Real estateGoal: cut operational costs and time8 weeks

Tenant requests sent to the right contractor in minutes, not the next morning

A property manager in Wrocław looks after 18 residential buildings — about 1,100 apartments. Tenant requests came by phone, email and a web form to one office coordinator, who read every message, guessed the trade and urgency, and called a contractor. Leaks reported in the evening waited until morning.

Client: Residential property manager, Wrocław
Their team: Managing director (owner), office coordinator, 3 building managers
Our team: Engagement lead, 2 engineers
Timeline: 8 weeks to production

26 h → 40 min

to the first meaningful response

64%

of requests routed with no coordinator involved

25 min

for an urgent leak to reach a plumber, day or night

−45%

tenant complaints about response time

The business goal

Answer every request within an hour during the day and stop urgent leaks from waiting overnight — and take on six more buildings without hiring a second coordinator.

Agreed in the outcome brief

Criteria: Time to the first meaningful response: contractor assigned, or tenant told what happens next
Baseline: 26 h median — 6 weeks of history, about 520 requests
Target: Under 1 h in working hours; urgent cases under 30 min, 24/7
Pilot exit: 50% of requests routed correctly with no edits, in 5 buildings, by week 4

Where it was

Requests came in through three channels and landed with one office coordinator. She read everything, decided which of 9 regular contractors to call and phoned them one by one. Building managers chased the status by phone too.

3 channels

phone · email · web form

1 coordinator

reads, classifies, calls

9 contractors

assigned by phone

What we did

1Outcome brief · 1 weekTogether with the coordinator we labelled 300 past requests to agree on 10 categories and clear urgency rules. That alone settled years of arguments.
2Pilot · 4 weeksClassification and routing rules in 5 buildings; the coordinator confirms each suggestion with one click. Week 4: 58% routed correctly without edits — above the exit rule.
3Production · 3 weeksAll buildings. Notifications to contractors, SMS to tenants with status updates, a 24/7 path for urgent cases to the on-call plumber or electrician.
4Run & improve · ongoingMonthly review of misrouted requests; new categories added from the coordinator’s feedback. 64% routed automatically by month three.

What did not work

Voicemails left after hours: noisy recordings made transcription unreliable. Instead of guessing, they go to the morning queue with a “call back” flag. And some tenants still phone the coordinator directly — that is fine, she now uses the same tool.

Who did what

The client’s team

Rewrote contractor agreements to include response times, defined urgency rules, briefed building managers.

Our team

Built intake, classification, routing and tenant SMS; measured response time every week.

Together

A weekly look at every misrouted request — the fastest way to improve the rules.

Before and after

NumberBeforeAfter

Time to first response26 h40 min

Routed without the coordinator0%64%

Urgent leak to contractornext morning25 min

Coordinator’s time on requests~5 h a day~1.5 h a day

Complaints about response timebaseline−45%

Under the hood

Email, web form and phone-call notes → LLM classifier (10 categories, urgency, building, flat) with business rules on top → routing by trade, building and response-time agreement → contractor notifications and tenant SMS. Evaluation set of 300 labelled requests; low-confidence cases go to the coordinator. EU hosting; personal data masked before it reaches the model.

Our office coordinator stopped being a switchboard. She handles the hard cases now — and leaks get fixed the same night.

Managing Director, property manager · name withheld at the client’s request