When the Wall Comes Down

Eric Aplyn — CEO, Allthings Technologies AG

Artificial intelligence in property management is a hot topic right now. But hardly anyone asks the real question: is your software actually ready for it? The uncomfortable answer: for most, it isn't.

Everyday Life Behind the Scenes

Most property management companies today run an ERP, a ticketing system, a phone system, a document management system, and often half a dozen specialized tools in parallel. Each system works well on its own. But hardly any of them know what the others are doing. As a result, employees spend the whole day jumping between systems, carrying information from A to B by hand, and simply remembering the rest themselves, because otherwise no one would. This isn't an isolated case. It's everyday life.

The Real Problem

The reason is rarely a lack of will, it's a lack of access. The data you'd need already exists: often in the ERP, sometimes in the document management system, in the email inbox, or in specialized systems. Unfortunately, the systems don't communicate with each other, because the interface is missing or deliberately kept closed. Based on our experience, on average 75% of a property management company's operational data goes unused, simply because no one can technically access it. And that's exactly what keeps AI and other automation efforts in property management from making a real difference.

Why This Isn't a Software Problem

The only real solution is for systems and providers to actually open up their interfaces, not as an exception for one partner, but as the standard. No single property management company can enforce that alone, and frankly, neither can a single software provider.

Below, we show two examples of what happens when these walls come down, and who we're working with right now to break them down.