Katie Harman, Enterprise Consultant at Funnel, spent nearly a dozen years in multifamily—on site, in a contact center, in management, and implementing Funnel as an operator—before crossing to the vendor side. Now she helps some of the largest and leading multifamily operators rebuild their operating models to incorporate centralization and AI orchestration. 

From 45% to 4%

Harman’s proudest moment came working closely with a Funnel partner. When she first met them, they were missing roughly 45% of their prospect calls—simply because of how their teams were structured. Those were real leasing opportunities slipping away before a conversation could even begin.

Harman walked them through what their operation could look like, then launched them on Funnel’s contact center platform. The result: that 45% missed-call rate dropped to 4%. 

“They were able to answer their customers quicker, faster, more efficient,” she said. For Harman, that kind of turnaround is “what dreams are made of in the leasing journey.”

Centralization, six years in

Harman had a front-row seat to one of the industry’s earliest centralization pushes back in 2020, when she was on the ground with the company that helped pioneer the new operating model. Now she works with a wave of operators following that same lead, which gives her a clear view of what’s changed in terms of how operators think about and implement centralization. 

The early adopters did the hard work of proving the model, often by consolidating broadly and learning what worked along the way. That groundwork is led the way for today’s operators to start their centralization and role specialization journey learning from the early adopter’s lessons learned. Today many operators are identifying specific gaps in the customer journey and plugging in specialized reinforcement, to align with specific business outcomes. That might be a dedicated application specialist who handles the steps an on-site team can’t easily manage between tours and walk-ins: identity verification, pay stubs, and lease generation and signing.

The payoff is twofold. Site teams are relieved of work that pulls them away from higher-value customer service activities like touring, closing, move-ins, and renewals. And specialized team members get to focus on what they’re genuinely good at. Harman points out that multifamily once hired people to “do everything,” which often produced uneven output. Now operators recognize that someone excels at one thing and lets them own it. 

Change management: buy-in at every level

After living through change management on both the operator and vendor sides, Harman has strong opinions, loosely held, about how to move a large group of people in the same direction. Her number-one rule: leadership has to commit to the change wholeheartedly first, and then work to share that vision with their teams.

That vision only sticks if the people executing it are bought in. “The people who are on site, the site teams, the centralized teams—they’re the ones who are actually going to be putting these business practices into place,” she says. She’s watched rollouts go beautifully and watched them stumble, and the difference usually comes down to whether “the little guys” understand they’re part of the big dream.

To get there, Harman recommends teasers, in-person and virtual trainings, site visits, and check-ins. She’s a fan of identifying the more vocal team members and convening roundtables to hear feedback from early adopters: Does this work? Does this not? Tell me about your day. 

That gives the people executing the change a genuine say in the process. 

In a previous role, she ran “Funnel Tips of the Week” and “Tips of the Month,” and used all-company meetings to celebrate new features and workflow shifts. Everything, she says, is either a learning opportunity, a training opportunity, or a moment to build anticipation, paired with a constant, two-way question: How are you feeling about this?

The hardest part of any big change is user adoption. Most teams contain both tenured employees who only know the old way and newer hires who only know the new way. Keeping veterans engaged while onboarding fresh talent is its own balancing act. Her framing is direct: “We’re not moving backwards, we’re moving forwards.” Nobody wants to be the Blockbuster in the Netflix story.

AI that enhances, not replaces

One of Funnel’s core philosophies is that AI exists to aid and enhance teams, not replace them, and Katie makes that real for enterprise clients by leaning into flexibility. 

“Funnel’s not one-dimensional,” she said. If a company wants their teams answering calls during the day and AI handling inquiries after hours, that configuration works. Or if they’d rather AI handle every prospect up front, freeing their teams for follow-up and walk-ins, that works too.

The balance can sit anywhere—90% AI and 10% human, or 10% AI and 90% human—and it can shift depending on where a property is in its lease-up or stabilized journey, portfolio goals, and how prospects are reaching out. “There’s no right, and there’s no wrong way,” Harman said. The goal is to give multifamily operations leaders the flexibility they need to operate how it works best for their business. 

The throughline: the people of multifamily

For all the talk of centralization and AI, Harman keeps coming back to people.

The technology and the operations only matter if they free teams to do their best work and give prospects and residents a better experience.

Listen to the full conversation wherever you get your podcasts, or through the links below on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.