an industry that didn't have a lot of good data before, I think we are just scratching the surface now. Um the AI collects so much data across the renter journey that there's gonna be a tremendous amount of power to actually make, to understand someone's business like they've never had before. Um and I think that's important to get better outcomes for your customers, for renters, and for your clients. Um but outs outside of I think that that's that's near term, I think a little bit longer term, but probably not as long term as people think, I think robotics is gonna play a much bigger role. Um so I'm very excited, especially as I think about centralization. I think about, hey, I think about maintenance a lot. A lot. Uh it's one of my favorite products. Um I don't know why, maybe because it's just such a hard problem to solve, it's so physical, uh, it's an exciting problem to solve. How do you do these things if there's not a lot of people wanting to work on maintenance anymore, right? There's things that you can do today. People are like, oh, that's crazy because they're thinking about these like humanoid robots that are going in and like, you know, plunging toilets or um or you know, fixing fixing small things, but um sure that there's not that dexterity that you need for for fixing a lot of the things that people fix today, but like can you do inspections? Can you have a robot that takes pictures, right? I think that's those are viable solutions that that can work today. Um there's obviously cultural implications, like what do you what do you do when you see a robot roaming around? But um I think it's gonna happen in a bunch of different industries. I think the same with how people engage with AI, even you know, voice AI or text message AI. Uh people are just gonna get used to this across every industry. So I think those will be tailwinds for adoption in multifamily and single family as well.

SPEAKER_00 19:38

I love it. I think my dream is to have just maybe like a grounds robot that can just do it 24-7 and keep the community clean, right?

SPEAKER_01 19:47

Yeah, I mean painting, people, there are robots that paint external buildings, not so much internal buildings right now. There are cool companies that are building consumer consumer robots. Uh OneX is one. Um, and I think that's cool because then that becomes an amenity, right? And maybe one of the best amenities you can offer your your tenants. So uh yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:09

Really great conversation. I'd be remiss to leave us. We're at a Zillow conference, you guys have a big partnership. That was huge for our industry. Zillow is a great product, I love Zillow. Uh you guys have a great product. Did you want to touch on this partnership just a little bit and how exciting it is?

SPEAKER_01 20:24

Yeah, I'm super excited about our partnership uh with Zillow to embed our leasing technology into their listings uh with a new feature called AI Assist. So, how it works is when a renter submits an inquiry, our AI assist can immediately respond to them 24-7, engage them, answer questions before they, you know, maybe we're waiting hours or days to get a response. Now you can do this all natively in the platform. And Zillow is the first marketplace to I I think this is a kind of one of uh first of its kind partnership. Um they're the only marketplace to embed AI natively into it, and I think that that just you just want to get closer to where where the renter is in their buying process, right? So all of this can happen right in the Zillow, uh the Zillow renter hub, and it makes it a much more streamlined communication platform for renters. So I'm really excited to work with them. Um they've been great partners, and uh uh I think it's it's we're really focused on the renter experience because ultimately that's all that matters. Um, and I think we both share that that vision.

SPEAKER_00 21:32

Yeah, that's awesome. I I mean I think it's it's really great, and it's gonna make our lead quality better, our prospects better. So thank you again uh for coming on the apartment department. We really appreciate your time today and enjoy uh the rest of the conference. Thanks so much. Thanks.