The inbox by the numbers
Welcome to this deep dive, specifically put together for Jason, Kat, and Bev over at Western Slope. We are looking at PropFlow’s free look at your leasing inbox today, and going over the short proposal for bringing in Clara, the AI assistant. Yeah, I’m really excited to get into this one. Right, because, well, imagine you get to the office, you unlock the door, and there are just 57 people standing in your lobby waiting for you. Oh man, yeah, that is a rough start to the day. It is, and that is exactly what is happening in your digital inbox. By the numbers, you receive 10,887 messages this year. Which is huge! Yeah, I mean it equals about 57 messages every single business day, and that number is only growing. And we have to add the context there too. A third of those messages are arriving completely off hours. So they pile up, you’re constantly starting the day trying to dig out of a hole.
Where the noise comes from
So because of that off hours overflow, where exactly does all that mail go once Clara is actually on the inbox? Well, Clara takes 36% right off the top. She handles all the prospect mail. Okay, so that means every Zillow and Apartments.com lead. Exactly. Website inquiries, direct emails from prospects, and all those Zillow listing alerts. And I want to pause there, because I know people sometimes think of automated listing alerts as like just noise. Totally. But they’re not. Those are absolutely Clara’s work. She uses those alerts to engage. But how does the team actually stay in the loop with all of that happening? So the team follows every conversation right inside PropFlow. And at the same time, Clara keeps the AppFolio guest card completely up to date with her notes. Got it. But we should be really clear here, Kat and Bev, you never work from the guest cards. Yeah. Clara updates AppFolio, you just follow the chat in PropFlow. Yeah, exactly. And then there’s the administrative mail. That is 40% of the inbox. Wow, almost half. Right. So we are talking bills, vendor invoices, marketing, and those RingCentral voicemail emails. All of that gets neatly sorted into folders. Nothing is deleted.
Seven changes, ranked
Okay, so if Clara takes the prospects and the admin stuff gets filed away, what is actually left to read? Just 24%. Wait, really? Yeah. It drops the team’s load to about 14 messages a day. 14 a day? That is incredible. So if Western Slope says yes to this, what specifically does PropFlow do? PropFlow does exactly two things. First, they let Clara handle every prospect email and Zillow Alert. Oh, does it pull it off? And second, they sort the bills, marketing, and voicemail emails into three folders, both right now for the current inbox and as they arrive in the future.
What we can do vs what they click
Okay, so then to make that seamless, what exactly is required on Western Slope’s side? There are exactly four steps here, right? Four steps. First, connect your Zillow rental manager listings to AppFolio so the Zillow leads arrive directly as guest cards. That makes the whole manual guest card step just go away entirely. Which is a huge time saver on its own. Right. Second step, you turn off the RingCentral email notifications and just keep the app ones. Makes sense. Third, give your critical items their own dedicated folder, meaning notices to vacate, leases and renewals ready to countersign, screening results, and resident mail. Right, the stuff that needs actual human eyes. Exactly. And the fourth step is to turn that folder sorting into Outlook rules. But let me push back on that for a second. Sure, go ahead. Isn’t setting up a bunch of Outlook rules just trading one administrative headache for another? I get why you’d ask that. But no, it’s a really quick one-time setup and once it’s done, it just keeps the sorting working perfectly on its own. Oh, okay. Set it and forget it. Exactly.
Do first
So, last thing here. Since the inbox is running on these rules and the AI, how does Clara reach the team when she actually has a question she can’t answer? Well, today she simply emails the leasing inbox. Oh. But an option is coming very soon for Kat to just get those questions directly as a text message. Well, that’s brilliant. Which, you know, really makes you think, once an AI is handling all that traffic, what makes a great leasing agent? It completely shifts from managing inboxes to just building real human connections with the people who walk in the door. Jason, Kat, Bev, thanks for joining us on this deep dive.