The Challenge: A Changed Market Put New Pressure on Site Teams

Nolan Living is a vertically integrated real estate investment and management firm that owns and operates more than 6,300 apartment homes across the United States. The company has long treated resident experience and online reputation as core to its operating model, with four communities earning J Turner Research’s 2025 ORA® Elite 1% distinction.

For Missy Singer, Senior Vice President of Operations, that reputation is built one resident interaction at a time. In her 32 years at Nolan Living, starting in leasing and holding nearly every role along the way, she has seen how much of the resident experience depends on the everyday conversations that happen after someone signs a lease.

For years, multifamily technology focused almost entirely on the prospect side of the resident journey. CRMs helped leasing teams manage leads and pipelines, but once someone signed a lease, the relationship was left to leasing agents to build and maintain. That model worked when the agents had time to build relationships face to face, but how people find and evaluate properties has changed.

Prospects who once walked through the door now do everything remotely, a shift the pandemic accelerated and never reversed, and online reputation became the new front door. As the prospect journey moved online, leasing teams spent more of their time on digital follow-up and reputation-driven demand, compressing the hours they once had for the residents already living in their communities.

So Nolan Living set out to reset its strategy around three priorities:

• Operational capacity: reducing the hours tied to repetitive resident intake, work-order conversations, and office traffic.

• Time allocation: giving leasing teams more room for the work the business needed most.

• Resident experience: keeping residents feeling appreciated, heard, and taken care of, even as onsite attention shifted.

Finding a tool that fit proved harder than defining the need. Many of the options Missy evaluated were CRMs first, with resident communication built around them, and Nolan had already invested in Yardi CRM IQ. Adopting one would have meant replacing a system the company had just chosen, or asking site teams to work across two.

The Solution: An Extension of the Office, Not Another Tool

Nolan Living rolled out ResiDesk as an operations platform built to absorb routine intake, simplify work-order communication, and give property teams capacity back. Residents could now simply text Sarah, ResiDesk's AI resident manager, to ask questions, submit work orders, and get help in a channel they already used every day.

Site teams could keep work moving without touching every conversation by hand. And Nolan Living could start shifting time away from repetitive intake and back toward the work that needed human judgment, leasing experience, and relationship-building.

"I can't tell you how many positive remarks we get about being able to text a work order to Sarah. It's so simple for people, and it saves us a 25-minute conversation. We get calls on a daily basis wanting to talk to Sarah — they view it as an extension of our office."

For Missy, resident-facing AI rises or falls on one thing:

“An AI tool is only good if people do not know it’s an AI tool. If they know it’s an AI tool, they’re going to treat it just like that.”

Sarah clears that bar. Instead of feeling like a disconnected bot, she felt like part of the Nolan Living team. Residents still felt heard, and site teams no longer had to carry every routine conversation from start to finish.

The Impact: Reallocated Capacity, Resident Satisfaction, and Better Reviews

Across Nolan's rollout, ResiDesk helped site teams transition to a more scalable workflow:

• $156,000 a year in payroll freed from routine intake, as work-order conversations moved from the front desk to Sarah

• 87% maintenance satisfaction rate, showing residents embraced texting Sarah as a fast, familiar way to get help

• 76.2% lift in 5-star reviews after 60 days of launch, with five of six communities now in the top 1% of ORA scores nationally

Before ResiDesk, several of Nolan’s larger, higher-demand communities relied on supplemental part-time support to manage work-order conversations and office traffic. Once routine work orders moved through Sarah, Nolan Living no longer needed the same level of coverage and eliminated six part-time roles, , removing $156,000 in annual payroll from the operating model.

The 87% maintenance satisfaction rate reflects more than resident adoption; it reveals how residents trusted the workflow. Sarah had become a familiar, easy point of contact, making residents more likely to raise issues they might not have brought to the office or called in directly — the kinds of small frustrations that can quietly shape a renewal decision later.

"It's the silent things residents harbor and never call in. No matter how good you think you are, you don't know they're there until Sarah brings them out."

By surfacing those issues earlier, ResiDesk helped Nolan Living treat maintenance communication as more than intake. It became a leading signal of resident sentiment, giving teams a chance to address problems while there was still time to improve the experience.

That same visibility into the resident experience created another benefit: better-timed review generation. As more of the renter journey moved online, reviews became an even larger part of how prospects evaluated a community before ever speaking to a leasing agent. Reputation was already a strength for Nolan, but Missy notes which kind of reviews that matter: organic, accurate, and tied to a real resident experience.

Because Sarah is already part of the resident conversation, ResiDesk can understand where a resident is in that experience. If someone is frustrated, Nolan Living can resolve the issue first and when sentiment improves, Sarah can ask for feedback at the right moment.

"ResiDesk takes the temperature and pulse of the resident and their satisfaction. That's when you want to ask for that review. That's the difference maker with ResiDesk: they know that resident's sentiment at that moment. We're able to drive more reviews, and our ORA scores have improved."

Within 60 days of launching ResiDesk, Nolan Living saw a 76.2% lift in 5-star reviews without compromising its standards for organic feedback. Nolan’s ORA® scores have continued to improve, with five of Nolan’s six communities now ranking in the top 1% nationally — building on an already high-performing reputation program.

Redirecting Team Time Without Residents Feeling the Difference

For Nolan, ResiDesk succeeded because it helped the company change how routine work moved through the operation without making the experience feel automated, impersonal, or disconnected from the office. Residents could text Sarah, get help quickly, and feel like they were still being supported by Nolan Living — not routed to a bot.

Site teams could now spend less time on repetitive intake and more time on the work that required their attention: renewals, leasing execution, resident relationships, and higher-touch moments that influence retention and growth. The result is a more scalable operating model for the way multifamily works today.