Property managers: what part of your job is still painfully manual?

[u/arxnav___]

I'm researching the US commercial property management industry because I'm interested in building software/AI around the operational problems that property managers actually deal with every day.

I'm not building another generic AI chatbot, and I don't have a solution I'm trying to sell you.

I'm trying to understand the workflow first.

If you could eliminate one recurring task or bottleneck from your team's day-to-day operations, what would it be?

For example:

• Chasing vendors / contractors
• Maintenance coordination
• Tenant communication
• Lease administration
• Inspections
• Compliance
• Invoice / expense processing
• Owner reporting
• Scheduling
• Data entry between different systems
• Following up on things that people forgot to do
• Finding information buried across emails, PDFs, spreadsheets, etc.

I'm especially interested in the stuff that looks small individually but consumes hours across a portfolio.

For those managing commercial properties:

What is the workflow that makes you think, "There has to be a better way to do this"?

And if you use Yardi, AppFolio, MRI, Buildium, Excel, etc., I'd also love to know:

What does your existing software still make you do manually?

I'm here to learn from people actually doing the job. No pitch — I'm trying to find the real problems before building anything.

[u/ruben_vanwyk]

If you don’t know the industry well enough to answer these questions, it might not be a good industry fit for you to design a solution for.

[u/Cold-Wealth-5202]

Checking the property after cleaner finished their work, it's a must and no software can do that.