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ResiDesk is an AI-powered resident communication solution that keeps a human in the loop. Their easy-to-onboard platform ensures renters receive efficient and empathetic service, while property managers and owners gain comprehensive property insights from conversation data.
Unlike the many chatbot-based point solutions, ResiDesk handles it all —from answering simple questions to resolving work orders. But it goes even further. ResiDesk generates deep insights from resident conversations, revealing a property’s challenges and opportunities in a digestible dashboard view. If the answer isn’t readily available on your dashboard, you can query the data just as you would with ChatGPT. ResiDesk offers more functionality than its competitors at a fraction of the cost.
We recently spoke with ResiDesk co-founder, Arjun Kannan, who provided insight into the company’s background, the problem they’re tackling, and what makes the company stand out above the competition.
What problem is your company solving? Can you highlight a product feature that speaks to how you solve that problem?
Arjun Kannan: We're solving for Business 101 in real estate, which is an industry that has no idea what its customers actually want. The reason that that's a problem is because real estate simply is not incentivized to talk to residents.
This leads to all kinds of challenges, from why residents don't pay on time, to what amenities they like or don't like, all the way to understanding if the residents are actually happy with the staff, maintenance, and everything else at the property, therefore predicting whether they will renew or pay more in rent.
We solve that by providing our customers, owners and operators in residential real estate across every asset class and geo a premium resident concierge. That's what we call it. It's an AI plus a human texting solution that starts talking to residents the day they move in all the way through to the day that they move out. It helps them answer questions, solve problems, streamline maintenance and payments, and then aggregates all the data for everybody from site teams, regional managers, asset managers, and owners to make better decisions based on what their residents actually want instead of flying blind.
Where did the idea for ResiDesk come from?
Arjun Kannan: We've all experienced what it's like to be a renter, right? It's kind of a crappy experience universally. Part of the idea from all three of us as founders comes from a personal experience of trying to understand why the process of renting sucks so much when as a renter, it’s the most expensive thing in my life, month to month.
Looking at it systematically, it comes from the deep-rooted expertise of all three of us in different parts of this problem. Whether it's Alex's experience in real estate and property management, Sam's experience in understanding why smart products are very hard to sell into right legacy industries, or my experience looking at this from the financial angle (I supported LPs who had real estate portfolios).
The common thread was there is absolutely no understanding of the resident at all baked into this industry, whether it's from an operational perspective or a financial perspective. That's really where the idea of trying to help real estate and understanding the renter came from.
Through jumping into it, we realized that it wasn't actually an issue of real estate not making sense of the data it didn't have. There was an issue of not speaking to the renter in the first place for multiple good and bad reasons. That's how we got to the idea of building software where properties talk to residents and vice versa so that customers can save time and money while we create this trusted relationship with the resident and solve all the problems we talked about.
Describe your target customer. If there's more than one, what are the different customer segments you focus on?
Arjun Kannan: Our target customer broadly is owners and operators in residential real estate of every shape, size and color. We have customers who operate across 40 plus states and a couple of Canadian provinces. We’re pretty agnostic to geography. We have customers across every asset class from high-rise skyscrapers in Manhattan, to garden-style housing in the sunbelt, through to affordable housing in Colorado.
The common thread across all of our customers is typically that they have somewhere between one and 100,000 units under management. They fall pretty squarely into the category of real estate companies that are becoming more professional and scaling themselves, therefore trying to centralize their operations and provide a better brand for their residents. Outside of that, our customers really run the gamut.
Our perfect customer or the prototype customer is typically a vertically integrated owner-operator because they can make decisions quickly. We want someone who has a relatively large portfolio and is trying to create a great experience and a consistent experience across all of their properties, but it can stretch pretty easily to owners or third-party managers as well.
How does ResiDusk make money?
Arjun Kannan: We operate just like every other SaaS model in the industry. We offer an all-in-one fee of $1.50 a unit a month, and that's pretty much it. Something that we really like to talk about when you talk about our monetization is not only are we basically doing a hundred times more than any of the point solutions in the industry, but we're doing it at a price that is significantly cheaper than any one maintenance, payment, review, or chatbot solution.
How do you differentiate yourselves from other chatbot solutions?
Arjun Kannan: I'd say there's three key differentiators: First, as we touched on earlier, out of all of the other somewhat similar solutions, nobody does quite what we do. They're all focused on point solutions. They all operate in transactions, right? They're focused on getting you to pay rent, closing a ticket, or answering a question, where on the other hand, we offer a much more holistic solution. You talk to one person all the time, and it's a trusted relationship for the resident. We're much more holistic in that sense.
Secondly, we're way more flexible than anyone else on the market, and by flexible, I mean, we can plug into practically any property management systems. We use AI to solve the integration challenge. That's very sticky in real estate. We can plug into any PMS and even plug into your custom workflows, so not just your existing ticketing systems, but literally any new software that you bring in, we're automatically adaptable to.
Thirdly, we beat all of our competitors on cost. We are typically at least two to three times cheaper than an alternative solution that would combine our competitors or even just choose one of them. What they charge for one feature that we provide is usually a couple of times more expensive than us. Underpinning all of this is everybody else is offering an AI chatbot. We know from experience that residents hate it. Even when the technology is really good, residents hate when they have this feeling that the property manager is pawning them off to a low-cost solution. The first question we get asked when we launch at a property is, “Are you a robot?” We differentiate significantly by offering a solution that is AI powered. It understands everything that's going on at the property, the context of the conversation, where the resident is at in their life cycle, etc. but it’s really human driven. That means there's a human using that AI intelligence to help answer the resident with empathy and build a relationship. And that's something that nobody else on the market is offering.
What's next on ResiDesk's roadmap? What other features are you working on or what other customer segments do you want to expand to?
Arjun Kannan: There are three things on our radar in order from nearest to longest term. First, we are in the process of scaling what we do today. We currently serve over a couple hundred thousand units across the country and would like to scale to close to 10 million units, which translates to 10 million conversations a month. That means we can handle any type of conversation with the resident and actually help our customers go from an average 1.5 heads per site to about 1.2 heads per site. I think it's the way that they think about goals with us. We're building on top of that, and you'll see this in a second when we get into the demo.
We're building our digital site visit product on top of that, which is taking the sum of all these conversations that we are having with the residents across your portfolio and generating insights based on those conversations to highlight opportunities and risks for everything, from how they feel about staff all the way through to potential challenges with insurance. That is getting turned into what we're going to call a “command center”, where clients will be able to not only see the challenges and the insights from their properties, but we're actually going to give asset managers and executives the ability to actually take action on that feedback for the first time. For instance, you see that somebody isn’t paying rent, or they're paying rent by checks because there's an issue with how electronic payments are presented to them. We're going to be able to surface in our software the problem of why people aren't paying electronically, and also provide a suggested next step of how you can use us to bring that messaging forward to your residents. By doing that, we're going to scale. We're going to scale the way that we have solved these problems for our customers already, case in point being the street that we're working with, where we reduce the share of check payments from 30% to below 15%.
Long term, what we're looking to do, effectively, is through building this platform of communication and these scaled insights, we will have a platform that we can package into a self-serve solution that can tackle the sub-thousand-units part of the market, which is dramatically underserved. There's basically no systems building for it. For us, it is actually even more price insensitive than a typical property manager. So, we would like to become the all-in-one solution for them as well. Building up to long term, we will become the only resident insights database in existence, which then helps us build solutions for everybody up the equity stack from better insurance to better acquisitions to better portfolio management.
