As fall and winter approach, leading affordable housing owner Fairstead is exploring how artificial intelligence (AI) can help the company prepare for and respond to hurricanes and other severe storms.
It’s just one example of how the firm is looking to apply the latest technology to streamline operations for both staff and residents.
“Overall, we see AI as very helpful for two things, in particular. One is looking at what tasks can we automate using AI. This can be communication as well as research and analysis. That’s one bucket,” says Will Peri, senior director of strategic operations and property management at Fairstead. “We also see AI as a big opportunity for developing software that helps us run our business better where we or a vendor previously couldn’t design it or it wasn’t worth investing the time. Now, the equation for what we invest in changes with the tools that we have with AI.”
With a portfolio of more than 30,000 units across the country, Fairstead is one of the nation’s largest affordable housing owners and developers. In recent years, the firm has expanded its use of technology and AI across property management operations, using AI-powered tools to support utility management, financial reporting, tenant communications, security monitoring, and operational analytics.
“For hurricanes, we have the ability to take weather data and forecasts and use AI in the research to see how properties weathered similar storms,” Peri says. “We can use AI for enhanced modeling and research.”
For example, Fairstead is exploring leveraging its enterprise AI platform and proprietary tools to anticipate extreme weather events, allowing it to better prepare maintenance teams and residents alike. For example, the goal is to flag when a freeze, heat wave, or storm is headed toward a property, prompting automated best-practice reminders to on-site staff and residents before conditions turn dangerous.
AI will also help teams assess and respond to damage once a storm passes. “It lets us get ahead of weather events instead of reacting to them,” Peri says.
“When you look at the entire value stream of what happens when you are impacted by a hurricane or another natural disaster, there are these pieces all along the process that you can apply AI to,” Peri says.
It’s not just about major events. AI is being used by many affordable housing operators to streamline routine maintenance orders.
Typically, a maintenance request begins with a resident reporting a problem. They put a ticket in through the property management system, the ticket is routed to the maintenance office, the maintenance office reviews the ticket, a maintenance technician is dispatched, and the technician looks at the issue and tries to fix it.
“Essentially, across each one of those steps we can incorporate AI to make the process smoother,” Peri says. For example, AI can aggregate across work order submissions to tell whether a complaint is a unit-level issue or a building-wide one. A spike in heat calls from a single property, for example, can signal a boiler problem rather than a single faulty radiator. “That speed of information helps us solve the problem quicker.”
AI can also follow up and check with residents to see if a repair was done to their satisfaction and to see if there were any issues. This gives feedback to the maintenance staff and also the corporate team about how the process is working.