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Colleen, an artificial intelligence solution for the property management space, is expanding its capabilities to assist in the collection of past-due rent and fees from tenants, Inman learned in a Dec. 20 press release. The new product is immediately available to customers nationwide.
Currently, Colleen’s suite of products addresses a range of communications and apartment community needs for managers in the multifamily space, including lease renewal engagement, rent submission and other lease term milestones. Collecting past due monies, however, is a unique challenge, requiring, in many cases, day-to-day efforts for landlords and leasing agents, requiring persistent follow-up and tenant finance tracking that leans on manual processes.
The software contextualizes each interaction in which it is needed, engaged by customers at the point of tenant move-out. It digests lease data, payment histories and other characteristics of the individual’s financial activity to begin an automated sequence of outreach. The AI has been fed by millions of resident interactions.
“By leveraging proprietary generative AI, Colleen immediately and proactively engages, follows up and negotiates terms with former residents at portfolio-wide scale, which has already been shown to increase collections by 20 percent,” the release stated.
Colleen also states its AI reduces the rate of unpaid rent by 40 percent.
The use of internal data by organizations to train AI systems is helping it become more intelligent, improving its ability to devise responses and take action based on individualized use cases. As the team behind Colleen understands, and as articulated by Pritesh Damani, the CTO of The Real Brokerage, in an Inman Intel report, “AI is worthless without proprietary data.”
Colleen also deploys a user experience to track progress and monitor collection activities, which are spurred by allowing a range of payment plans and digital payment options, such as ACH, Google Pay, Apple Pay and other common fintech apps.
“Payment collections is more than a simple algorithm; it necessitates ‘human-like’ interactions that proactively prompt former residents to pay outstanding balances and avoid a collections process that is costly and frustrating for all parties,” said Itamar Roth, CEO of Colleen, in a statement. “Speed is especially key in recovery as the chances of collecting drop 16 percent every 30 days an account remains delinquent with larger balances dropping even more from 40 percent to a mere 5 percent recovery rate.”
Proptech for the rental space is having a moment, partly a result of macroeconomic conditions pushing aspiring homebuyers into long-term lease scenarios. Also encouraging its adoption is the demand of tenants to have their landlords provide generally accepted efficiencies that are part of modern business practices. Signing leases with pens, paying rent with physical checks and having to call someone for a repair are outdated concepts. There’s no reason it can’t all can’t be offered by a mobile or browser-based experience.
To that end, last month Colleen debuted Lease AI, software “to optimize the lease renewal process at scale while ensuring residents have a simple, quick path to renewing.” The company also said its rent collection offering has “saved a 2.5 million unit customer pipeline hundreds of hours per month on payment collections.”
