Golden Horizons
CAPABILITY · VERTICAL-SPECIFIC
Tenant Comms (Property Management)
Maintenance triage, rent-late ladder, and lease renewal cadence — all automated.
$9,000 build · $2,500–5,000/mo
Talk to us about a Tenant Comms (Property Management) build →What it does
Handles inbound maintenance requests with triage and vendor dispatch, runs a rent-late reminder ladder using state-specific notice language, and sends lease renewal outreach 90-60-30 days out. Writes every touchpoint back to AppFolio, Buildium, or Yardi.
Property managers spend a disproportionate share of their week doing work that shouldn't require them at all. A tenant texts at 10pm that the water heater is making noise. A new resident emails asking what the late fee is. Someone in unit 4B calls three times in a row because nobody picked up. None of those contacts needed you specifically — they needed a response, a next step, or just confirmation that someone heard them.
The math compounds fast. A 30-door portfolio might generate 15 to 25 tenant contacts on a busy week. At 60 doors, that's closer to 50. Owner-operators running 15 to 40 units without staff are the ones hitting a wall first — they're handling every inbound touch personally while trying to run showings, manage vendors, and close new acquisitions.
Here's what the build actually does. On maintenance: when a tenant submits a request — via text, email, or a web form — the system asks one round of clarifying questions (how long has this been happening, is it affecting safety or habitability), then sorts it. Habitability-affecting issues like no heat in winter or a sewage backup get escalated immediately with an alert sent to the manager. Routine requests like a dripping faucet or a broken cabinet hinge get logged, triaged, and routed to whichever vendor on your preferred contractor list covers that trade, with scheduling confirmation sent back to the tenant. The manager gets a digest, not a firehose.
On rent: the system runs a configurable ladder — a friendly reminder a few days before the due date, a firmer notice the day after, then state-appropriate language at the intervals your jurisdiction requires before a formal late notice triggers. Nothing gets sent without matching the language your state or municipality requires. If a tenant responds with a hardship situation or makes a partial payment arrangement, that gets flagged for a human. The system doesn't negotiate lease terms or accept payment arrangements autonomously.
On lease renewals: 90, 60, and 30 days out, tenants with expiring leases get outreach prompting them to confirm renewal intent. The cadence is configurable. Responses route back into your property management system. A tenant who goes quiet past 45 days gets a different prompt asking about their move-out plans so you're not caught with a surprise vacancy.
Fair Housing exposure is a real concern on anything touching tenant communication.
Use cases
- A 15-door investor self-managing across two cities texts every maintenance call personally. After go-live, tenants text a dedicated number, requests get triaged and routed to preferred vendors, and the investor reviews a morning digest instead of reacting all day.
- A 200-unit multi-family operator's rent ladder handles the first three late-payment touches — pre-due reminder, day-after notice, day-five notice with state language — freeing the leasing manager to focus on residents who've actually gone delinquent.
- A vacation rental host managing 12 short-term rentals gets guest maintenance contacts triaged between check-in and check-out. Habitability issues (no AC, broken lock) escalate immediately; cosmetic complaints log for post-stay review.
- A scattered-site operator with 40 homes across three zip codes holds a vendor routing table by zip and trade. Plumbing east zone goes to one contractor, HVAC west zone to another — consistent response times without manual dispatch.
- A mid-size PM company onboards a 60-unit building mid-year with lease expirations spread across 11 months. Renewal outreach runs automatically against each lease end date — no manual calendar reminders per unit.
- An owner-operator who previously took every after-hours call now gets an immediate tenant acknowledgment sent automatically, with a manager alert only when triage surfaces a safety or habitability flag.
What’s included
- Fixed scope with written acceptance criteria before any build starts
- Customization layer for your brand voice and business rules
- Clean handover with documented runbook and live training
- Monthly ROI report for three months post-delivery
- Source code delivered to your GitHub on handover
What’s NOT included
- Third-party API subscription costs (billed to your accounts)
- Data migration from legacy systems
- Ongoing infrastructure costs after handover
Retainer
Monthly retainer covers monitoring, prompt tuning, config refinement, and minor integration additions. Range: $2,500–5,000/mo.
How clients use this
Fixed-scope build with clean handover, then an optional monthly retainer covering maintenance, monitoring, and minor changes. Most clients move to retainer within 60 days of delivery.
Questions Tenant Comms (Property Management) clients ask
Does the system handle Fair Housing compliance on tenant-facing messages?
The build includes a pattern-detection layer that flags messages touching protected-class categories — race, familial status, disability, national origin, and others covered under the Fair Housing Act — and routes them to a human instead of generating an automated response. This is a routing control, not a compliance program. It reduces the risk of an automated reply inadvertently using language that creates Fair Housing exposure, but it's not a substitute for proper Fair Housing training, a licensed property manager's review on sensitive matters, or legal counsel when a complaint situation arises. State and local fair housing laws vary — some jurisdictions add protected classes beyond the federal baseline. The manager defines the escalation paths; the system enforces them.
How does vendor routing work if we have preferred contractors by trade and geography?
During setup, we build a vendor routing table that maps by trade category (plumbing, HVAC, electrical, general maintenance, appliance repair) and by whatever geographic zone you define — zip codes, neighborhoods, or property groups. When a maintenance request comes in, the triage layer identifies the trade and property location, looks up the routing table, and contacts the appropriate vendor. If the primary vendor doesn't confirm availability within your configured window, the system can fall back to a secondary vendor for that trade-zone combination. You control the vendor list, the fallback logic, and the confirmation window. If your vendor relationships are informal and scheduling is by phone rather than text or email, we build routing to alert you with a pre-drafted vendor contact rather than attempting fully autonomous dispatch.
Can this integrate with our existing PM system — AppFolio, Buildium, or Stessa?
The rent reminder ladder reads lease and payment data from your property management system — AppFolio, Buildium, or Yardi — through their API. It checks payment status before each ladder touch, so a tenant who pays on day two doesn't receive the day-five notice. The system doesn't process payments directly; it reads status and sends communications accordingly. For operators using Stessa, which has more limited API access than AppFolio or Buildium, the integration typically relies on a scheduled data export rather than a live API pull — we scope this during the audit phase before build begins. If you're running a different PM platform, we confirm API access during discovery before committing to a timeline.
What happens when a tenant situation escalates to eviction — does the system still communicate with them?
No. Once a matter crosses into formal eviction proceedings — a pay-or-quit notice has been served, an unlawful detainer has been filed, or you've flagged the tenancy as in active legal action — the system hands off entirely to the manager. Automated communication during eviction proceedings creates liability exposure: content, timing, and tone all carry legal risk that varies by state, and anything the system sends could surface in court. The build has an eviction-hold flag that, once set on a unit, suppresses all automated outbound for that tenancy and routes any inbound from that tenant directly to the manager. The flag can be set manually or triggered by a status field in your PM system if you track it there. What gets communicated during an active eviction is a decision for the manager and their attorney, not the automation layer.
Can property owners and tenants both access the system, or is it tenant-facing only?
The build is scoped by role. Tenant-facing flows handle maintenance submission, status updates, rent reminders, and lease renewal outreach. Owner-facing flows are separate and configurable — a rental owner might receive a monthly digest with occupancy status, upcoming lease expirations, and open maintenance tickets, rather than seeing individual tenant communications. Owner contacts that come in as maintenance or financial questions route to the property manager, not into the tenant communication layer. If you manage properties for third-party owners, the owner-access scope is something we define during the build — some PM companies want owners to have a read-only view of open tickets; others keep owners out of day-to-day communication logs entirely. Golden Horizons scopes the access controls before anything gets built.