Case study · Green Doors
The calls came at all hours, and most of them were not emergencies.
A property manager answers the phone whether they look after nine homes or nine hundred. The only way to find out whether something could wait was to pick up.
What it did
- Property companies
Ran their maintenance line on it.
9 - Residential units
Under management across those companies.
1,000+ - Improvements shipped
Driven by what customers asked for.
115 - Average delivery
From request to shipped.
8 days
The problem was never the repairs. It was the triage.
Maintenance work has to happen either way. What costs a property manager their evenings is not the blocked drain, it is having to be the one who decides whether the blocked drain can wait until Tuesday. That decision cannot be delegated to an answering service, because an answering service does not know which unit has one bathroom and which has three.
So the phone stays on. Every call gets picked up, most of them turn out to be routine, and the few that genuinely could not wait are buried among them.
What the line could see
- The phone line
Speech understanding and call handling, so a tenant could just talk.
- The property records
Who is calling, which unit, what has broken there before.
- Local weather
The same fault is urgent or routine depending on the temperature outside.
- Staff availability
Whether anyone could actually attend, and when.
- Contractor supply
Booking and paying someone to attend a routine job.
Urgency is not a property of the fault. It is the fault plus the context.
- Heating out
Urgent below 50°F outside. Otherwise a normal request.
- Air conditioning out
Urgent above 80°F outside. Otherwise a normal request.
- A blocked toilet
Urgent only if it is the only toilet in the home, so the system asks.
- No power, an uncontrolled leak, a broken lock, a lockout
Always urgent. Straight to a person.
What we built
A phone line that answered, understood what the caller was describing, checked it against the property record and the weather, and then did one of two things. Routine jobs it took the details for, scheduled, and hired a contractor to attend. Serious ones it handed to a person immediately, with the details already gathered so nobody had to ask twice.
The part that took the work off the property manager was not the answering. It was the hiring. A system that only classifies still leaves someone to arrange the visit.
It never decided a repair, and it never let itself into anyone's home.
Three rules, written down before any of it was built. The system never decided what the repair should be, only how urgent the report was. It never sent anyone into a home without the tenant agreeing first, and if they said no it asked when they would be there instead. And at any point in the call, a tenant could ask for a person and get one, with no condition attached to the request.
Those rules are the reason people used it. A tenant who believes the machine will hand them to a human when it matters will talk to the machine. One who does not will hang up and call back angry.
Who ran it
The property management companies did. The line sat between their tenants and their staff, and escalation went to them, not to us. We founded Green Doors and operated it from 2019 to 2023, which means this approach was worked out on our own customers and our own money before any client paid us for it.
Where it starts
Which part of the job still needs a person?
A Connected Business Audit works out what is actually taking the time, and what has to stay with people, before anyone builds anything.
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