The Company

Cedarstone Property Management is a residential property management firm in Columbus, Ohio, overseeing 340 rental units across 12 multi-family properties. The portfolio ranges from a 64-unit apartment complex to several 8-unit buildings scattered across the metro area. Owner Adriana Vasquez started the company in 2018 managing her own investment properties and grew it through referrals from other landlords. Today her team consists of herself, one full-time property coordinator, and one part-time maintenance technician — plus a roster of contracted plumbers, electricians, and HVAC techs.

The Challenge

Managing 340 units with three people requires relentless efficiency. And nothing wrecked that efficiency like the after-hours maintenance phone.

Cedarstone’s lease agreements promised 24/7 maintenance availability. That meant Adriana or her coordinator, Devon Mitchell, carried a work phone every night and every weekend. A water heater failure at 11 PM. A lock that won’t turn at 6 AM. A neighbor noise complaint at 2 AM. Every call required a human decision: Is this a real emergency? Can it wait until morning? Which contractor should I call?

The volume was staggering: roughly 85 after-hours calls per week. But here’s the part that made Adriana want to throw the phone into the Scioto River — fewer than 15% were genuine emergencies. The rest were requests that could absolutely wait until business hours: a dripping faucet, a dishwasher that smells funny, a request to replace a screen door. Each of those calls still woke someone up, required a conversation, and consumed 5-15 minutes of time.

The impact was personal. Devon had burned through three phones in two years from sleep-deprived drops. Adriana hadn’t taken a vacation without her work phone since 2020. And their contractors were frustrated too: getting called at midnight for a “running toilet” that had been running for weeks wasn’t anyone’s idea of an emergency.

“I was averaging four hours of broken sleep on my on-call nights,” Adriana said. “And the worst part was that most of those calls ended with me saying ‘I’ll put in a work order for Monday.’ I didn’t need to be awake at 1 AM to say that.”

Tenant satisfaction suffered too. Not because Cedarstone was unresponsive — they answered every call. But because the response to non-emergencies was always “we’ll handle it during business hours,” tenants felt like calling accomplished nothing. The result: a 3.2 out of 5 tenant satisfaction score and a rising number of formal complaints.

Why They Chose Help Genie

Adriana looked at three solutions:

• Hiring a night answering service at $1.00-$1.50 per call would cost $340-$510/month. But answering services can’t triage maintenance urgency. They’d still page Adriana for every call, which defeated the purpose.
• A property management software add-on with a tenant portal worked for tech-savvy tenants who would submit requests online. But Cedarstone’s demographics skewed older, and many tenants strongly preferred calling.
• Help Genie’s maintenance dispatcher could triage every call by urgency, create work orders for non-emergencies, dispatch contractors for true emergencies, and give tenants immediate confirmation that their request was logged and scheduled.

The triage capability was the deal-maker. The genie could distinguish between “water is flooding my kitchen floor” (emergency: dispatch now) and “the kitchen faucet drips when you turn it off” (work order: schedule for this week). That distinction was exactly what Adriana spent her nights making — and the genie could make it in seconds, 24 hours a day.

Implementation

Setup took about an hour. Adriana configured the voice genie with:

1. Emergency classification rules — active water leaks, gas smell, no heat below 40 degrees, lockouts, and electrical hazards trigger immediate contractor dispatch and a call to Adriana
2. Non-emergency intake flow — the genie collects unit number, tenant name, description of the issue, preferred access time, and whether the tenant has pets (for contractor access)
3. Work order creation — non-emergency requests automatically generate a work order in Cedarstone’s property management system with all details captured
4. Tenant confirmation — callers receive a text confirmation with their work order number and expected resolution timeline
5. FAQ responses — common questions about rent payment, lease terms, and building policies are answered instantly without creating a work order

The genie launched on a Wednesday night. By Sunday, it had handled 73 after-hours calls. Of those, 8 were triaged as emergencies (three water leaks, two lockouts, two heating failures, one electrical issue) and escalated to Adriana with full context. The remaining 65 were logged as work orders with complete details, ready for Devon to schedule Monday morning.

Adriana slept through the night Thursday, Friday, and Saturday for the first time in months.

The Results

Four months after deployment, Cedarstone’s operations looked fundamentally different.

Response Time

Average maintenance response time dropped from 4.5 hours to 52 minutes. For emergencies, the improvement was even more dramatic: from 45 minutes (time to wake up, read the voicemail, call back, assess, dispatch) to 8 minutes (genie triages, dispatches contractor, notifies Adriana with full context).

Tenant Satisfaction

Tenant satisfaction scores jumped from 3.2 to 4.4 out of 5. The biggest driver wasn’t faster repairs — it was the immediate acknowledgment. When a tenant calls at 10 PM about a dripping faucet and gets a work order number, a text confirmation, and a timeline, they feel heard. That was something voicemail never provided.

After-Hours Staff Load

The number of after-hours calls requiring human attention dropped from 85 per week to about 12 — only genuine emergencies that needed contractor dispatch. Adriana’s on-call nights went from “dreading the phone” to “checking the morning summary over coffee.”

Tenant Complaints

Formal tenant complaints dropped from 18 to 10 per month — a 44% reduction. Most of the remaining complaints were about issues unrelated to maintenance (parking, neighbor noise) that required policy conversations rather than work orders.

A Day in the Life

Here’s what a typical after-hours period looks like now at Cedarstone:

6:18 PM, Thursday — Office closed for the day. A tenant in Unit 12B at the Riverside complex calls about a garbage disposal that stopped working. The genie asks a few questions: Is there standing water in the sink? (No.) Is there a smell or leak? (No.) It classifies this as a non-emergency, creates a work order, and tells the tenant a technician will be out within two business days. The tenant gets a text confirmation and says “thank you, that’s all I needed.”

9:45 PM — A tenant in Unit 7A at the Grandview property calls about a toilet that won’t stop running. Same flow: non-emergency, work order created, text confirmation sent. Total call time: 2 minutes 40 seconds.

11:52 PM — A tenant in Unit 3C at the High Street building calls panicking. Water is coming through the ceiling from the unit above. The genie immediately classifies this as an emergency, dispatches the on-call plumber via text and call, and notifies Adriana with the unit number, building, and situation description. Adriana sees the notification, confirms the plumber is en route, and doesn’t need to call the tenant back because the genie already told them help is coming.

2:30 AM — A tenant calls asking when rent is due and whether they can pay by Venmo. The genie answers both questions (first of the month, and no — online portal or check only) without creating a work order or notifying anyone.

7:00 AM, Friday — Devon arrives and reviews the overnight report: 11 calls handled, 1 emergency (already resolved), 6 work orders created and ready to schedule, 4 FAQ calls that needed no follow-up. His morning starts with scheduling, not returning voicemails.

What’s Next

Cedarstone is expanding the voice genie to handle:

• Rental inquiry screening — qualifying prospective tenants who call about available units, collecting income and move-in timeline information
• Lease renewal outreach — proactively calling tenants 90 days before lease expiration to discuss renewal terms
• Move-in onboarding — guiding new tenants through utility setup, key pickup, and building orientation

“I got into property management because I like real estate, not because I wanted to be woken up at 3 AM about a dripping faucet,” Adriana said. “The genie gives my tenants instant service and gives me my nights back. That’s not a small thing when you’re running a business this lean.”

Ready to handle maintenance calls without losing sleep? See how Help Genie works for property management or explore our property management solutions.