How St. George Associates Meets the Demand of UCSB & SBCC Students

My name is Nick. I work with specifically the leasing department with St. George & Associates. St. George & Associates, it's a large company in California. It mainly handles like student housing next to SBCC and UCSB. But we also handle certain housing in places like the valley nearby us or in places like Auburn and things like that. With our case specifically, we were running into a lot of phone calls that were a little redundant. To be frank, most of our people that are calling us, these are kids that are living by themselves for the first time with a group of six or seven. So it's these kids who have a lot of questions, their first time living alone, and they're just simple answers they've just never

heard before. So they'll give us certain calls and they're like, hey, I can't find my package. And we'll say, well, did you check your mailbox? And they'll say, oh no, I'll go do that. Things like that. It seems kind of simple to us, but it was really taking a lot of time out of our day where we have over 600 tenants and we're getting these redundant calls, taking away from our time. With kind of the time that has freed us up, previously we had what we like to call CAs, but which more traditionally called RAs, answer calls. Students that go to SBCC or UCSB that currently live with us that needed a job. So we offered them to work with us. And while they're working with us,

they realized that a lot of these calls were, like I said previously, a little redundant. And this freed up our staff to kind of feel more like they're having more of an impact on answering important questions, like their time is being spent well. How did you do your job? I mean, when we first went through it, it was something new to learn, of course, just like anything else is. And I was working primarily with Suki and she was great. I mean, she's very helpful. She helped us with action tests, things we need to do, even things we need to do after the call. She followed up really well. But everything's so straightforward, so straightforward. There's a prompt, you figure out what it wants, and then it just goes for it. And I specifically liked

how you could test it out before it goes live. You guys can, we can change a bunch, test it out before it goes live and then decide if it's going to go live or not. And then it went great. I think one of the best things that I could mention about the company is that a lot of people, me, I mean, me specifically, how I felt is that I didn't want to go out of my way and take all this extra time and pay all this extra money to do something that was going to be maybe even medium effective, not necessarily ineffective, but even if it was going to be like, okay, I didn't want to have to spend time to do something that was just going to be okay. By going through this, going through it from the beginning, talking within it, talking with all these people, it's proven to be very, it's proven to be actually exceptional. It's handling everything you want it to handle and

there's possibility for it to handle more. All it's waiting on is us to really prove that, to really make it handle more because it's extremely customizable. So it's worked out really well. I don't necessarily have the numbers, but it's, I mean, it's saving us so much time and we're not even using it to its fullest extent like we could be. I mean, in my personal opinion, and I'm sure a lot of people feel this way is that, you know, AI is, this is whether we go with a company or we don't, I think that AI is going to be in the workforce of every job, almost every job you can imagine. This is whether we like it or not, it's something that's going to save companies money, save CEOs money, and they're just going to do it.

And what I would, in my opinion, if you can use AI to help you to get ahead of the curve, it's, it's good to do so. And I would say the biggest thing that in my experience, people have a fear with, with AI is the learning curve, or they don't want to support AI or whatever it is, you know, in my, there's, there's really no learning curve with this specific platform we're talking about. It's, it's very simple and proven to be easy to use and easy to manage.