Square Plan, a New York based software company, founded in 2017 by Lio Slama, fuses artificial intelligence, or “AI,” with real estate, to help manage, streamline, and automate key operations and tasks for residential and commercial landlords and property managers.
For those who live in multi-family dwellings or residential units, many have experienced the trials and tribulations of trying to contact a landlord or managing agent when a door is jammed or a sink is clogged, but then days pass, and the problem still hasn’t been resolved.
Unfortunately, this phenomenon is all too commonplace, especially when a landlord owns multiple properties and might have overlooked the messages or may not have had the time to respond.
Slama’s company plans to flip tenant-landlord communications on its head, by creating a virtual assistant, to whom tenants can submit issues or questions to their landlords in real-time, via calls, emails, and texts.
While the real-estate industry has typically been slow to innovate, Slama believes that will change. “Real estate is not simply about monetary transactions. Rather, it revolves around providing a service and ensuring that tenants and management are on the same page,” Slama said in an interview with Gentry Magazine.
Square Plan’s system automatically sorts and unifies all communications and similar inquiries so that information is dispatched to the right people. This centralization allows for more control over staff and vendors, and more transparency on both sides. Thus, instead of 10 tenants all texting about bed-bugs, SquarePlan will group together and timestamp interactions that are similar in nature in order to avoid redundant requests.
The company’s app and website also give landlords and property managers access to a dashboard where they can find all tenant inquiries for each building.
Ultimately, the growing startup hopes to automate repetitive tasks, and to optimize inefficient processes that burden landlords and tenants alike.
Now that sounds pretty intelligent.