Ep 2 | You Can’t AI Your Way Out of a Broken Operating Model w/ Gregory Lozinak

Everyone in multifamily is being told to adopt AI.

But there’s a problem hiding underneath the hype.

You cannot AI your way out of a broken operating model.

In this episode of The Multifamily Property Management AI Playbook, Daniel Cunningham sits down with Gregory Lozinak, advisor at GJL Real Estate Advisory and former COO, to talk about why many AI initiatives fail in property management.

Greg shares a simple framework for operators: standardize workflows, automate repeatable execution, then apply AI to improve decisions. They also unpack why maintenance triage may be the biggest opportunity for AI in multifamily today.

You'll learn:

- The difference between automation and AI in property management
- Why broken workflows cause most AI deployments to fail
- Greg’s 3-step model for operationalizing AI in a PMC
- How AI triage can resolve maintenance issues before a work order
- Why better maintenance data improves technician productivity

🎧 Listen now to learn how the best operators operationalize AI.

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Chapters

00:00 The AI Hype Wave in Multifamily
01:00 You Can’t AI a Broken Operating Model
02:30 Greg Lozinak’s Operator Background and Perspective
05:00 Automation vs AI: What Operators Misunderstand
06:30 Why AI Amplifies Broken Workflows
09:00 Audit Your Process Before You Add AI
12:00 Why Maintenance Is the Biggest AI Opportunity
15:30 AI Triage, Work Orders, and Resident Signals
18:00 Technician Burnout and After-Hours Chaos
27:00 System of Action: The Future of Property Operations
30:30 The 3-Step Model: Standardize, Automate, Then AI

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

You know, there's something happening right now across multifamily that feels familiar. Every operator is being told they need AI, new dashboards, new tools, new promises. But there's an uncomfortable truth beneath all of that excitement. You cannot AI your way out of a broken operating model. That's why I wanted Greg Lodznak to come on. Greg has one of those careers that gives him a rare lens in this industry. He started as a military officer leading teams. And then he moved into the multifamily operations at Archstone, learned the investment side at Clary and Partners, and spent time on the vendor side of PopTech. And now he advises operators and technology companies on how these systems actually work in the real world. And in this conversation, we break down the difference between automation and AI, and why layering AI on top of broken workflows only amplifies chaos, and why maintenance operations may be the biggest opportunity for immediate impact. Greg also introduces a simple framework that operators should follow. Standardize your workflows, automate repeatable execution, and then apply AI to improve decisions. Because the companies that win with AI won't be the ones who adopt it first, they'll be the ones who operationalize it best. Let's dive in. Welcome to the Multifamily Property Management AI Playbook. I'm your host, Daniel Cunningham. If you're responsible for running properties and trying to make sense of where AI fits, no hype, just insight, you're in the right place. This show is about what's possible, what's practical, and what delivers results. Presented by Venderoo, your all-in-one AI solution for resolving maintenance needs. Let's dive into the playbook. We're really glad to have you. Thanks for having me, Daniel. Let's just start off today by just kind of giving us some sense of how you got into this industry and the different sort of roles that you had.

SPEAKER_00 2:15

Yeah, uh kind of an interesting story. I started my professional career in the military. I actually got commissioned as a second lieutenant and graduated college on the same day. So spent about seven years on active duty and decided I wanted to get out. And I was working with a recruiter that focuses on junior military officers. And I ended up at a career fair, an interview with a company that at the time was the third party manager for a publicly trade degree. And after the interview, I was really excited about it. And I was driving back home from Charlottetown to Georgia, and I kept thinking about like, what is it about this job that I'm so excited about? And you boil it down, it's basically the same thing I was doing in the military, was leading people, working with teams, building teams. Of course, I was an infantry officer, so coming to corporate America, the teams I was working with were dressed a lot better, smelled a lot better than a bunch of infantrymen out in the field for days on end. So that was the biggest change, I guess. But it it was uh that's how I got into the real estate industry.

SPEAKER_01 3:18

Now you've been in you've been in the investing side, the management side, you've you've had a stint on the vendor side, and now you're doing some advisory services. Tell us just kind of a flavor of a couple of those those stops along the way, what what those entailed.

SPEAKER_00 3:32

Yeah, you know, my first stop was at a company that eventually became Archstone Communities. Great, great company, great culture. Scott Sellers built one of the best companies and best cultures I've ever been involved with. And I tell people that I learned property operations at Archstone. And then I moved to Clarion Partners in New York, and there I learned the investment management side of the business. So going forward in my career, I always tried to couple the two, the operations and the investment management side, to help build teams that can deliver performance results. And after quite a while on the owner-operator side in different investment structures, publicly traded REITs, institutional investors, private equity, took a little pause for my mom was ill and wanted to spend some time with her. So I took a little pause there. When it came back, I wanted to try something different. So I jumped in on the vendor side, customer success. And that was a great experience as well. Got to see the the industry from a different perspective. It was a good time.

SPEAKER_01 4:32

And now, what sort of clients are you servicing in the consulting capacity?

SPEAKER_00 4:36

Working with a few prop tech companies, talking about how to how to bring their product to market, how owner operator would see the product offering, and how to really, I guess, answer the questions or issues that owner operators are dealing with today.

SPEAKER_01 4:52

Cool. Well, that's a that's a one question and issue that owner operators are dealing with today, is that guys, there's so much talk about AI right now. And from your what you're seeing, from what you're hearing from you know clients or prospects you're talking to, where is AI making an impact in real estate investment and operations as of today, right now?

SPEAKER_00 5:13

Yeah, it certainly is getting a lot of hype. Um, I think to a certain degree, it's the the shiny new toy. I'm seeing a few things right now. First of all, a lot of what's being marketed today is AI is really automation. Slight difference, or there's a difference between automation and AI. Automation is doing the same task faster and consistently, whereas AI is helping you decide what to do next. So you automate to reduce work and you implement AI to improve your decisions. You need both. And the real opportunity, I think, is understanding when you need efficiencies versus when you need better decisions. Secondly, I think operators, you know, because it is the shiny new toy, they're trying to implement AI and they're using it to fix broken workflows. So it's like garbage in, garbage out, right? If you have bad processes and you add AI on top of that, the adoption fails. Because all the AI is doing is amplifying the chaos. And so AI gets to blame. Jumping to AI before fixing processes and workflows is like installing a GPS in a car with no engine. You're not going to go anywhere. So audit your processes before you try to implement AI. And speaking of adoption, and this dovetails with auditing processes, talk to your on-site teams. What are their days look like? How many dashboards do they need to open to run their business? And are they being reactive versus proactive? Are they being strategic and creating value? So at the end of the day, I think AI might be a little overhyped right now. The marketing is a little ahead of the operating model, but the underlying capabilities is very real and will change this industry dramatically.

SPEAKER_01 6:46

Okay, there's a lot to unpack there. Let's start, let's start with those workflows that you mentioned, Greg. Where is AI being inserted right now where there are broken workflows that that hold up it being impactful?

SPEAKER_00 7:00

You know, I think that depends on the company and the operating model, right? But you know, if you're leasing workflow, who's handling the inbound prospects? How do you follow up with that prospect? How do you determine which prospects are the most likely to lease, the most likely, you know, for example, to be able to absorb rent increases in the future? Which prospects are you targeting to make sure that you're getting the lease done, right? Same thing with renewals, right? The renewal process. Which residents are having problems today that might impact their renewal decision, which residents are able to absorb that increase, which are not, and how do you work through that process? So I think trying to identify where those workflows are broken are really is a company by company thing. But you really need to take a hard look at your workflows, your processes to understand where the inefficiencies are before you just sort of try to layer AI on top of that and fix problems that may not be there and not fix the problems that are there. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:56

So there's there's two things here. First of all, there is an opportunity to leverage AI, especially AI that is very vertically oriented in the say, for example, for maintenance or for leasing, as you're mentioning. To leverage AI to say, hey, where are my best practices? Where are my where are my workflows broken? What are the best practices in scenario? And AI can help you fix those workloads. But I think the salient point you're making here is AI is a human emulator in that that's the magic, right, of what's happening with AI now. Like it it should be able to do the things that many humans can do, especially on the administrative side, right? There's always an interesting philosophical discussion right now about creativity and this sort of thing. But in terms of like process, AI can move along process in the same way, faster, more reliably than humans can. However, if you don't even understand what your process is for a human, AI is not going to be able to come in and help things. It will only expose those areas where you haven't really thought through. Or maybe you're you haven't thought it through, or you just sort of assume people know, you know, what under what circumstances we can decline an applicant, or you know, on what circumstances we can, you know, we're offering a monthly concession right now. If that is not specified internally in your organization, you're you're not ready really to bring AI. Now, like I said, you can have AI help you figure that stuff out, but it we are all getting better. We as operators are all getting better as a result of this AI evolution because we have to, in order to have to step away as a human from the process and allow AI to step in. So I think that's a really good point you're making there, right? And I is that something that you often is that is that step one, oftentimes, with some of these organizations with you, it's like, hey, first of all, let's talk about process.

SPEAKER_00 9:44

Yeah, absolutely. You gotta audit your process, and then you know, from there it's the automation, which is not necessarily AI, you can automate processes without AI, but then you layer the AI in on top of that, which then helps you to make better decisions. Automation, if you're doing something the same way 95% of the time, automate it, let the automation take that through the process, and then use AI to make better decisions off of that automation.

SPEAKER_01 10:12

Okay, so earlier, Greg, you talked about it's that AI is somewhat of a bit of a shiny new object, it's kind of the newest you know, toy that people have in their arsenal. I understand there's a lot of hype about AI. So let's let's talk about two things. Let's talk where you feel like AI is still not quite ready for prime time, and let's talk about maybe areas where it's is is surprisingly ready for prime time. So let's start with the first one. Where are their unrealistic expectations right now?

SPEAKER_00 10:38

Yeah, I think the unrealistic expectation is, and we just talked about this a little bit, is that AI will solve all the problems with the current operating model, but you can't layer AI on top of broken processes. If you don't understand where your current inefficiencies are, you just risk automating chaos, which is even more frustrating for the onsite teams. AI doesn't transform organizations, operating models transform organizations. AI accelerates the winners. So do a process audit. How what's the workflow for your renewals, your releases, your work orders before you're deploying the AI? Understand that process audit, that workflow, and then use AI to help make you bet help you make better decisions based on the results.

SPEAKER_01 11:26

And then so the counter to that is where are we just scratching the surface of it? Where where can AI do more, but we're just really just getting started?

SPEAKER_00 11:34

Yeah, you know, I look at that like when I first got into the industry with the kind of equivalent of training, right? When I first got into the industry, a lot of the training was focused around the office team, the leasing staff in particular. And there wasn't a lot of training on the maintenance side, which is which is a very technical training, right? So today we're seeing AI in the leasing and renewal process with CRMs. I think we're just scratching the surface with maintenance. You know, going back to the pandemic, staffing on the maintenance side was incredibly difficult. It was hard to fill those positions. So a lot of a lot of properties were short staffed. And I think today there's still a lot of short staffed. You know, so we we've got to do a better job of managing that maintenance team maintenance team's workload so they don't burn them out and turn them over, right? So when you think about it, let's start with the work order. Resident calls in a work order to the office. Office teams are not maintenance technicians, right? They don't know what questions to ask in in some cases. The result is the information on the work order is incomplete. And it's not the office team's fault. We likely didn't train them on how to do this. And oh, by the way, they have their own job responsibilities that they're trying to do. So yeah, we we should be able to use AI to handle resident communications, right? That will that call comes in, AI can triage that, it can create the work order, it can coordinate vendors if needed, and it covers the after hours covered. So your maintenance technicians are not being woken up in all hours of warning because you know the the the toilet's running when it you know, not an emergency work order, right? So let's start with the triaging, for example. Run through a series of questions and steps. AI can ask, did you do the circuit breaker flip? If so, turn it back on. Did you try to reset the button on the GFCI outlet? If not, let's try that. Which bathroom are you is the issue in, right? Ask some very specific questions so that the maintenance team then ends up with a very detailed work order. They make sure they arrive with the right tools and the right parts, they complete the work order correctly in the first visit, and the results speak for themselves. Roughly 30% of issues resolve before they even become work orders. You reduce your after hours costs without missing emergencies, you increase your work order velocity with the same crew, and you deliver better resident experience overall. Now, you can then take that to the next level, right? Take that to the next step: predictive and behavioral AI. Where can we predict that they're going to be equipment failures? Are we optimizing our unit turnover cycle? Are we identifying for random maintenance services based on usage patterns? So we're really just scratching the surface on all of that right now.

SPEAKER_01 14:02

A lot of good stuff there, Greg. So let's let's let's talk about you were you're talking about data collection and getting a better work order sort of assembled as a result of AI. I mean, another thing that that that I think what we've seen at Bedro, for example, is being able to collect solicit photos, videos of the issues, and and take a look at that and say, and have the AI look at that and say, oh, I see, I think where the where the water is coming from, or whatever the exact situation might be. Those things really enhance the work order, like you said, so that people show up with the right tools, or you, you know, if you've got mobile, if you're using vendors or mobile technicians, you're you're rolling a truck when it's really appropriate and not just you know because of uh a resident planes that there's an emergency.

SPEAKER_00 14:45

Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 14:45

And then you you touch on something else, you're talking about hey, the the uh you know the front desk, like they're not maintenance technicians, they take this call and like they don't know the how to triage you sort of thing. The talk about the flip side of that, because because sometimes there are many cases where these calls go to the maintenance technician, and and then you have a resident who's talking about you, maybe they name it, they may have called the maintenance emergency line, but they're what they're really upset about is a dog barking upstairs. Like, talk a little about how I AI can step in because in the same way that that front-of-house folks are not maintenance people, maintenance people are not therapists, right? Right, they're not they're not always the greatest um frontline customer service folks. They're often not trained in that talk a little bit about that. You is the I assume the same opportunity exists there to improve the residents.

SPEAKER_00 15:35

Yeah, I mean, let's just look at what you just talked about, right? The resident may be calling in a work order, but in between all of that, they're complaining about the dog barking upstairs, or the neighbor next to them's got their stereo on too loud or TV on too loud. AI can pick up on that and then send a message to the leasing team or the office team that says, hey, you've got a resident issue over here in apartment 101 with apartment 102 or 201, the one above it, whatever, right? So again, you're improving that resident experience, but you're using AI to kind of identify where the problem, the unstated problem is, right? I'm calm because my my garbage disposal isn't working, but I'm mad at my resident above me because they're they're stomping on the floor and their dogs barking all day.

SPEAKER_01 16:20

Yeah, yeah. And you know what else? The nuance behind that tone of voice that that that's that's lost forever right now. Like you have no idea. You can't run out of work order right now, uh, report and see like who which residents are really mad at at us, right? Who's at risk of churn? But you've got AI now who can parse what was actually said, the transcribed conversations, even you know, measure the tone of voice and and give you some resident sentiment feedback on these people are at risk. Their lease is coming up and they're not in a great frame of mind right now. Let's reach out to them and do something to make sure that they don't churn.

SPEAKER_00 17:01

Yeah, exactly. I mean, the resonant sentiment, right? AI can can learn as it's going along. So the more data you're pushing into it and the more experiences that it's handling, the more it learns. And over time, you know, AI should be able to really nail down that resonant sentiment and then create that alert. Hey, you know, Dan in 201 lease is expiring in six months. They've had free maintenance problems with a toilet, and they've complained five times about the neighbor next to them with a dog barking. We're gonna have to do something really different in order to help get this resident to renew.

SPEAKER_01 17:35

Yeah. I want to double-click on something else you said. You talked about after hours, you talked about, you know, the current model right now is as we all know, is you have a maintenance technician who's on call, right? He's got to pick up that phone, he's got the emergency phone. You who's got the emergency phone this weekend, like that's that's that whole process. And a lot of those calls that come in a weekend are not really, you know, or after hours are not really emergencies, they don't really require somebody to interrupt their day. If you can relieve a technician of that of the unwarranted interruptions there, do you think that AI can actually improve the quality of life, improve retention? Your time at it is hard to find people, they're precious, that's for sure. Should we look at this as an opportunity to to retain those people who're improving the what the work life balance looks like for them?

SPEAKER_00 18:25

Yeah, yeah. But you know, look, let's look at the AI team. Can AI improve the quality of life and retention for on-site teams? Absolutely. When you start to remove all of that repetitive minutiae and I guess unqualified interruptions due to maintenance activities, you know, from an office standpoint, the on-site team feels like their role really matters, even the maintenance team, right? That their role really matters. They're able to be more strategic and focused on value creation, that value creation through the resident experience. You know, that we used to, at one of the places I worked, we used to call the community manager, we call them CEOs, community executive officers, right? When you think about it, right, they're they're not just property managers, they're running multi-million dollar real estate investments. So if you're using AI to help you make better decisions and be more proactive and be more strategic, that job goes from I'm just the property manager to I'm the CEO of multi-million dollar real estate investment. If you're a maintenance tech and you're trying to celebrate your kid's birthday party, you're not getting that unwarranted emergency call, you know, because of a drip in the bathroom faucet, right? On a Saturday night. So you're getting a better quality of life because you're not having the least of your kids' birthday party, right? And that all helps with the work life balance. You know, I interviewed so many people over the years, and they've always asked, like, what's the work life balance at this company? And it took me a long time to figure this out. And maybe, maybe I'm just slower than the average person, but the only person who's going to make sure that I have work life balance is me. AI helps elevate that role, which in and of itself improves the quality of life, but it should free up time for life outside of work as well.

SPEAKER_01 20:10

This reminds me of a talk I did at uh I think it was OpTech last year. And Rube Elliott Dodgers had just had just won the World Series. We're talking about Shoy Tano and his impact on that team because he's a unicorn, he can do it all. You know, he can he can pitch, he can catch, he's a smart player, he can run the bases. He's like a unicorn, and and we expect our maintenicians to be unicorns like that. They've got to be able to turn a wrench and fix the thing and and have great resident relations and work all hours of the day and be happy. And like that's not it's rare in baseball, it's it's also rare in uh property management, maybe rarer in property management, had a unicorn like that, right? And so there is this other guy that we pointed to is his name's Alejandro Kirk, and Alejandro Kirk is like he's not the fittest guy in the world, but he is he's he can hit, right? He can hit and like just ask him to do that one thing, and you can you can also get to the world series, and so like that's uh kind of a roundabout way of thinking going at what you're saying here, which is like the quality of of their work-life balance improves if we just ask them to do the one the one thing they're really good at, right? And and and and not burden their lives with all this other stuff, and then that should lead to better retention, I I would think. I agree.

SPEAKER_00 21:30

Absolutely. I think uh another example of that is just the the Winter Olympics just this past week, and you look at USA versus Canada in a hockey game, they're throwing it. USA was throwing guys over the board in a defensive zone to do nothing more than win the face off. They'd win the face off, gain control of it, and then that center would go out, and the other center that was with that line would jump on. So it's kind of the same thing, right? You get the specialist. Here's what I need you to do, go do it. Right. And so when you look at the maintenance team, does that give you the ability then to to Rather than have a unicorn, do you have specialists? You got one guy who handles HBAC, you got another guy that handles plumbing, and depending on the work order who comes in, or even to a certain degree the emergency work order, maybe somebody different gets called out depending on what the issue is.

SPEAKER_01 22:17

You know who the other specialist is? Is your is your AI agent. Like they're they're a specialist in, you know, they know all your policies and procedures, for example, in a way that your humans never do. So you have another specialist to call upon now who's really good at at some things that maybe the humans aren't and and offload that stuff to them, and everybody gets to focus on what they're good at, which is right. If AI is getting more involved in leasing and uh and operations and maintenance, what does this pretend? What's the end game you think for the on-site team? What a property would look like in the future.

SPEAKER_00 22:53

Yeah, you know, I think uh at the end of the day, people talk about eliminating positions, but I I don't think you necessarily eliminate positions, you just change the role or you change the responsibility. So I think the role of the on-site team turns to curating the resident experience. You look at companies like Amazon with the next day delivery and Netflix with on-demand shows, and Apple and Uber, just to name a few, especially since the pandemic and going forward, they've changed the customer expectation across all industries. So while we may not be in the same industry as Amazon or Netflix or an Uber, the the expectation that we're being held to, the bar that we're being held to is the same. So with AI, the on-site teams are spending less time on low-value friction activities, like administrative work, chasing paperwork, reactive service. And they become more focused on that resident relationship with regards to maintenance, the complex service recovery, community engagement, and exception handle. So that resident relation, there's no replacement for personal bonds and relationship building. That's something that AI can't do. So the role has to evolve, and the role has to move from this administrative type role to curating that resident experience.

SPEAKER_01 24:19

Yeah, that's a real opportunity to improve retention, raise the bar on your product, your brand. You know, you become sort of a hospitality ambassador, right? You're less the bad guy, you're less the enforcer, the person who quotes the rules, the SAPs, and you get to focus more on hey, how can we provide great service? You know, what more can we do here to make your home a more livable place and those sorts of things. And yeah, and that's that is the air that properties breathe to really stay competitive.

SPEAKER_00 24:51

Yeah, and you know, and you talk about taking the on-site team and putting them in a position not to be the bad guy, right? You talk about AI and you know, you can use it for collection, use it, you can use it for renewal increases, the renewal process. So, you know, instead of the community manager who see who potentially sees this resident on a daily basis, having to go, hey Dan, you didn't pay your rent. Yeah, you know, you need to pay it or I'm gonna evict you. Centralize that stuff, use AI to manage that, and then put the community manager in a position to be the good guy. Oh, you know what, let me talk to the collections team and see what we could do to you know get you paid up. Or, hey, you know, I'm sorry you think your retail increase is too high. Let me talk to the retail team and and see what we can do. So take that community manager. You talk about trying to improve the quality of life, imagine not having to be the bad guy all the time, right? Imagine getting to be the good guy and be seen as the problem solver rather than the problem creator.

SPEAKER_01 25:48

So so when it comes to this fear about AI eliminating jobs, and you as the way you see it, it allows us to focus on the resident experience.

SPEAKER_00 25:55

Right.

SPEAKER_01 25:56

Absolutely. If you could wave a magic wand right now, Gray, and fix anything, what should AI be solving that it can't right now?

SPEAKER_00 26:06

Golly, if I could wave a magic wand, there's only things I would do. You know, I think one of the things to look at is I remember when I was at one owner operator, we were using all kinds of different software for different things. And so somebody had the idea of taking a picture of a brain and then carving that up into sections depending on categories software, marketing software, budgeting and forecasting, market data, all kinds of these different categories. And then in each one of those sections, we listed the software we're using in each of those categories, and it was mind-blowing. I used to say I could never manage a community at that company because I wasn't smart enough. And I don't think the community manager shouldn't have to be a genius to manage 20 to 30 different software or dashboards. Reality is we need one cohesive layer or operating system to pull this all together. And you take the smartphone as an example, right? Smartphones didn't change the world because the camera got better or the GPS got smaller. They changed everything because the operating system turned separate devices into one experience and gave the hardware new value, right? You can scan a barcode or take a picture of a meal in a health app or a dieting app, and it'll tell you all the give you all the macros for it just by taking a picture or scanning a barcode. You can be in one app and click on an address in that app, and then it'll open the address and give you directions in the map app. The devices already existed. What changed was the layer that made it all work together. And I think multifamily is kind of in the same place right now. The average building runs on, I'd say safely, 10 plus, if not more, disconnected systems that claim integration, but they're really operating like fragments. And I think 10 teams end up manually orchestrating tools, logins, dashboards, and vendors because there's no true operating system. And we really need to fix this.

SPEAKER_01 28:06

It wasn't lost on me. You you you worked in the the claim integration into that description of the tool. Um, and I think what you're describing, you know, we for many, many years we've talked about property management assistance being a system of record. And this brain that you're describing is a new evolution in that I think is at the core of what AI, what the ultimate value will be to these organizations in probably not too long of a time, the you know, two, three-year horizon, which is your operational best practices, methodologies will all be encompassed and described in this brain that will use your system of record. So system of records don't go away, but that's not what you interact with anymore. The system of record is just it's it's you know, you don't think about the system of record any more than I think about my hard drive right now running behind the scenes to present this image of Greg in front of me.

SPEAKER_00 29:06

Right.

SPEAKER_01 29:06

Uh, I'm interacting with Greg. And so this the system of action is what's is what is going to, I think, be able to finally bridge this gap between all of these different applications you're talking about. Use whatever applications you want. Your system of action is what you interact with. You don't care if it's one or 10 or 20 applications in the background. You are interacting with your system, you're telling it how you want the property to run, you're telling it what your parameters are for sure. It's talking back to you and saying, consider this as a maybe a better way to increase occupancy or rate. And that's your interaction. That's what's being built right now. And it's a really exciting time to be on the cusp of all of that.

SPEAKER_00 29:46

Yeah, I mean, think of it this way, right? Your PMS, your property management software, that runs the business. The system of action that you're talking about, that runs the property or the building.

unknown 29:57

Right.

SPEAKER_00 29:58

To your point, I don't want to have to interact with 10, 20, 30 different software. I want to interact with that system of action so that again, like you just described, I don't worry about what's happening in the background. I'm talking to Dan. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 30:13

Well, let's wrap up with this, Greg. This has been really touched on a lot of great points. But I I if you if you somebody who's listening is like, I'm interested in this and learning how this can benefit how AI or or just really you know, sort of modernize my tech stack in general can be can be used to our organization. If you walk into a new client today, how do you how do you start? What is the first step? What's the first thing in must do?

SPEAKER_00 30:37

Yeah, I I think it's a it's really a three-step, what I'll call a maturity model, right? Step one is you got to standardize your workflows. If five managers run this process five different ways, fix the process, right? Get that fixed first, standardize your workflows, then automate repeatable execution, right? If your best operators would make the same decision 95% of the time, automate it, then apply AI to optimize those decisions. You can't AI your way out of a broken operating model. Fix that operating model by starting with your standardized workflows, automate and then AI. I think you know, I don't know if we want to go into closing comments right now, but um sure, sure. We'd love to go ahead. Let's share it, share your thoughts. Yeah, so I would say in closing, let's look for it's 2030, right? The companies that won in multifamily didn't win because they had the most AI. They won because they redesigned how operating decisions get made. The best operators won't be the ones who adopt AI first, they'll be the ones that can operationalize AI faster, which means building that AI component within their operating model.

SPEAKER_01 31:49

Double-click on that a little more, Craig. What does that mean to you? That sounds like urgency bound together with strategy. Does that mean that you go wide with it first, or that you were the first to solve your workflows first so that you could insert AI right away?

SPEAKER_00 32:13

I don't think it's implementing AI first. It is understanding your operating model, right? And then changing that operating operating model for the needs of today, and then using that AI to then leverage that operating model to help you make better decisions, right? So to get to your point, it's hurry slowly, right? It's not like just go, go, go, heartbeat. There is a sense of urgency, but you have to be smart about it in order to not, as I mentioned earlier, amplify the chaos. Have a plan, be strategic about it, understanding what your operating model is today and how it needs to change going forward, then layer in your automation and then layer in your AI.

SPEAKER_01 33:00

There you go. Love it. Okay, Greg, this has been uh, I mean, obviously one of my favorite subjects. You we talk all about maintenance today, and that's solidly where Vendrew lives. So I'd love you touch on some of the things that we talk about all the time. Thanks for coming on, Greg. And uh, if somebody wants to get a hold of you and and uh talk to you, engage with you on the consulting side, how do they find you, Greg?

SPEAKER_00 33:21

Yeah, they can reach out to me through email. Email address is Gregory at GJL RealestateAdvisory.com.

SPEAKER_01 33:30

Wonderful. All right, Greg. Thanks again for joining on us today.

SPEAKER_00 33:33

Thanks for having me, Daniel. It's been great. I enjoyed it, and we'll talk again soon. We will. Take care.

SPEAKER_01 33:39

Take care. Thanks for listening to the Multifamily Property Management AI Playbook, where AI stops being theoretical and starts improving how multifamily operations actually run from processes to people to performance. Learn more at vendoroo.ai. Until next time.