Cut tenant requests left without a reply after a day from one in five to almost none for a property management company
Client snapshot
A property management company in Austin looking after about 220 rental units for 40 owners. Five people run it: an operations manager, a maintenance coordinator, an accounts person and two leasing agents. Tenants mostly write on WhatsApp; owners and contractors mostly email.
The problem
Everything landed in one shared Gmail inbox and one WhatsApp Business number, and whoever had a minute picked something up. A tenant would report a leak on WhatsApp, then email about it the next day, and two people would each start on it. A rent question would sit for two days because everyone assumed accounts had seen it. Nobody could say how many requests were open, and the first sign of a dropped one was usually an angry owner.
What we built
One intake for both channels, with every request turned into a card someone owns.
n8n watches the shared inbox and the WhatsApp Business number. Every message is checked against recent ones first: an exact repeat is dropped, and a new message from the same tenant about the same issue within 48 hours is added to the existing card instead of opening a new one.
Claude reads each new message and pulls out the tenant or owner, the unit, the request type (maintenance, rent and payments, lease and move, owner reporting, other), the urgency, any deadline mentioned, and anything missing, such as a unit number. A card is created on the right Trello list and assigned by type: maintenance to the coordinator, money to accounts, leases to leasing. Emergencies like a water leak, no heat, a gas smell or a lockout also ping the on-call phone straight away.
Each card gets a drafted reply in the company's tone. If information is missing, the draft asks for it. A person reads it and sends it with one click, from Gmail or WhatsApp, whichever channel the request came from. Nothing goes out unreviewed.
If a card has no reply after 4 hours for urgent requests or 24 hours for the rest, its owner gets a reminder, then the operations manager. When the tenant writes back, the reply is attached to the same card and its status moves on.
If any step fails, n8n retries once and then alerts the operations manager with the message attached. Every message, decision and action goes into an activity log in Google Sheets, so the team can see what the system did and why.
Results, 90 days in
- Requests with no reply after 24 hours: about 1 in 5 → under 1 in 50.
- Time to first reply: around 6 hours → under 30 minutes on working days.
- Duplicate tasks for the same request: dozens a month → none.
- The Monday meeting starts from the open card list instead of everyone's memory.
Quote
"We stopped arguing about who saw what. If it's not on a card, it didn't come in." Operations manager
Build snapshot
- Timeline: 7 business days
- Stack: n8n, Gmail, WhatsApp Cloud API, Claude, Trello, Google Sheets
- Investment: $1,800
- Who owned it: the operations manager owns the request types, the routing rules and the reply tone.
The pattern
This is the pattern we ship in the Inbox Triage & Draft engagement. Here WhatsApp came in alongside the inbox, and requests became Trello cards instead of labels. If your team answers customers on more than one channel, the build is the same, with your categories and task tool swapped in.
This is an illustrative composite drawn from operator engagements. Names, identifying details, and exact metrics are anonymised. The workflow, stack, and approach are real.
Looks like your situation?
A 30-minute call tells us whether the same pattern fits your operation, and what it would cost to ship it.