Travtus + Preiss: Using AI to Personalize, Scale, and Win in Student Housing
Preiss, one of the largest student housing operators, is known for high quality student living, but what truly sets them apart is their vision. They are not adopting technology just to keep pace. They are using it to change the face of student housing. As a third party manager, Preiss is focused on delivering a personalized service that others cannot offer.
They aim to create meaningful value for landlords through tailored, data driven operations that respond to the specific needs of each property and owner.
Unlocking the Preiss Advantage
The leadership at Preiss has a clear mission. Their approach to adopting AI went beyond a search for point solutions and fads. They recognized that AI could help them stay ahead of the curve and uncover their “secret sauce.”
To guide that transition, leaders Adam Byrley and Whitney Kidd focused on creating more structure and clarity in daily operations. And their partner of choice was the Travtus Everyday(AI)™ platform.
The first step in their platform journey was to mine the company’s knowledge and make it accessible to site teams, enabling them to make informed decisions and deliver consistent service.
The Travtus platform provides Preiss teams a clear, real-time view into what is happening across the business. With everyday use of the Travtus Gateway, teams can understand performance, listen to customer feedback, and recognize emerging patterns in their communities. This kind of clarity creates a ripple effect. Teams raise issues to landlords quickly, and property owners can act with purpose and precision. The result is stronger partnerships, faster resolutions, and better experiences for residents.
The platform also supports continuity. Even as teams evolve, everyone works from the same source of truth. That consistency helps keep operations stable and service levels high.
Empowering Teams With Automation For a Better Experience
As the Preiss team democratised all data across the company, they took the next step very quickly: using their Everyday(AI) platform to drive action through automation. With the Travtus platform in place, they expanded into smart workflows designed to save time, improve consistency, and help both on-site and central teams focus on service and connection.
The first area of focus has been Q&A automation. With the answers already mined, portfolio wide deployment was as simple as flipping a switch, rather than a time consuming process of identifying and filling knowledge gaps. Since launch, the Travtus platform has handled over 2,700 resident conversations, generating more than 45,000 minutes of time savings for teams. That’s the equivalent of 94 full working days redirected from routine questions to more meaningful service.
Each interaction, whether handled by a human or AI, is scored for quality. This gives managers visibility into performance and provides clear coaching opportunities. AI-powered responses now consistently score 20 percent higher in quality than those handled by human agents.
Preiss has also embraced the platform workflows to strengthen reputation management. All reviews are acknowledged promptly and thoughtfully, helping residents feel heard and reinforcing trust across communities. In the first three months alone, the platform responded to over 600 reviews, capturing positive experiences and ensuring consistent follow-up.
This responsiveness has a measurable impact. Businesses that respond to reviews are seen as 1.7 times more trustworthy than those that do not. This translates into stronger engagement, improved online reputation, and a more confident resident experience.
Preiss is leading a new definition of excellence for the student housing industry. Their visionary platform adoption has allowed them to expand use cases of efficiency, productivity and automation by unlocking true intelligence from operations. Automation builds on that advantage, adding a new lever for scale, consistency, and responsiveness.
“Travtus is looking at next generation AI and utilizations. When we looked at other providers, they had strong capabilities in automations, but we wanted to go a step further. We wanted to utilize AI to understand our data, our asset performance, our customer sentiment. And that’s something we couldn’t find, where an AI provider currently in the space or outside was looking at all of those areas, not just automations.”
Patterns in resident interactions revealed new opportunities to improve service
One of the key benefits Preiss gained from Travtus was visibility into recurring themes across resident interactions. By analyzing real-time questions and feedback, the platform highlighted where small but consistent disruptions were affecting service and slowing down teams.
For example, printing questions emerged as one of the most frequent inquiries across communities. Although printing was already automated, teams were regularly assisting residents with how to access and use it. With that pattern clearly surfaced, Preiss prioritized the topic for automation, reducing repetitive requests and freeing up time for higher-value work. The insight helped guide their roadmap and reinforced the value of using data to inform where automation can have the most immediate impact.
In another case, a steady volume of Wi-Fi-related questions at one property signaled a persistent connectivity problem. The team was able to flag it with the landlord and resolve it quickly. Both examples show how resident-facing data can uncover what needs attention and help teams respond with speed and focus.
This demonstrated how the right insight, applied with clarity, can lead to measurable improvements for teams and residents alike.
The Everyday(AI) platform that supports Teams across the business
The Travtus platform supports multiple use cases and helps Preiss deliver personalized service across properties. This flexibility allows them to serve landlords in unique ways without constantly changing their tech stack. With over 400 Preiss users, using AI every day, these are some of the use cases that the platform is delivering for the team.
| Who uses it | Problems they are facing | How Travtus helps |
|---|---|---|
| Regional Managers | Too many systems led to a disjointed experience and made it hard to find information they needed. | A single platform for feedback, risks, and tasks. Highlights residents who need attention and follow-up actions. |
| Community Managers | Customer history buried in systems, with staff turnover disrupting service continuity. | Quick views of customer journeys and instant access to policies & procedures for consistent, real time service. |
| Marketing Teams | Looking for new ways to boost reputation management and drive customer engagement and satisfaction. | Automated review responses and prompts to turn moments of delight into public feedback. |
At its core, the platform is designed to support the people doing the work. Preiss has always taken a people-first approach, focusing on solutions that reduce complexity, improve day-to-day experiences, and give teams the clarity they need to deliver great service. That commitment is what makes the everyday use of AI both practical and personal.
A Platform for the Future State
“Travtus is the most transformational technology we’ve implemented since online leasing.”
Preiss is building something lasting, a business where residents are well served, teams are empowered, and decisions are guided by insight rather than guesswork.
Travtus brings the tools to support that work. With the Everyday(AI) platform in place, Preiss teams can respond faster, operate more consistently, and stay connected to what is happening across every community.
The impact of this transformation is already clear, with measurable gains across reputation and retention, operational efficiency, and productivity. By supporting all three value pillars, the platform provides a scalable foundation that unlocks new efficiencies and enables meaningful tech consolidation.
This partnership goes beyond technology. It is grounded in a shared commitment to progress. Together, we are helping Preiss move with clarity and build a stronger, more resilient organization for the future. As Adam Byrley, Chief Operating Officer, shared at the Preiss 2024 leadership conference, “Travtus is the most transformational technology we’ve implemented since online leasing.”
