A few highlights from the episode below. Full conversation linked at the bottom.
Lindsay shared her experience as a real estate investor and operator, and the thematic challenge around communication, and why voice AI is the niche her team is focusing on solving best:
"I've just been personally investing in [real estate] for over a decade now... across that just kept coming back to this idea that this common thread for where it was falling down as an owner, or working with my property manager, was that communication was the blocker to the success of the relationship.
[With voice AI] it's not another dashboard, it's not another centralization tool, it's not another interface or a login, but actually just using the thing that is the most intuitive, which is just speak it."
Voice AI has several other variables to contend with that chat-first interfaces do not: "Unlike chat-based interfaces, you have a lot of variables at play — background noise, accents, the delay time between the agent talking back and not being too awkward in the silence, what we call latency. There's multiple languages you have to contend with. There's industry lingo. There's so many things that can go wrong. And frankly with AI and LLMs, if it can go wrong, it will."
On deciding between the tradeoff on speech-to-speech models and a deconstructed pipeline: "With speech-to-speech, the downside is you don't have as much granular control... The way that we do it is we have a deconstructed pipeline. We choose our transcription layer, we choose our LLM — the inference layer — and then we choose our text-to-speech layer, and then we can fine-tune all of the other components within that."
On why you need small, focused jobs across agents: "Anyone that's trying to do an agent deployment where that agent is just responsible for too much — it's not going to do the job very well... The goal is to really break it down into smaller pieces so that your agents can succeed," then hand off context between them so it "starts to feel really intelligent and seamless at the same time."
Some of the lowest hanging fruit? It's not in removing the human from the conversation—it's about being the fastest path to resolution: "This idea of zero touch — inbound receptionist to the correct person on the team — is a huge opportunity there. It's not that the AI is trying to get in the middle of, let me prevent you from talking to the human. It's, let me get you to the right person right away."
Lindsay's closing advice: start with the job to be done, not the technology, and look for easy wins — after-hours coverage, missed calls, collections outreach — before tackling anything more complex.
Listen to the full episode of Why Voice AI Is Property Management's Hardest Problem on the Beyond Rent Podcast (episode 157)
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