The beginning of 2023 kicked off with a renewed energy for technology’s potential to advance progress in business and society . With the help of innovative teams at Invitation Homes, who share this enthusiasm, we’ve been able to implement the latest single-family rental home technology in our operations and continue setting industry standards for a leading resident experience.
Throughout the resident journey, we’ve found ways to deploy technology to make residents’ lives easier and our operations more efficient. This starts with making the leasing process as smooth and seamless as possible. We never want prospective or current residents to feel frustrated or overwhelmed by different logins, separate portals, or multiple password entries. For prospective residents, we want to make sure our leasing application is user-friendly, especially on mobile devices, since this is how most of our customers come to our website.
To that end, we’ve created a new leasing application platform that hosts all application elements in one place and was built to be mobile-first. We’ve seen a 28% increase in individuals who have completed the application in a single session on mobile devices with this new system. While this new platform is currently being piloted in select markets, we expect to complete a national rollout by the end of the year.
We’re also exploring how we can utilize digital technologies to make it easier for prospective and current residents to submit payments. Artificial intelligence (AI) could allow us to enhance our chat-like features to reduce customer friction points, resulting in faster responses or quicker redirection to answers online. We’ve also been looking into how we can improve our automated communications to limit the number of times a resident has to pick up the phone. For example, when we send email communications about a rent payment reminder or lease renewal, our goal is to have residents simply respond within that email with their payment or lease renewal plans.
Another area where Invitation Homes is excited to make continued progress is maintenance and service for residents. Residents use our maintenance app to submit requests for service; in fact, year-to-date, 37% of work orders were submitted via the app. We’ve also implemented new technologies that allow field technicians to act faster to resolve resident requests. Through the digital toolbelt, we’re able to give technicians all the resources they might need to solve an issue so they don’t have to search multiple resources for information. This allows them to make the right decisions in a timely manner and ultimately boosts resident satisfaction. A new app for associates was also recently launched to ensure no critical tasks are missed when preparing a home for its next resident. By digitalizing this process, we’re able to more quickly and efficiently perform quality checks and make sure homes are ready and welcoming.
Driving these efforts are part of our five-year roadmap to implement customer-enhancing technologies, and we’re excited to build upon the projects we already have underway, whether it’s enhancing our automated email communications, refining our application so all requested information is captured in a single flow, or simplifying our communications with residents. Invitation Homes is also exploring how we can provide prospective residents with real-time feedback on their application so we can get qualifying residents into new homes faster.
As a leading single-family rental company, we believe we have a responsibility to explore and apply the latest technologies to benefit residents. We’re excited to continue improving the resident journey with technology, AI, and every applicable innovation in between.
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