Use case · Real estate & property management

Answering residents, day or night.

After hours, a resident with a midnight leak hits voicemail. Here the droid answers the phone, opens the work order, and dispatches the on-call vendor, then hands the office one morning brief instead of a backlog.

Isometric resident-services desk with work orders, a property map, and a unit availability board
Does
Runs the resident services desk, around the clock
Answers on
Phone, SMS & email
Works inside
AppFolio + the calendar
Covers
3,200 units across 7 states
01The situation

Voicemail isn’t an answer.

After hours and on weekends, residents hit voicemail or a generic answering service that just took a message. Maintenance emergencies sat until morning, leasing leads went cold, and the office spent the first hours of every day digging out from a backlog of texts, emails, and missed calls.

With 3,200 units across seven states, “we’ll get back to you” wasn’t cutting it, and staffing a 24/7 desk was never going to pencil out.

02How it works

How it got handled.

Rather than staff a 24/7 desk, the team handed the after-hours desk over. Unify stands ready on the phone, the text line and the inbox, so it picks up every resident the moment they reach out, handles it end to end, and pulls in a person only when something genuinely needs judgment.

TASK#314After-hours resident deskstanding
trigger
Any resident message, after hours
also
A wrap-up brief when the office opens
scope
Every unit across the portfolio
runs as
A contained action per message (leak, tour, rent…)
memory
Per-resident & per-unit summary, carried interaction to interaction

Set up once, in plain language: “whenever a resident reaches out after hours, handle it end to end, and brief us in the morning.” Unify turned that into a standing job: no phone tree, no answering service, no one on call.

FIG. 1The durable task, exactly as it exists in the runtime.

Every time a resident reaches out, it runs the same loop:

FIG. 2The loop each run walks.
03Ongoing handling

How it ran, through the night.

Here’s the night as it actually unfolded, message by message, down to how it reached for each app. Only the calls that needed judgment ever made it to a human.

  1. 11:48pmleak · 4Bescalated
    • SMS
    • Google Calendar

    An emergency leak: opened a work order, dispatched the on-call plumber, and talked the resident through the shutoff while help rolled.

  2. 12:05amnoise · 2C
    • SMS

    Logged a quiet-hours complaint and sent the unit upstairs a policy reminder, with no manager woken over one report.

  3. 12:15amtour
    • Gmail
    • Google Calendar

    Answered a leasing lead while it was still warm and booked a self-guided tour for the weekend.

  4. 12:40amvendor
    • SMS

    Plumber checked in on-site; updated the work order and closed the loop with the resident it had promised a follow-up.

  5. 1:10amFAQ
    • Google Calendar

    Answered the gym’s holiday hours and issued a one-time code for a waiting package.

  6. 7:34amrent
    • Stripe

    Itemized a balance and sent a secure payment link; the account was clean, so it handled the whole thing itself.

  7. 8:00ammorning brief
    • Slack

    The office opened to a clean board, with every interaction written back to AppFolio and one brief posted to the team.

FIG. 3One night, run by run.
See it in action

One night, message by message.

Each resident message and run event lands on the left. Watch each one get worked end to end across the apps, turning to a person only when something needs judgment.

The result

What changed, by the numbers.

2 hrs → 4 minto a first response
78%of after-hours requests resolved without staff
< 10 minemergency dispatch, 24/7
more leasing leads contacted same-day

An illustrative workflow built from real product mechanics. The connected apps, the schedules and the run handling are how a droid actually works; the companies, the people and the figures are composites rather than a customer's numbers.

Try this workflow

Run this workflow yourself.

Copy the brief below and paste it into Unify. It’ll walk you through the prerequisites, connect what it needs, and stand the workflow up with you.

Workflow brief
I manage a portfolio of residential rentals, and after hours there's no one to answer residents. Overnight maintenance, leasing inquiries, rent questions and noise complaints hit voicemail and get sorted the next morning, so emergencies wait, leads go cold, and the office starts each day digging out of a backlog.

Run the after-hours resident desk. Apps/channels: AppFolio (property system: residents, units, leases, work orders, ledgers), SMS (resident texts), email (leasing inquiries), Google Calendar (tours, amenity hours), Stripe (payment links), Slack (morning brief).

Runs whenever a resident reaches out after hours, plus a wrap-up when the office opens. For each message:
1. Identify the resident or lead and pull up their unit, lease and history from AppFolio.
2. Handle it end to end: triage maintenance and dispatch the on-call vendor for emergencies, answer leasing questions and book tours, explain balances and send payment links, log noise complaints and send policy reminders.
3. Write every interaction back to AppFolio as you go.
4. Only pull in a person when something genuinely needs judgment.

When the office opens, post one morning brief to Slack: what was handled, what's still open, and that nothing was dropped.
Read next

Other jobs handed over

All use cases →

What would you take off your desk?

Tell us the job that never gets done before close. We'll wire it up on a call and you can watch it work.