How Mark-Taylor scaled AI across the resident journey, without diluting the white-glove experience.
“There’s no one in PropTech SaaS that prioritizes support and partnership the way Union does. Union is peerless there.”
Forty years of Class A operations, built on a white-glove promise.
Founded over 40 years ago and headquartered in Scottsdale, Arizona, Mark-Taylor Residential is one of the most respected Class A multifamily operators in the country. The company is known for a white-glove resident experience, a deeply held mission to create exceptional communities, and a culture of operational excellence that runs from corporate leadership down to the on-site teams.
That culture now has a national scoreboard behind it. In the 2025 TALi Awards, the Turner Apartment Loyalty Index from J Turner Research, Mark-Taylor ranked #1 in the country for resident loyalty, across 1.35 million units and 5,370 communities, with 13 Mark-Taylor properties placing in the Top 100.
The Class A promise the old leasing model couldn’t keep.
By the time Mark-Taylor began rethinking how it ran its leasing operations, the legacy model was already showing strain. Industry-wide, call answer rates during leasing-office hours sat between 30 and 40 percent. Voicemail converted to scheduled tours at roughly 7 percent. After-hours leads were effectively lost. With rising personnel costs and entry-level turnover north of 50 percent, the cracks were widening every quarter.
The problem went deeper than missed calls. Mark-Taylor was making a Class A performance promise across 140 communities with no reliable way to see how any single one was performing. Leasing teams were generalists, juggling calls, walk-ins, tours, applications, renewals, and delinquency at once. The work that drained them fastest was the work residents valued least.
COVID became the inflection point. When Mark-Taylor closed leasing offices during the pandemic, resident satisfaction didn’t collapse, it went up. Specialists replaced generalists, scheduled meetings replaced walk-ins, and a leaner operation proved efficiency didn’t have to cost service. What it needed next was a technology layer to carry that model across 140 communities.
From CRM to Voice AI, one integrated platform.
The relationship with Union didn’t begin with Voice AI. It started in 2018, when the market offered no CRM purpose-built for the operational reality of a Class A portfolio. The available tools were bloated and generic. Rather than force a premium operation to shrink to fit them, Union built products around how a Class A portfolio actually runs.
That early work set the pattern for everything since. The same relationship now informs Voice AI, Delinquency AI, integrated websites, the CRM, and digital advertising: A product suite that spans the full resident journey, from the moment a prospect lands on a property website to the day a resident moves out.
Voice AI itself was deployed in layers: missed-call interception, so no prospect call goes unanswered while teams are on a tour; full after-hours coverage, turning a historical dead zone into a working sales channel; AI-first pickup at POD properties, where Taylor answers first and transfers only when needed; and warm handoff with Fair Housing consistency, a human concierge for the moments that need one, on every shift.
Asked to sum up the partnership in one word, Scott Hines, Mark-Taylor’s Sr. Director of Systems & Applications, didn’t hesitate.
“Organic.”
A conversion rate that climbed 2.5×
Across the Dec 2025 – Feb 2026 window, Union Voice AI handled 7,803 calls from 5,225 unique callers and scheduled 1,702 tours, while creating 1,604 follow-up tasks and unlocking 957 hours of agent capacity.
The conversion math is the story. Measured on the same 5,225 engaged leads, the old voicemail baseline converted 7.3 percent to a scheduled tour. Union Voice AI converts 18.1 percent. That delta works out to 564 additional tours in three months, tours the portfolio would otherwise have lost.
From a 30 to 40% answer rate to essentially every call.
Mark-Taylor now answers essentially every prospect call, including after hours, against an industry answer rate of 30 to 40 percent during leasing-office hours. About 80 percent of calls are handled by AI alone without agent involvement, up from 71 percent a year ago, and coverage runs 24/7 across all 140 communities, every shift.
After hours stopped being a dead zone. Overnight and weekend calls now convert at 15.1 percent, above the 13.9 percent the industry manages during business hours, when their leasing teams are answering the phones.
“The industry average for answer rates is 30 to 40 percent. With Taylor, we’ve skyrocketed that to about 100 percent, and that includes after hours. That’s the all-hands, fully-supported experience we want to provide.”
Nearly a thousand hours back to the people who define the brand.
The unlocked capacity doesn’t show up as a dashboard number. It shows up in what Scott Hines calls ghost hours, five clicks instead of two, windows opened just to find one piece of information, voicemail callbacks during what was supposed to be a tour. In isolation they look small. Across 140 communities and three months, they add up to nearly a thousand hours, roughly 319 hours a month, now spent on the relationship work that defines the brand, with 1,604 follow-up tasks routed to the right teams along the way.
There were zero layoffs due to AI. Natural attrition handled the headcount math. What grew alongside the deployment was a new career tree of specialist and centralized roles, a path beyond the traditional leasing consultant track.
With AI, the white-glove experience got stronger, not weaker.
The result Mark-Taylor cares about most can’t be measured in calls or tours, it’s the resident’s verdict. The company was nowhere near the Top 100 before the centralized operating model and the Union platform came into place. In 2025 it ranked #1 nationwide in the TALi Awards, and resident retention reached an all-time high of 55 percent, roughly 8 points above Mark-Taylor’s historical average, in a saturated market where falling rents should have pushed it the other way.
Asked directly whether the white-glove experience had weakened, stayed the same, or gotten stronger since Taylor was deployed, Scott Hines was unequivocal: The scores went up, not down.
“The way we’ve balanced AI plus five-star service is really what sets us apart. We’re leveraging technology to automate and streamline, not to replace. That TALi award reinforces it, because TALi is real feedback from real residents.”
Union AI plus the human touch. Never a replacement for it.
Multifamily, like most service industries, has carried a quiet fear that AI will replace people and hollow out service. Mark-Taylor’s data tells the opposite story. With Union’s AI carrying the routine work, the company runs a leaner, centralized operation while leading the country in resident loyalty. The white-glove promise didn’t break under automation. It got sharper.
At Mark-Taylor, Union’s Voice AI is called Taylor, and described as a superpowered assistant. It’s not there to replace the on-site team; it’s there to take the rudimentary work off their plate so they can focus on the moments that actually require a human. The same routine work Taylor now handles, chasing voicemails, fielding repeat FAQs, working delinquency callbacks, is the work on-site teams disliked most in the first place.
“We deployed Taylor to defend the white-glove experience, not to dilute it. Our residents still get the Mark-Taylor experience. Union’s AI just means we have more of our people available to deliver it.”
Mark-Taylor lets the data decide whether Union AI is improving outcomes. So far, it’s been clear in all four directions: clients, prospects, residents, and employees.
AI didn’t replace the white-glove experience. AI is the reason it finally scales.
Every prospect call is now answered. After hours moved from a dead zone to a working sales channel converting above industry average. Tour conversion grew 2.5×. On-site teams recovered nearly 1,000 hours. And the residents themselves voted: #1 in the country.
Mark-Taylor started by making sure no prospect call went unanswered. Union can do the same for your portfolio.
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