AI Leasing Agents in Multifamily: Why Every Team Needs a Kelsey

Life as a Leasing Agent – The Crazy Beginning

It was late 2008 and I was in the car, patiently navigating Bay Area traffic and I called my best friend from college, Kendrick. 

I was planning to sell him on an idea that even I thought was crazy. He picked up the phone and I said...

"What if you became a leasing agent at an apartment building in San Mateo?" 

"What if you did it for free?”

At the time, Kendrick was an engineer at SpaceX, and I had my own job in management consulting. We were both on a path to an interesting (and hopefully highly successful) career.

But we saw an opportunity: if we took this role as a leasing agent,  we’d learn the multifamily industry from the ground up, prove our value, and maybe even turn this landlord into a long-term partner. We built a pitch deck showing how we could increase NOI and fill units faster. We offered to work without pay. 

And we got rejected.

A week later, everything changed. The landlord called in a panic: an employee had just stolen hundreds of thousands in rent, and he needed help immediately. Kendrick didn’t hesitate. Within days he left Washington, moved into a distressed apartment building in California, and started leasing full-time. It wasn’t glamorous, he spent Thanksgiving eating at Denny’s, but he was energized. Kendrick rolled up his sleeves, grinding on booking tours, coordinating repairs, and optimizing the resident experience in a human-centric way. For the first time, we were in the business, learning by doing.

We quickly learned scheduling tours was manual, responses were delayed, leads slipped through the cracks. We’d gone from starting our careers in tech-driven businesses that ran at the click of a button to an outdated process that felt like the 1990s.

That pain was our lightbulb moment. We realized leasing didn’t need more humans working longer hours. It needed technology that could handle the repetitive, time-sensitive tasks for us. Out of necessity, we built an early version of what would become Kelsey, our AI leasing assistant. She kept up with inquiries, answered questions, scheduled tours, and never missed a lead. Within months, she wasn’t just keeping us afloat, she was transforming the way leasing could work for everyone.

Why Every Team Needs a Kelsey

So why am I convinced that every multifamily team needs a Kelsey? Let me break down the key reasons that an AI leasing agent like Kelsey isn’t just a nice-to-have, but a game-changer for multifamily teams:

• Never Miss a Lead (24/7/365 Coverage): Prospects don’t only shop for apartments from 9 to 5. In fact, many inquiries hit your inbox at odd hours when your office is closed. With Kelsey on duty 24/7, every lead gets an instant response, day or night. You’ll capture interested renters that might otherwise move on if they don’t hear back promptly. No more coming into the office Monday to find a bunch of “missed” weekend leads.
  
  
• Lightning-Fast Response Times: Speed matters immensely in leasing. We’ve seen properties using Kelsey cut their average response time from over 4 days to just 2 minutes for new inquiries. In fact, 95% of leads get a reply from Kelsey within 2 minutes This kind of immediacy wows prospects and dramatically increases the chances they’ll engage with your property rather than looking elsewhere. (Ask yourself: when was the last time you waited 100 hours for a return call? Prospective residents certainly won’t.)
  
  
• Higher Conversion & Occupancy: Engaging leads quickly and consistently means more of them turn into signed leases. Some communities using Kelsey have seen their lead-to-lease conversion rates double within a month, with a 35x return on investment in marketing spend, all while significantly reducing the workload on staff. By nurturing every inquiry and not letting interested prospects slip away, Kelsey helps drive both occupancy and revenue. It’s like having a top-performing sales associate who never tires.
  
  
• Consistent Follow-Up: Leasing teams often struggle to follow up with every lead, especially when juggling walk-ins and resident issues. Kelsey, however, never forgets to follow up. She will keep the conversation going with prospects – sending friendly reminders about scheduling a tour or completing an application – long after a human might have moved on. She’ll even automatically reschedule tours if a prospect can’t make itbutterflymx.com. This persistent yet polite follow-up means interested renters feel looked after, not left hanging.
  
  
• Frees Your Team for Human Touch: By handling the repetitive Q&As and scheduling, Kelsey frees up your human staff to focus on higher-value interactions. As one property management executive observed, AI assistants act as a supplement, not a replacement, to your leasing team. With Kelsey taking care of the busywork, your leasing professionals can devote their time to in-person tours, relationship building, and resident satisfaction,  the things that truly require a human touch. They won’t be constantly interrupted by phone calls or emails, so when a customer walks in the door, your team can give them full attention, “look you in the eye and be present for that interaction” instead of multitasking.

In short, Kelsey makes your leasing operations more responsive, efficient, and personable all at once. She’s like the most reliable leasing coordinator you could imagine, the one who handles 1,000 conversations simultaneously without dropping the ball.

Vision: AI with Humans in the Loop

A question I get a lot is: “Are AI agents like Kelsey going to replace leasing professionals?” 

As a former leasing agent myself, let me be very clear – absolutely not. AI is about augmenting and elevating the human element in property management, not replacing it. Kelsey was designed to work alongside humans, each doing what they do best.

Here’s how we approach it: Kelsey handles the tedious and time-consuming aspects of leasing,  the endless emails, the late-night texts, the FAQ-type questions… So that the humans on the team can focus on the complex, relationship-driven work that truly requires human intuition and empathy. I often echo this core mission: there is work being done by humans today that should be done by technology, so that humans can focus on more energizing and personalized work. Answering “Do you have parking available?” for the 50th time in a week isn’t a good use of a skilled leasing agent’s day. Closing a prospective resident who’s touring the property is. Kelsey exists to empower leasing teams, not cut them out.

Crucially, we built Kelsey with a “human-in-the-loop” philosophy from day one. This means a real person is always available to step into the conversation whenever needed. For example, if Kelsey encounters a question she can’t answer or a frustrated prospect that needs special attention, she will flag a human team member to intervene. Our platform even has humans on our end monitoring Kelsey’s interactions in real time at scale, to make sure things are going smoothly. The Chief Data Officer Andrew Steiker-Epstein at Charney deployed Zuma and stated, “this has increased our tour volume by over 100% and tour conversion by 20%,” as reported by Bisnow. In practice, this means prospects get the best of both worlds: immediate answers when possible from Kelsey, and a warm hand-off to a human onsite leasing agent.

This humans-in-the-loop approach also helps Kelsey get smarter over time. Every time our team intervenes or a leasing agent handles something Kelsey couldn’t, we treat it as a learning opportunity. We update Kelsey’s knowledge so that next time, she can handle that scenario on her own. It’s a continuous cycle of improvement where humans train the AI, and the AI in turn takes more work off humans’ plates. The end goal is a symbiosis between AI and people – much like a seasoned leasing agent might work with an assistant. As Connie Chan of a16z noted in TechCrunch, about our approach, a blend of AI efficiency with human support can create an almost “magical” leasing experience that feels both high-tech and high-touch at the same time.

Looking ahead, our vision is that AI assistants like Kelsey will become a critical lmember of every property management team. We’re already seeing rapid adoption of these tools across the industry. They’ll handle not only leasing inquiries and rent collections, but other resident interactions too,  from maintenance requests to resident experience support, always with oversight from your staff. In an era where hiring and retaining leasing employees has been challenging (especially after COVID) AI assistants are helping teams stay nimble without sacrificing service quality. They take care of the volume, so your humans can deliver the personal touch where it matters most. AI is a supplement to human interaction. It is not a replacement. The future of multifamily is AI + Human, working in tandem.

Embracing the Future of Leasing

My journey with Zuma has taught me a valuable lesson: sometimes the road less traveled holds the greatest opportunity. A few years ago, it meant pivoting our business and building an AI leasing agent when it was an unconventional idea. Today, it means encouraging multifamily teams to embrace an AI assistant as a trusted colleague. Adopting something new can be intimidating just as attending endless conferences and doing things “the way they’ve always been done” can feel safe. But if we hadn’t questioned the traditional way of leasing, Kelsey wouldn’t exist, and we’d still be stuck in that reactive grind that so many teams know all too well.

Every time I see a property team start working with Kelsey, I’m struck by how quickly they wonder how they ever lived without an AI leasing agent. Suddenly, their human staff isn’t burned out from answering repetitive inquiries; instead, they’re spending time giving prospective residents memorable in-person tours or crafting creative marketing campaigns for their community. Prospects, in turn, feel heard and attended to from the very first moment they reach out. It creates a better experience for everyone.

In an industry often described as “people business,” we sometimes forget that listening to people is the most impactful thing we can do. But listening at scale was impossible when we relied solely on human bandwidth. That’s where Kelsey changed the game; she makes sure every inquiry gets listened to and answered promptly. This not only boosts conversions and occupancy; it also builds trust and rapport with prospects from day one. By the time a human leasing agent meets the prospect for a tour, there’s already a positive relationship in place.

For multifamily leaders, marketers, and property managers reading this, my message is simple: don’t be afraid to take the leap with AI. Integrating an AI leasing agent like Kelsey into your team might feel like a bold move, but it can quickly become your secret weapon. It’s a chance to elevate your team’s performance by letting technology handle the grind, while your people focus on what truly moves the needle, engaging personally with customers and making strategic decisions. The companies that combine human empathy with AI efficiency are going to set themselves apart in the coming years.

At the end of the day, I believe every team deserves a Kelsey. I say that not just as the CEO of Zuma, the company that created Kelsey, but as someone who has lived the problem and seen the solution firsthand. Every team deserves an assistant who works 24/7/365, never complains, never misses a lead, and continuously learns to serve your mission better. In my case, it took a near-disaster and an unconventional journey to realize this. I hope for you, it might be as simple as reading this and deciding to give your team the support it needs. After all, when you strip away the noise and embrace new solutions, you often find that “better way” you were looking for all along.

– Shiv Gettu (CEO & Co-Founder, Zuma)