Beyond the Hype: How AI is Actually Transforming Property Management Today | David Bitton

A Podcast | David Bitton

Pete Neubig: Welcome everybody to the NARPM Radio podcast. I'm your host Pete Neubig, the voice of NARPM. Today, we have another excellent show. David Bitton, a five-time entrepreneur, two successful exits, a TEDx speaker, a keynote speaker, a best-selling author, and a respected SaaS thought leader. Currently, he's the co-founder at DoorLoop, which many of you know is a PM software that is big in the NARPM space. They raise over $130 million, employ over 250 people, and manages hundreds of thousands of properties worldwide. That's a mouthful. David, thanks for being here, buddy.

David Bitton: Thanks so much for having me. I appreciate that. That's super kind of bio.

Pete Neubig: So talk to me a little bit about like, I want to basically, every time I get a tech guru like you on, obviously, I want to steal the conversation towards AI. You and I have talked before in the past. You've given us a great webinar on VPM. But let's, before we get into that, we'll dive into that. Let's dive into DoorLoop. Just tell me a little bit about how you guys started it, what was kind of the purpose behind it, and just give us some of the whistles and bells that you guys are doing and working on and stuff like that.

David Bitton: Wow. All right. So the origin story, to make it quick, basically our co-founder and CEO Ori, he started buying up residential apartments to rent as investments. He went online, started searching for property management software, was looking for something easy, affordable, quick to get started, fast. And he really couldn't find anything available a few years ago. So a lot of legacy players out there back then. So as a developer himself, he knew he can do it better and build it better and make it easier and faster, more modern, intuitive, better support, live chat, phone number on the website. So all of these sort of things that today we take for granted, but back then it wasn't so obvious. So that's it. He assembled the dream team of co-founders. There's about five of us and we built it in 2019. Here we are today. And I would tell you that as far as tech and future forward thinking is going, it is, like you said, it is all about AI. We'll get more into it, I'm sure, but the entire company has transformed around AI. Really? The entire company.

Pete Neubig: So how long has Doorloop been around? About seven years now. About seven years. Okay. So right before the pandemic, you guys- Literally right before.

David Bitton: Yeah, pretty much. But you would say like, wow, what a horrible time to launch. But what ended up happening during the pandemic is real estate prices started skyrocketing in some areas. So they ended up becoming a lot more renters. And when there's more renters, there needs to be more people managing the rental portfolios, people needing more software. So it ended up being a really good time for us, surprisingly.

Pete Neubig: So is Doorloop good for just single-family homes or can you do HOA? Can you do multifamily? Talk to me a little bit about what's really the main use for it.

David Bitton: Our bread and butter really is residential, single-family and multifamily. So anywhere from a property owner, landlord, owner-operator that has 10, 20 units up to a property management company that has 300 to 2,000 units. We are a great fit for that. We do also service commercial. So there's a lot of real estate investors and property management companies that have a mixed portfolio of both residential and commercial. And then we also have a product called Doorloop HOA, which services the HOA community as well. But the bread and butter is residential.

Pete Neubig: Yeah. I haven't heard too many of the softwares out there that can handle commercial. So would you consider that your main differentiator or do you have a couple other... I love y'all's slick UI. I think that's your differentiator. It's pretty.

David Bitton: Yeah. Thank you. There's some very basic features that we have that a lot of other softwares out there don't have. For example, camera conciliation and tracking sales tax and basic stuff that is just needed for them. So from day one, we wanted to make sure that we covered that area as well. Now I will tell you, disclaimer, if you only manage commercial portfolios and that's all you're looking for and you want the best of the best in the world, there are other providers that are likely better. If you have a mixed portfolio of both residential and commercial, we are an amazing fit.

Pete Neubig: Now you gave us a webinar for VPM on the top 10 AI tools. But before we get into talking about some tools that are out there for property managers, how are you guys using AI in door loops? I know that last time I saw you speak, you were actually touching on that stuff. So tell me what's been going on with AI inside of the door loop software.

David Bitton: Yeah. You know, it's funny. It's like every month when we talk, everything has changed. It's just crazy how rapid it's going. So a month ago, the conversation would have been different today. It's all Claude, Claude, Claude, Claude, Claude, Claude, Claude, Claude, Claude. It's all Claude automation. So it really started when, you know, we've been using AI for a while already, a few years, but more so the chat aspect of it. And then about the last 12 months, we started diving really deep into the agents and NNN and automations. And now it's all about Claude code and Claude Cowork for all these workflows. Now for the less technical people there, what is the difference between chatGPT and Claude? So all the chatbots agents, LLM models are all pretty similar where you're asking a question or a prompt, and it's giving you back an answer. What makes Claude Cowork so special and you could download it and just pay 20 bucks a month and get it is it can actually do the work for you. So it can control your computer. It can open up tabs on your Chrome browser and it could do the work for you. So I'll give you one example. We do these webinars, right? And it takes a few hours to set up every podcast, every webinar, create the host bio, the email campaign, social media posts, the webinar on your platform. Like it takes hours to do all this stuff. Claude Cowork, you could teach it. This is my process. Step-by-step copy this and do it for me. And it will open up your Chrome browser and literally do everything for you.

Pete Neubig: Wow. That's what we're getting to.

David Bitton: We're going to talk offline. I'm going to help you out.

Pete Neubig: I like that. So, you know, as AI matures, which seems to be every two weeks, there's something new out there. Yeah. What do you see? Like, I worry, honestly, now I'm an old guy. I'm a doom and gloom guy. I'll be the first one in a minute, but I can see in 10, 15 years, there's no need for people like in work, like working, like what are we all going to do? So tell me what just go and kind of put your futuristic hat on. Where do you see this thing in 15, 20 years?

David Bitton: Oh, man. I don't even know where I see it in 12 months, to be honest, because it is moving so rapidly. So what I think we're going to see, what I just told you is the agent is starting to do work for us on the browser, but it's only limited to the browser. It can't control my actual computer. So I think the next step is probably, hey, it's going to start controlling your computer. Now, what's annoying now is I have to build the prompts and text and type. Today, I wrote a four-page prompt of how to do something, and it took two hours to write that prompt. I think also the future is just going to follow me once on my screen, and then it's just going to do work for me. So I train it once. And I think that's going to probably come in the next 12 months. Eventually, you're just going to be talking. You're going to be wearing the meta glasses. You're not going to need to type anymore. Typing is probably going to be irrelevant. And it's just going to automate all this stuff for you that we're doing manually. So a lot of things will be automated. I don't think there's not going to be a need for humans. There's always going to be that creative side of us I don't think you'll ever get to, but we're going to be sort of the architect and the project manager directing it of what to do versus doing the work ourselves. So now at Doorloop, we are all becoming super human, and we're able to do the work of five people. So historically, you'd be able to do maybe three to five blog posts a month. You could do a hundred a month in your sleep. So that's sort of what you're seeing. A lot more output, efficiency, automation, time savings from a lot of people.

Pete Neubig: Do you think that with AI, that we'll get closer to having a national PM company doing it well? Like Love Pure, Love Mind, I mean, you know, Soul to Mind, but they're having challenges, right? They have some challenges getting across all these multiple markets. Evernest, another one. Do you think it's going to make it easier for those guys? And do you see the death of the mom and pop PM firm because of that?

David Bitton: You know, I think all these platforms are going to get there in the next five years. Like it's still pretty early days. A lot of people aren't using vibe coding tools or AI coding tools or cloud code or cursor. Like they're still, people are starting to dip their toes. So I think in the next five years, you're going to see everyone starting to transform into that. What I do also think is that mom and pops, the reason they're still successful today is the human element, the personal aspect of it, the boutique size and feel that you get, the customer service that you get. So I think there's always going to be a need for that. People, you know, the more we automate and the more there's agents and robots, the more people might be gravitating more towards, hey, I just want like a mom and pop feel. I want to pick up the phone and talk to Bob or David and just be able to talk to someone. So what you're seeing is a lot of automation and robots and automated customer service, AI customer service, and people still want that human touch. So we've recently added back the phone number to our website. So people were complaining, it's too much AI, AI. Okay. You know what? We're going to go back to the old days and have a phone number and you can just call us. So we're going back into that customer service and that's what people want. They want to talk to a person face-to-face.

Pete Neubig: I literally, the other day was trying to call my mortgage company and they had Gina, the AI assistant. And I'm like, Gina, I don't want to talk to you because I've already done my research. I know I need to talk to a person. Yeah. The new AI auto attendant reminds me of the old auto attendant. And I did zero, you know.

David Bitton: By the way, so when you're calling companies on the phone, what do we always do? You press zero, zero operator, operator, operator. It's the same thing today. You get an AI chatbot, human, human, human, you know, people, people still want the human touch.

Pete Neubig: And I think, you know, like the kids today, like young kids, they are going to be basically like you grew up in the time of internet, right? I had to learn internet. I was, I was around before internet. Right. So I had to learn that you would just, you wouldn't, it was native to you, but you have to learn AI. The kids that are today, the young kids, they're just going to be native to AI. So I think there is going to be the next generation. They're not going to want it. They're literally going to be the opposite. They're not going to want to talk to anybody.

David Bitton: So, you know, it's funny. I'll tell you a funny personal story. My daughter loves taking my phone and taking pictures and stuff. And she took it recently. I don't know how she figured out what chatGPT was. She opened my chatGPT app and she pushed the microphone button and she started talking to chatGPT. Hi chatGPT, what's your name? Can you be friends with me? Hey, how do I do this? How do I do that? What do you think about this? And she just started having a conversation and learning. But the cool thing is today, when she wants to figure something out, she could just take a phone and say, Hey Siri, how do I do this? chatGPT, how do I do this? So the knowledge they have is unbelievable. And I don't think it's going to make them, let's say dumber. They are going to have unlimited knowledge where they can just learn how to do anything in the click of a button or a voice prompt. So that's, I think, pretty cool.

Pete Neubig: Yeah. And one thing that I think through is like, you know, there is a like, when I, when I work through a problem and I figure it out, like there's something about that. Like I feel good about myself versus just asking Siri. Even when we're in a bar and I'm like, Hey, who hit 30 home runs for the Dodgers in 88? And then we're just trying to figure it out. Of course we could just ask AI and it'll tell me, you know, who all did it. But it's like, I got, I figured it out. Right. And so I, I worry about like people just feeling that, that, you know, feeling good. Right. About like accomplishing something.

David Bitton: So, so I'll, I'll add to that. I feel the same way when I'm doing hard math problems, or I used to have to build crazy formulas and in, in, in Google sheets. Right. And now I was like, I don't need to figure out the formula. Hey, do it for me. So I sort of miss that mental stimulation, but I will tell you. When you're going back and forth for hours with a prompt and you're, and you're finally get to what you want to get to. It's incredible. It's still a great feeling. There's still a lot of creative back and forth going, and you're able to accomplish a lot more, much faster.

Pete Neubig: All right. So I'm going to keep, I'm going to keep on this AI theme. What, what are you, you got some tools here, but what do you think property managers, what should they be using in their business? Doesn't have to be property management specific, but just AI, you know, anything to help their, help their life.

David Bitton: So I'll tell you my personal favorite tools that I use that I think can also help them as well. Number one, everyone should be using some LM chatbot, whether it's Chatterbot, Gemini, Microsoft, right to Cowork, Claude, choose one, learn it, master it. You should be using it. You should have all your employees, all your staff using it. It is game changing. So that's number one. That's, that's the bare minimum to start. And it's not, it's not hard. It's all free. Chatterbot.com, Gemini.com. It's very easy. Go to YouTube, watch a three minute tutorial. It's easy.

Pete Neubig: Should you have them have everything under the company GPT versus a personal GPT?

David Bitton: Great. Yes. A hundred percent. So you can have a shared workspace also as a company account. If you're paying $20 a month for Chatterbot, for example, there are settings for privacy settings and security settings to not share your data and train the model with your confidential data. So you always want to make sure that's enabled. And if you're not sure what to do, go to Chatterbot.com. How do I do X? I'm a property manager. What should I use you for? Right. Just ask. And it's going to tell. So that I think is the bare minimum. My two favorite tools I'm using today. Besides that one we mentioned in the last webinar is jace.ai. It handles all of my emails for me. All of them. So property managers are flooded with emails all day long from tenants, vendors, owners, you name it, right? Coworkers, et cetera. I get over a hundred emails a day personally. So what happens is when you go into your inbox, jace.ai, if you're using Google Workspace and Gmail will automatically draft replies for you in your tone of voice with all the context and history from the email chain and prior emails, and it is a perfectly drafted email ready for you just to hit send. And I'm telling you, Pete, 95% of my emails, I don't need to adjust at all. It's incredible. And it will follow up for you also, right? So Pete, if I email you and you don't respond, but you always respond, and you don't respond in three days, it will follow up and draft a follow up email for me. So it just automated my email life and it saves me hours a week at least. Yeah. So that's my top two, I would say.

Pete Neubig: Okay. So jace.ai and just getting an LLM and making sure that it's a company LLM or a company chat. Do you see a need, like you have to policy around this, no? Do you guys have an internal policy on how people use the GPT? And is that something that do you think top managers would need?

David Bitton: So we always have to have, everyone has to request access to a certain tool. And then we want to know what you're going to use it for, why you're going to use it, and then we'll approve the tool. So it is important that people aren't just signing up for random tools just to play around, but they might be exposing or sync linking to your company email or downloading a file that could expose company information. So you always want to be careful. But today, if you're going with any of the big players that I'm talking about here, they're all pretty secure. You don't need to worry too much. Let them have fun, right? Like I would actually say the opposite, like let them loose, let them go explore. What you don't want to do is stifle innovation, hold them back. So at DoorLoop, when we realized how powerful this was, we said, hey, company, whoever wants a license to all these tools, just request and you will receive. Go have fun, go build, let's see what you can build and come up with. And it's incredible when you give the power to people and you empower them to go and have fun and explore and build whatever they want, you'll be shocked at what they come back with.

Pete Neubig: What if a DoorLoop user comes into DoorLoop, where would they be using AI inside DoorLoop?

David Bitton: Yeah.

Pete Neubig: So they have like a little assistant or chatbot or like data. How do you guys use an AI for your end users?

David Bitton: Yeah. So we launched our AI product. It's called the AI Assistant back in October, I want to say. And it just keeps getting better and better and better, as you can tell. October is like years ago now in AI. So we have probably seven or eight different AI features. I'll probably cover my top two or three. The first would be the AI Assistant. So it's like your typical chatGPT. But when you ask chatGPT a question about your business, it doesn't have context. It doesn't know anything about your business. It doesn't know your tenants, doesn't know your rent roll, doesn't know who owes you rent, doesn't know anything. So the cool thing is that we brought that into DoorLoop so you can ask it and communicate it and ask any question you want about your business. Who owes me rent? What's my profit and loss? What's my biggest expense? Where should I be saving money? How can I make more money? You can just ask any question you want. The other cool thing it can do, it can do any action for you, almost any action. Who owes me rent? Great. Send them all rent reminders by email and text. Oh, and for my Hispanic customers, write a Spanish email to them as well. So it could do anything for you. So that's pretty cool. The second one, I think my favorite would be the Tenant Communication Bot. So most people that use DoorLoop, they teach their tenants, if you want to communicate with us or submit a maintenance request or ask any questions, you have to use our tenant portal to submit the question. So when they go to the tenant portal to submit the question, we found that about half the questions that property managers get all day that they can't stand are lease-related questions. The same ones, when's my rent due? How much is my rent? When is my lease over? How can I renew my lease? All typical lease questions. Guess what? DoorLoop knows that because your lease is created by DoorLoop. So the chatbot answers all of those questions for them. The second half of the questions that people ask, maintenance, my toilet's clogged, my fridge isn't working, my AC isn't cooling, the typical stuff. Great. The AI bot knows how to handle those things. So it works through, what's the problem? Hey, have you checked? Is your refrigerator powered on? Do you see a light? Can you send me a picture of the issue? What's the serial model? And it tries to troubleshoot the issue. If it cannot troubleshoot, it will create a maintenance request ticket for your team with all the information, so they don't need to try those steps again. Now, we've been testing this for about two months before we released it, and it resolved up to 80% of all tenant questions. You're talking about 80% of your time back because they don't need to communicate with you. These are game changer things. And there's probably six more things that I can keep talking about. Now you can do inspections with AI in 20 minutes compared to three hours. So it's just what you're going to be seeing is a ton of automation.

Pete Neubig: Don't just kind of, don't just say that. All right. Let's hear about that one. So wait, you can do inspections in three minutes instead of hours?

David Bitton: 20 minutes. So you still unfortunately have to go to the property. So let's say it's an apartment.

Pete Neubig: Next year, next October, it'll be a robot.

David Bitton: Robots. That's it. Robot dogs. You know, you're joking, but it's probably going to happen.

Pete Neubig: I was at a conference and I saw a robot dog, like it was from an inspection company. So they're literally...

David Bitton: It's coming. So you go into the property, you take out your phone, you start snapping pictures or video, right? Of all the issues, all the damage. And then you go to DoorLoop on your phone, if you want, you upload the pictures. And with your voice, you could transcribe the, this is broken, that's broken, the mirror's broken, whatever. And you're uploading pictures. It will take all the pictures and your voice transcription, and it will automatically create all the work orders for your maintenance team to fix. And it will automatically add everything to the invoice to take out of the security deposit, as an example. So it creates a whole report. It automates everything in a few minutes. So the 20 minutes is going, taking the pictures, adding in the voice transcription, clicking accept, that's it. So all the automated work is going to be done for you now.

Pete Neubig: It really is amazing what it can do. Yeah. All right. Give me one more tool before we head out.

David Bitton: One more AI tool outside of DoorLoop. Okay. So I mean, I'm using a few right now. Let me see which one I want to tell you about though. We could talk about WhisperFlow is one. We could talk about, yeah, let's talk about WhisperFlow. So the average person types at around 40 words a minute, right? If you're a fast typer, like I'm pretty fast, I could type at around a hundred words a minute. If you're super fast, 120, and that's like crazy, average person, 40 words a minute, but the average person can speak at 150 to 200 words a minute. So WhisperFlow is an app that lives on your computer and it's like Siri, but AI powered. So you hit a key on your keyboard, WhisperFlow activates, and you start talking to your computer. And whatever you say, it will transcribe with AI to your computer. So if you're writing an email, drafting memos, any, if you're texting people, anything that you're writing, you can now do with voice. But unlike Siri, where if you're talking and say, no, actually, scratch that, it will actually transcribe those things with WhisperFlow. You're like, no, actually we do that. Bullet point one, next line. It's really smart. And it learns when you're making mistakes and it will auto correct. So it is very cool. So pretty much you're typing four times faster today.

Pete Neubig: Very cool, man. All right. Is there anything that a problem manager listens to this, what's their first action? If they're, if they're listening to this.

David Bitton: First action, a hundred percent. If you are not already using a ChatsVT or similar, go and use it. If you are using it, go master it. If you think you're mastering it, now make sure all your employees are using it. And if, if you've gotten to that part already, now I encourage you to go have fun and test out Claude Cowork, watch some tutorials, pay 20 bucks a month. It will rock your world, change your life, automate your work. Yeah. I'm just, I'm excited for you.

Pete Neubig: I'm hearing stories where somebody, somebody's guys building stuff already and they're getting rid of, you know, some of the subscriptions. A thousand percent. Yeah. I don't know if you've heard, but I hear they're calling it the SaaS apocalypse. That's SaaSpocalypse. Yeah. You've heard that then, huh?

David Bitton: Yeah. A lot of companies are safe, but it's the small companies that do one thing for you that now AI can do. So I'll give you an example, right. Jace, what I just mentioned, which I still love, Claude Cowork has a connector, it could sync with your email and it could do the same thing now. So there is still, your computer has to be on, it has to be running all the time. So it's not so easy yet. Eventually it will get better. So even though I can do it and automate it, I still use Jace because it's always running. It does a bit of a better job. So I'm still paying them for now, but I bet in six months I probably won't. So we'll see.

Pete Neubig: Yeah. I wonder if like the Calendlies of the world are going to be around in six to eight months.

David Bitton: Oh yeah. Who knows? I know, I know.

Pete Neubig: And now you can put your chatGPT $8 subscription. It could do X, Y, and Z.

David Bitton: You know, the cool part is that my slogan for Claude is if you dream it, you can build it. And that's what I'm seeing now with me and all my friends and internally at the company that we have ideas. I wish I could do this. Oh wait, actually, hold on. Let me, let me ask Claude maybe or Lovable or Replit, and maybe I can do it. And within 15 minutes it's done. So, you know, it's fun. We're having fun right now.

Pete Neubig: It's a good time to be a, I guess it's a good time and a bad time to be a developer, right? It's a good time to be a, somebody who knows how to ask lots of questions and know what they want, right?

David Bitton: A great time to be a developer. You can develop 20 times faster and that's not an exaggeration.

Pete Neubig: Do you see a lot of developers losing their careers though, or do you see?

David Bitton: No. So it depends. So the first one I have in my normal webinar presentation, what it says is AI won't take your job, but someone using AI will. So right now, if DoorLoop is going to hire another developer, it's going to be a developer that knows how to use AI. If you are a developer at a company and the company is saying, you've got to be using these tools and you are refusing to use these tools, you will probably be replaced by someone that knows how to use these tools. So if you're a developer, if you're in any industry, AI won't be replacing you anytime soon. It might, but someone that knows how to use AI will replace you. So you've got to learn how to use it.

Pete Neubig: David, you're always a wealth of knowledge and I love the energy you bring. If somebody wants to learn more about DoorLoop, how do you get?

David Bitton: Just go to, you know what, maybe I can make a link for you guys. Let's see. Yeah. So this is the NARPM podcast. I'll make a link for it right after this. So go to doorloop.com/narpm. It will give you all, I'll add a special promotion for you guys and gals to go, go check it out. And if you ever want to, you know, geek out on AI, please add me on LinkedIn, DM me, I would love to chat and, or email me, right? David@doorloop.com. I answer every email usually within 24 hours because my AI is doing it. Exactly. Now they know my trick, unfortunately, but I do read and respond to every email.

Pete Neubig: I'll say this too. If you are throwing, if you're going to throw like a, one of the state conferences, or if you're on the broker owner or whatever, reach out to David. He'd be a great speaker for any of the conferences. So David, thanks so much for being here. All right, everybody. If you're not part of NARPM, you can easily join, go to narpm.org or give them a call at 800-782-3452. And if AI hasn't taken all the VA jobs and you need a remote team member, go to vpmsolutions.com or email me direct at Pete@vpmsolutions.com. David, thanks so much for being here, buddy.

David Bitton: Thanks so much again. Take care.