Never miss a call with the top property management answering service
Address tenant emergencies and capture new leads 24/7 with Sona, OpenPhone’s AI agent. Say goodbye to missed calls and collaborate with your team efficiently with the best phone system for growing businesses.
Trusted by over 60,000 businesses
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Smarter than voicemail, more effective than property management call centers
Sona greets callers, answers questions, and captures messages — all within the same system you can use to call and text with existing and potential tenants.
Why Sona is a better virtual receptionist for property management companies
Here are three reasons how Sona outperforms traditional call answering services:
1. Integrated in your business phone
OpenPhone is a modern business phone designed to help property management teams scale their tenant communications. Property managers can use OpenPhone to make calls and send texts to tenants, schedule visits to available units, and handle tenant emergencies.
Sona works within OpenPhone, so you can manage conversations with potential and existing tenants without switching between different apps. Sona’s call summaries, transcripts, and recordings show up in your inbox right after a call ends. You can also filter your call history to show calls handled by Sona.
With a live answering service, tenant conversations happen outside your business phone. Your team has to piece together which tenants need your attention immediately, which tenants are interested to sign, and which of your leads have moved on. Since properties and preferences change quickly, if you don’t act fast, you might lose a potential tenant or buyer.
2. More cost-effective
Save hundreds of dollars every month with Sona. Other answering service providers have plans that start at 3x-5x higher than Sona, with higher per-minute charges, too.
Another benefit of Sona is that calls that last less than 15 seconds are not billed to you, so your bills accurately reflect your Sona usage.
3. More consistent service
Train Sona to meet your business needs, no learning curve required. It references your policies, FAQ answers, and any other documentation you upload to your Sona knowledge base. You can also test Sona before you go live and make adjustments based on how it performs during testing.
In contrast, live answering services are inconsistent compared to AI answering services. They take weeks to set up because their teams have to get up to speed on your documentation and policies. Even after they go live, you never have full control over how they represent your business, and you have to constantly train for quality.
As a property manager, your available units are constantly changing. With Sona, you can update your list of available properties and units in your knowledge base to reflect rental and purchase availability in real time. If you work with a live answering service, however, you have to send over new property details and constantly ensure they’re sharing up-to-date information with your callers.
Elevate your customer experience
Train Sona in seconds. Assign Sona to your calls in minutes.
Add Sona to after-hours call flows
Never lose a potential buyer or tenant. Simply drag and drop Sona into your existing call flows, both during and after business hours. Sona works alongside OpenPhone call routing features like ring order, phone menus, and call forwarding.
Train Sona to record maintenance calls
Sona can become an expert on your property management business in minutes. Share your key policies and answers to FAQs with Sona so that it can give the right information to callers.
Ask follow-up questions for real estate leads
Whether it’s a prospective tenant for your rental properties or a commercial property inquiry, Sona can take detailed messages for your team. Give instructions to Sona to ask follow-up questions based on specific keywords in a conversation so your team has the information they need.
View Sona’s call logs instantly
See Sona’s call summaries, transcripts, and messages in your OpenPhone inbox right after calls end. Unlike some live answering services, you don’t have to wait for them to email you a summary before you can follow up.
Feature comparison
See how Sona compares to traditional call answering services.
Features
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Sona
Traditional answering services
Starting price per month
$49 for 50 calls, $0.99 per call for additional calls
~5x-7x the cost of Sona
Setup time
Instant
2-4 weeks
Brand voice and tone
Consistent
Highly variable
Monitoring
100% in OpenPhone
Custom solution or daily email summary
Integrations
HubSpot, Salesforce, Zapier, Make, Jobber, and more
Limited integration options
How to set up Sona in four steps
It only takes four steps to get started with Sona:
- Start with a free trial.
- Try our free trial features, including calls and recordings.
- Configure your Sona settings and test Sona in OpenPhone’s call flow builder.
- Once you’ve confirmed it’s a good fit, activate your OpenPhone account and get the Sona add-on.
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“With Sona, I never worry about missing a call again. It’s like having a smart, reliable assistant who always picks up. It’s professional, friendly, and on it 24/7.”
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“Sona has my back. Even when I miss a call, I know it’s handled—and handled well. Total game changer.”
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“Sona has transformed the way I handle my calls. It’s like having a trusted partner who ensures I never miss an opportunity, no matter how busy I get.”
“With Sona, I never worry about missing a call again. It’s like having a smart, reliable assistant who always picks up. It’s professional, friendly, and on it 24/7.”
Why thousands of businesses choose OpenPhone
See why OpenPhone is the #1 business phone provider by customer satisfaction on G2.
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Local and toll-free numbers for every team
Get as many numbers as you need with OpenPhone. Choose between local US and Canadian numbers or North American toll-free numbers. With local area codes, your team can build trust with local tenants or buyers interested in your properties. And with a toll-free number, you can offer customer support across multiple cities.
All OpenPhone plans include a phone number for every user who joins your workspace. Your team members can have individual numbers, or you can share numbers for specific departments, like for customer support or sales.
Add more numbers as your team grows — additional numbers cost $5 per number per month.
Call handling made easy
Handle your call volumes as they grow with OpenPhone’s call management features. Create custom call flows with our call flow builder. Easily adjust call routes in the visual call flow canvas.
Choose how your team receives phone calls, either all at once or in custom ring batches, with ring groups. Give your callers the ability to navigate to different departments with phone menus. Send missed and unanswered calls to a backup number with our call forwarding options.
Need to transfer maintenance requests to a dedicated team or escalate emergency calls? Warm transfers help you share the right amount of context with your team when you transfer calls.
Collaborate better with your colleagues
Know exactly what your team is working on with OpenPhone. Split responsibility for incoming calls and texts with shared numbers and see all your customer interactions — calls, texts, voicemails, call recordings, and more — with shared inboxes.
Go a step further with team collaboration. Tag teammates and assign follow-up tasks to them in internal threads. No need to follow up with them to see if they’re all caught up — inbox viewers lets you know which team members have reviewed a customer interaction.
Send the right text at the right time
Communicate with customers over text with OpenPhone. Send SMS and MMS messages to your customers using your smartphone or your computer.
Send more texts with our automated texting features. Automatically respond to leasing inquiries during and after your office hours with SMS auto-replies. Schedule texts to reach customers based on their time zones with scheduled messages. Answer common tenant questions quickly with pre-written text templates, also known as snippets.
You can also create automated text workflows to scale your texting capabilities. With our Zapier and Make integrations, you can automatically text prospective tenants appointment confirmations and reminders or send rent payment reminders to your existing tenants.
Reduce admin work for your team
Get rid of all the repetitive administrative tasks so your team can focus on your customers. Offer automatic call recording and AI-powered call summaries and transcriptions so your team doesn’t have to take notes and you can capture every customer detail.
Automatically log call and text data to your CRM with our third-party integrations. Use our HubSpot, Jobber, and Salesforce integrations, or connect to any CRM using Zapier, Make, or the OpenPhone API. You can even share your call summaries directly to your CRM so it continues to be your single source of truth.
If you upgrade to our Scale plan, you can also use AI to analyze your phone calls and automatically label them with AI call tags. Review calls faster and gain business insights over time.
Plus, Sona is always available to handle AI phone calls for you. It’s your after-hours answering service that can answer questions and take messages on your behalf, giving you additional peace of mind that you’re not missing important calls when you’re off the clock.
Call and text from anywhere
Whether your team is in the office, at an open house, or on the go, OpenPhone is always with you. With our Mac, Windows, iOS, Android, and web apps, your team can use OpenPhone on their preferred devices. You just need an internet connection to make calls and send texts with our platform.
Find out how much you’re investing in your business phone solution upfront on our pricing page.
Frequently asked questions
Can’t find the answer here? Check out our Resource Center.
An answering service is a solution that handles incoming calls on behalf of a business or an individual. An answering service can function in-house in a company’s tools and existing team with an AI voice agent or it can be outsourced to a third-party provider, like a live receptionist service. Most answering services answer common questions from callers or take down messages they pass along to the rest of the team.
The benefits of property management telephone answering services are:
- Eliminate missed calls: Answering services ensure every incoming call is answered. Customers aren’t directed to a voicemail where they have to leave an open-ended message and hope businesses call them back; they can interact with a virtual receptionist and ask a question or leave a detailed message and get a clear idea of next steps.
- Capturing high-quality leads: A telephone answering service can help small business property managers capture high-quality leads, similar to other sales AI tools. If a prospective tenant or buyer calls in to enquire about available units, an answering service can collect their specifications and pass them along to the wider team. These tenants can then get matched with the right apartment complexes in the company’s portfolio.
- Maintain tenant satisfaction: For teams struggling with call volumes during after-hours emergencies, an answering service can help you manage incoming calls smoothly. You can program Sona to address an ongoing emergency with a standard response and set tenant expectations for how you plan to address it.
Live answering services typically cost between $49 and $150 per month to start, plus additional per-minute calling fees, making them even more expensive.
On the other hand, Sona costs $49 per month for 50 calls; any additional calls are $0.99 each. It’s a more cost-effective option because we bill you based on your calls instead of by the minute. We also don’t bill you for calls that last less than 15 seconds, which means your spam calls or wrong numbers won’t be added to your Sona bill.
You don’t need a live call answering service to handle most of your incoming calls. If you’re a small and growing business, you can manage your after-hours calls with an AI answering service like Sona.
We’re biased, but we believe that Sona is the best AI answering service for property managers. It’s easy to set up and use, communicates with callers like a member of your team, and integrates directly in your OpenPhone workspace. Plus, it’s a fraction of the cost of traditional answering services.
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