A burst pipe does not wait for business hours, and a tenant standing in two inches of water is not going to log into a portal. They call. Now they can call a number where Luna picks up, in English or Spanish: she works out what is wrong and which unit, steers a real emergency to 911, and drafts a maintenance ticket on your desk to approve. The big platforms make your tenant hunt for a portal, charge enterprise minimums, or hand the call to a paid human coordinator. Rentari.ai answers the phone with AI, starting at $8 a month. Here is how it compares.
You have met Luna already: the assistant that answers your tenants from their signed lease and the facts on file, and says "I do not have that on file" instead of inventing a gate code. Luna now has a phone line. A tenant calls, Luna picks up, works out what is wrong and which unit, and drafts a maintenance ticket on your desk to approve. Same assistant, same honesty rule, a new way in for the tenant who reaches for the thing on their nightstand at 2 a.m. instead of an app.
Why a phone line, when Luna already lives in the app
Most maintenance still starts with a phone call. A tenant who is scared, half-asleep, or not great with apps does not want to find a portal login. They want to talk to someone. Without an answer, that call goes to your voicemail or to you, at 2 a.m. A line that Luna answers means the call still gets taken, the details still get captured, and you wake up to a clean ticket instead of a panicked voicemail.
What Luna does on the call
Luna greets the caller, notes the call may be recorded, and asks what is going on and which unit they are in. She works out the problem and how urgent it is, the same triage the app already does. If the caller describes something life-threatening, she tells them to hang up and call 911 and flags it for you right away.
- She figures out what is broken and which unit.
- She judges urgency, and treats a gas leak or a fire as the emergency it is.
- She keeps to what is on file. She does not guess a gate code, a fee, or a trash day.
Luna drafts the ticket. You approve the dispatch.
The call does not schedule a vendor or send anyone. It drafts a maintenance ticket and puts it on your board for you to review and approve, exactly like the rest of Rentari.ai. Luna will never tell a caller that a plumber is on the way.
Now in English and Spanish
The line answers in two languages. A Spanish-speaking caller hears a short prompt, presses 2, and Luna takes the rest of the call in Spanish: the same triage, the same drafted ticket on your desk, and the same emergency safety net. We built that safety net in Spanish before we turned the language on, so a caller who says "fuga de gas," a gas leak, gets steered to 911 exactly like an English caller would. Here is the full story on the bilingual line.
What the other platforms do when a tenant calls
Here is the honest gap. When a tenant calls a competitor's landlord, there is no AI on the line. Buildium and DoorLoop give you a work-order inbox the tenant has to fill in themselves, with manual or rule-based routing. Hemlane reaches for a paid human coordinator. AppFolio is built for 50-plus-door firms and starts around $400 a month. None of them put an assistant on the phone, and most of them cost many times what a landlord or property manager pays for all of Rentari.ai.
| Rentari.ai | DoorLoop | Buildium | Hemlane | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starting price | from $8/mo | $69/mo (10-unit min) | $62/mo | $30/mo + per unit |
| AI phone line tenants can call | Yes | No | No | Human coordinator, not AI |
| AI triage to a drafted ticket | Yes | Manual / rule-based | Manual work orders | Human-handled |
| You approve before anything is sent | Yes | n/a | n/a | n/a |
| Free tier, no card | Yes, up to 5 units | No | No | No |
Pricing and features reflect each vendor's publicly listed information as of June 2026. Plans and prices change, so confirm on each vendor's own site before you decide.
Where the big platforms genuinely win
To be fair: if you run a 250-door portfolio with multiple owners, Buildium and AppFolio have deep trust accounting and owner-statement tooling that Rentari.ai does not try to match. That is who they are built for. And if you want a real person to physically coordinate a repair on the ground, Hemlane's local-agent network does something software alone cannot. Rentari.ai is built for a different customer: landlords and property managers, where the question is not "how deep is the trust accounting," it is "can one person keep up without paying enterprise prices." For that person, an AI that answers the phone, screens applicants, drafts the lease, collects rent, and keeps the books, from $8 a month, is a different kind of tool.
The same honesty rule, now out loud
The reason Luna can take a call without making things up is the same rule that governs her in the app: she answers from what is on file, and when she does not have a fact she says so and points the tenant back to you. We wrote about why an assistant that says "I do not know" is worth more than one that always has an answer in this piece on honest AI. A phone is just a louder place to keep that promise.
Emergencies: what the line catches, and what it can never replace
The line is not a 911 service and we will never pretend it is. For anything life-threatening, Luna tells the caller to hang up and dial 911, and flags it for you. For an ordinary repair, she takes the report and drafts the ticket. The phone channel sits on the same triage brain described in our maintenance triage playbook, so a call and an app submission end up as the same kind of ticket on your desk.
How to turn it on
A dedicated line is included on paid plans. From your settings you claim a number, and tenants can start calling it. There is no per-call fee buried in the fine print, and no human-coordinator markup. The AI does the work, and you make the call.
