A Scottsdale, Arizona, startup has built a new artificial intelligence tool designed to sort through and rank calls from people looking to rent property, and the company says the AI is more accurate than human beings.
LeaseHawk announced the new tool, called Leadscore AI, Monday, saying it lets leasing agents identify “the volume of calls that are from actual prospects.” LeaseHawk’s business is built around tracking the ads that agents and property managers place on listing sites like Zillow or Apartments.com. The company then records, listens to and scores the calls that those ads generate based on the likelihood that they were actually made by people looking to rent.
According to LeaseHawk, “only 30 percent of incoming calls to properties are from true prospects.” In the past, the company has relied on people actually listening to calls in order to figure out if they came from actual prospects.
The Leadscore AI, however, streamlines and automates that process. Sarah Saglam, LeaseHawk’s senior vice president of sales and marketing, told Inman that “the cool thing about AI is that it’s more accurate than the human scoring.”
The AI is capable of identifying 18 different types of callers, according to LeaseHawk, and has been trained by “nearly 700,000 human-scored calls.” The company also believes it will get better over time as it absorbs additional data. It works by examining everything from the caller’s tone of voice to the various keywords that they might use.
So far, LeaseHawk has rolled out the Leadscore AI on a test basis, but the company expects to implement it widely in the coming weeks. The company can also transcribe calls and send them digitally to agents and property managers — a service Saglam described as “visual voicemail.”
LeaseHawk primarily works with multi-family rental properties. Saglam said that the tool offers “insight into the effectiveness of your marketing,” which can sometimes cost millions of dollars.
The company’s founder and CEO Mike Mueller agreed that the service helps clients better understand what kinds of calls they are receiving.
“There are few things more valuable to a leasing agent than being able to identify a prospect versus a non-prospect,” Mueller said in a statement, “and the AI-driven lead scoring gives them the insights they need to determine what ad sources bring them the most prospect calls.”