What’s most important in a CRM built for multifamily centralization
The “old way” is broken.
The 1:100 model (one leasing team member for every 100 units in the community) isn’t working for anyone. It’s broken. It asks team members to be jack of all trades and masters of none, and burns them out because there aren’t enough hours in the day to get through the list of tasks that they need to accomplish. It leaves renters on “read” and doesn’t answer their questions in a timely, on-brand manner (or many times at all 🫣). It also costs millions per year in inefficiencies and unrealized cost reductions.
It can feel impossible for everyone. Impossible for teams to get their jobs done. Impossible for renters to get (helpful and timely) answers to your questions.
Leading operators know that what got them here won’t be enough in the current climate of high team turnover, of flat apartment demand and stagnant rents. Many are looking to centralization, and role specialization. If you’re looking for a proven solution to help you shift to the new operating model, which includes shared services, multi-property workflows, centralization, and role specialization — you need a solution proven to provide these results — which you largely won’t find from legacy CRM and PMS software solutions, or stand alone AI solutions.
Why legacy software, and AI-focused start-ups can’t help you centralize
Most legacy multifamily software solutions promise centralization — but are unable to truly deliver. Their property-centric data architecture (that they’re in no rush to recode) does not allow them to create portfolio-wide or multi-property workflows and queues of tasks for specialized centralized teams.
If you’re relying on your AI-first solution to help you centralize, you’ll be sorrowfully disappointed too. While AI is often one component of centralization success, the heartbeat of your operational strategy relies on a single source of truth — the customer relationship management (CRM) software. AI can help take repetitive tasks and follow-up off of your team’s plate and enhance your team’s abilities. However, when handing off tasks between onsite teams, centralized teams, and AI you need one source of truth regardless of communication source — text, email, phone — to keep everyone on the same page and keep operations moving in the right direction. That source of truth is a proven CRM as the foundation.
While many multifamily software providers claim centralization, Funnel is the only proven CRM provider to allow leading property management companies to move to the new operating model. In this article we’ll dive into what you should look for in a CRM, when you are wanting to move to a centralized operating model.
Five questions to ask any vendor who is promising to help you centralize
Many multifamily vendors are buzzing about centralization, but it’s important to understand if they can actually help you centralize…or if they just promise “centralization” because it’s a trendy word.
When we say centralization, we mean an operational shift to take administrative tasks offsite and moving them to specialized roles on centralized teams. Some operators call this shared services, role specialization, or work re-imagined to name a few terms that we’ve heard.
So, to drill down on what our fellow multifamily suppliers promise vs. what they deliver ask the following questions:
- What’s the source of truth for your solution (i.e. is the data architecture built around the property or around the renter)?
- Does your solution move administrative tasks off the onsite team and route them to specialized teams with role-specific task queues?
- Can they tell you how many renters were cross-sold between properties, and if a renter has ever rented from you before but at a different community?
- Can onsite and offsite teams communicate from the same email/phone number using their solution?
- Without using multiple tabs or logins from one dashboard, are you able to have specialized teams work specialized to-dos across your entire portfolio (multiple communities)?
What you need in a Multifamily CRM #1: renter-centric data architecture to empower multi-property workflows
You might know that renter-centric® is our tagline, but you might not know that it’s also the underlying data architecture that is fundamentally different from any other multifamily solution and allows us to create multi-property, and portfolio-wide workflows. When we say renter-centric we mean that the renter, not the property is the source of truth. For each renter who inquires at a property using Funnel, there is only one guest card created no matter how many in-portfolio properties they inquire about.
Now, compare this to the traditional, broken, data architecture that silos information at the property level and limits multifamily leaders’ flexibility to craft streamlined portfolio-wide workflows that serve their teams and customers better.
What you need in a Multifamily CRM #2: AI-infused CRM where AI and CRM are built into not around one another
Once upon a time, AI was a huge investment of time and team members to build. It is still an investment, but with the advent of large language models democratizing AI, it’s becoming a commodity.
Everyone is leveraging the same data models. It’s (now) less about your proprietary data model and way more about what you do with that data, how conversational you can make your AI, and what guardrails you put into place for regulated industries like multifamily.
You do not want your CRM to be built around your AI solution. You need your CRM to be the single source of truth for communication at every source — email, sms, phone calls — and to keep onsite and centralized specialized teams in sync with queues of tasks that take the guesswork out of their next steps and what’s needed to delight renters. You need the CRM to be the brains of your operations, and then leverage AI that is built into the CRM to take tasks off of teams and give them a hand.
A proven CRM that is full of all community information — amenities, pet policy, neighborhood amenities, parking etc — can then feed all of the community-specific information to the AI solution for in depth accurate answers that take tasks off of your team’s plate and give them a hand. An AI-infused CRM will also generate follow-up for more sensitive and less routine conversations with prospects and residents and allow the emotionally intelligent team member to adjust based on any company guidelines, context and policy needed. This takes the emotional weight out of these tricky conversations for team members and allows them to respond in an on-brand way faster.
What you need in a Multifamily CRM #3: renter-centric data architecture = CRM is the source of truth for renter and resident facing workflows
When your teams are jumping platform to platform not only is data getting siloed in individual solutions (yes, even if there are integrations you know it’s true). And, since most solutions are built on the foundation of a property-centric architecture their ability to actually enable centralization and multi-property workflows is limited at best, and made up at worst.
When jumping between solutions, or with property-centric solutions, it can be difficult for team members to know what are the most important next steps. This is particularly for high-turnover teams where someone is constantly new/training, and it inevitably makes them less efficient. Property-centric solutions may appear to have centralization functionality, but in practice often team members are still clicking into the property instance to complete tasks. Since there is no way to surface tasks and workflows to a higher level it creates silos within the workflows, because of the data silos that are inherited from the underlying property-centric data architecture.
Additionally, for leaders in your organization data can be difficult to extract from some legacy solutions, and reporting isn’t always aligned. Meaning a team member who has a masters in excel wizardry is probably testing the limits of what is possible to provide some-what-accurate-but-definitely-cobbled-together reporting and analytics. Just because this is the way it’s always been done does not mean it makes sense or is the way it SHOULD be done.
A CRM purpose built for the multifamily industry, provides one record of each renter or customer, and then also shows all communication no matter the source — phone, sms, or email — attached to their record all in one place. This provides onsite and centralized teams with an easy-to-navigate queue of tasks that tell them what actions to take next to provide a consistent on-brand customer experience. For leaders at your company, it provides quick, accurate reporting across the portfolio.
What you need in a Multifamily CRM #4: engaged teams + happier renters = exceptional experiences
Speed to lead is vital in an environment with high supply, low demand, and stagnating rents. Leaving your prospects on read, or ghosting them because your team’s queue of tasks is too long to allow them to get to routine follow up is a sure way to lose prospective renters. Your CRM should curate task queues for team members based on their role and responsibilities, and allow AI to assist them in getting through this list of tasks. With Funnel, a Virtual Assistant works alongside team members to take care of follow-up, while escalating items that need empathetic customer service that team members are known for providing. Most traditional AI, PMS, and CRM solutions rely on team members to be a jack of all trades. You need a CRM that understands what kinds of tasks to send to specific teams and individuals to operate with specialized centralized teams that allow team members to play to their strengths.
Funnel’s AI-infused CRM allows for instant responses from the Virtual Agent, while also dividing tasks between specialized teams’ queues to ensure that team members are focused on the kinds of tasks that they are good at and align with business goals.
Unlocking the centralization + role specialization with a renter-centric multifamily CRM
For leaders looking to move to the new operating model Funnel is the proven multifamily CRM solution that has helped dozens of operators leave the old operating model behind and centralize their operations. Don’t fall into the (expensive) trap of other vendors over-promising and under-delivering functionality. With centralization there are a lot of people claiming centralization, but there is only one proven CRM for centralization.