As the owner of IRE Investment, a commercial real estate brokerage, numerous acquisitions associates & agents always tell me how great it would be for AI to source deals. Yes, that would be great, but I have a different take on it now.
AI’s Potential to Cut Operational Costs and Create Efficiencies
My opinion right now is that AI could be a great resource to help cut operational costs and create efficiencies in the commercial real estate industry. Right now, my focus is on how AI can help promote sales, revenue, and customer satisfaction for the business operations in commercial real estate.
Implementing AI in Contact Centers for Sales and Leasing
Here’s my idea. We start implementing AI in contact centers to set sales appointments, process reservations & leases, collect delinquencies, and prospect leads to help increase occupancy.
Here’s what IRE Investment is doing now. We’re building ires.ai, which is a conversational ai bot to help self-storage facilities lease storage units. We have a beta client, Speedway Self Storage, and we’ve collected all the pertinent information to answer questions that a renter would ask.
We’re working with the owner to forward the incoming calls to our AI bot, where the bot will gather all the leasing information from a prospective renter. From there we are putting the leasing data into the owners’ management system to provide a full-service ai leasing solution.
Benefits of AI-Assisted Leasing for Self-Storage Operators and Renters
IRE Investment’s beliefs are that this service will cut down on labor costs, help provide work-life balance for operators that answer their own calls and create benefits to potential renters who want to lease a self-storage unit without waiting for a return call.
Upcoming AI Features and Functionalities
We believe we’re only a few weeks away from having this solution up and running. Our ai bots will be able to process leases and input the data into the owners’ management systems without any human interaction. You might ask where are we going to go next?
Other AI functions and features will be next! The database we’ve constructed will allow us to not only have a phone ai bot but a website chat bot to process reservations. This will be an easy transition for us. But we don’t want to stop there. We want to have our ai bot respond to texts & emails once we’ve completed all the tasks required for the voice and chat features.
Expanding AI Solutions to Other Commercial Real Estate Asset Types
Lastly, we’re in talks with other owners of different assets inside of commercial real estate. Our next focus is going to be implementing these ai functionalities in RV resorts (outdoor resorts, campgrounds), manufactured housing communities (mobile home parks, trailer parks), office spaces, co-working spaces and golf courses.
We believe that all these asset types, including others we have not included above, will have low hanging fruit to increase productivity while lowering operation costs.
I’m writing this article on April 10th, 2024. So, by the time you’re reading this we may have made great advancements on our ai bot. If you’re interested in learning more about it, feel free to use the contact form or by phone at (518) 879-2268.
You can also visit our website at www.ires.ai to learn more. We look forward to what the future can bring and hope to help people in our industry while we’re doing it!
