Landlords & PMs — What’s your biggest time-waster in managing rentals?

Question

Hi all — I’m working with a student to explore building an AI assistant for landlords and small property managers. The goal is to reduce manual work like responding to tenants, handling maintenance, sending rent reminders, and generating simple reports.

We’re trying to understand what parts of rental management actually consume the most time, create stress, or just feel too manual even if you’re using software like AppFolio, Buildium, Avail, or Hemlane.

A few questions for you (feel free to answer any):

What’s the #1 task in property management you’d love to “hand off” completely?

Do you ever get overwhelmed by tenant messages or maintenance coordination?

What still feels manual or repetitive even if you use PM software?

Would you trust an AI assistant to help — like a bot that triages issues, messages tenants, or talks to vendors under $ thresholds? Why or why not?

This is purely exploratory — no sales pitch. Just trying to build something that solves a real need.

Thanks in advance for any feedback — even one sentence helps a lot!

Ryan Randall · Answer

1. Evictions2. Coordinating plowing.For 2, I wish there was a service my plow guy could just text/email and it blasts a notification to all my tenants. Same goes for other types of repairs, maintenance work, etc.

Sudha Govindarajan · Answer

Thanks Ryan, we are considering this in the mvp as part of triaging and managing maintenance communication. We may pick a few critical maintenance aspects like plumbing, electricity to test for the mvp.

Sudha Govindarajan · Answer

Thanks so much, Samantha — this is incredibly helpful.

You surfaced several real pain points that align closely with what we’re working on. We’re building tools to help automate repetitive tenant communications, streamline emergency response, and simplify maintenance and billing processes.

Your challenge about handling invoice uploads more intelligently is a great one — definitely something we’ll consider for the roadmap.

I’d love to keep you posted as things progress. Your feedback would be invaluable when we’re ready for early reviews.

Thanks again for sharing your experience!

Sudha

Sudha Govindarajan · Answer

Thanks so much for your thoughtful feedback—it’s incredibly helpful to understand what’s most valuable to you.

Your point about insurance shopping really resonates. It’s a major pain point I’ve heard from others too, and I love your idea of using AI to surface top options ranked by quality, price, and customer satisfaction. It’s not something I’ve built yet, but it’s exactly the kind of feature I’m looking to explore—and I’m seriously considering adding it to my roadmap.

I’ll definitely keep you in the loop as things evolve. Thanks again for sharing such a useful perspective!

Samantha Wakaruk · Answer

I can definitely name a few things. I'm a property manager that directs the maintenance department of the company, so my answers may be more maintenance specific. We currently use Appfolio.

1. Reaching out to tenants to give them updates of when a city inspection will be. Yes, I can text everyone at the property level, but I wish there was a button that I could have pre-set responses built in to choose from. 2. Creating bills from invoices received - I wish I could just upload a PDF of an invoice and AI grab the text and create a bill that I can proofread and edit if needed.

3. Explaining the same thing over and over and over to tenants - again, I wish there was a preset responses built into the software we use.

4. Fielding a REAL emergency from a tenant-thinks-this-is-emergent. I get calls daily from Appfolio about 'emergencies' that are definitely not emergent in the least.

5. Listening to my voicemails at the office. Although my line is only supposed to owners or new owners looking for management, tenants will still leave voicemails on my line. 6. We are currently in the market for an AI chatbot for our website that will field emergencies and send a message to a member of our team if one arises. Although we have that for the phone, we're finding that many people prefer texting in. 7. I wish that Appfolio would allow me to set maintenance labor prices by owner. Going in and changing all the billing for each individual labor line in the back end gets exhausting. I can say, my team went from Tenant Cloud to AppFolio, and Appfolio is definitely so much better.

Landlords & PMs — What’s your biggest time-waster in managing rentals?

Most Popular Reply