The multifamily real estate industry is undergoing a transformation. Rising operating costs, tenant expectations for instant service, and the need for environmental accountability are pushing property managers to rethink how they run their portfolios. For K3 Holdings, a Los Angeles-based investment manager specializing in affordable and workforce housing, the answer lies in embracing emerging technology to bring the property management process into the future.

Through its property management arm, Alpine LA Properties, K3 Holdings has integrated a number of powerful platforms, like Haven, DrizzleX, and AppFolio, across its portfolio, each designed to make property management smoother and more efficient, while keeping prices low for tenants.

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“One of the biggest and oldest challenges of property management has always been that it’s mostly a reactive business,” says Michael Kadisha, who co-founded K3 Holdings with his two brothers and is the president of Alpine LA Properties. “No matter how much proactive maintenance you do, a huge part of the job is still going to be fixing things once they’re bad enough for people to notice they’re broken. What these emerging platforms let us do is notice those things faster.”

One of these platforms is DrizzleX, a real-time water monitoring service. Invisible leaks are among property managers’ worst nightmares. They can keep getting worse for months before they make themselves known on a water bill or even worse, through meaningful structural damage.

DrizzleX aims to help that discovery process take a fraction of the time. The platform uses water monitoring devices on water fixtures like toilets, sinks, showers, and common area lines, which track water usage. This allows management to understand when usage rises beyond normal levels, like it would say if a toilet were running all the time or a shower was slowly leaking for a couple of days. This kind of aberrant consumption lets property managers respond quickly and fix the problems before they get worse.

“Fixing leaks may sound small, but those kinds of things add up quickly as a single running toilet can waste up to 7,000 gallons each day,” Kadisha says. “It’s easy for a small leak to turn into something that costs thousands of dollars and dozens of hours. With DrizzleX, we can catch these issues long before they ever become a problem. Those are the kinds of savings that add up quickly and help keep housing affordable.”

The savings go beyond leaks and maintenance too. For years, water billing for tenants has mostly been handled through averages: property management companies get a water bill for the whole building, then divide up the costs evenly between units across the property. With DrizzleX’s monitoring, however, properties can charge units directly for what water they’re using, ensuring that tenants are never charged more than they should be for water usage – and further passing on the savings that smart monitoring enables. This kind of direct awareness also makes every tenant a partner in water conservation, leading to huge reductions in water waste property wide.

For Kadisha, working with DrizzleX is a two-way street. Alpine LA Properties and K3 are such strong believers in DrizzleX that they’ve joined the company as design partners, sharing information, data, and insights with the company to help it better understand how it can serve both their properties and even more buildings in the future.

“Working with K3 has been a great example of how forward-thinking owners and operators are using technology to drive real efficiency,” says DrizzleX CEO, Esther Altura. “As a DrizzleX design partner, K3’s on-the-ground expertise has helped us create a system that customers can truly get the most out of. Together, we’re proving that smarter, data-driven water management can meaningfully reduce water waste, operating costs, and environmental impact.”

Streamlining the future

While getting in front of problems is always great, some parts of property management will always be about response, and for K3 and Alpine, that’s where Haven AI comes in. Haven uses automation and AI to streamline some of the simplest, but most time-consuming and urgent, property management tasks.

Things like scheduling showings, responding quickly to interested applicants, and providing prospective renters with relevant and important information about the property, are all tasks that Haven can handle quicker and more efficiently than management staff. More importantly, Haven even expedites the process of creating work orders, quickly fielding reports from tenants, and sorting them and alerting management about the relevant details.

K3 and Alpine have also partnered with AppFolio, an all-things property management platform designed to similarly smooth out daily management tasks both for managers and residents. AppFolio streamlines processes like producing and compiling resident applications, connecting with vendors, and building comprehensive resident portals. This kind of technology enables Alpine and K3 to speed up nearly every process that goes into the day-to-day management of properties.

"As AI transforms how real estate is owned and operated, K3 stands out as a true leader, not just adopting new technologies, but actively shaping how they're applied to serve residents and operators alike,” says Haven AI CEO, Juan Burgos. “Their commitment to innovation while keeping residents at the center of every decision sets the standard for how technology can make quality housing more attainable."

Speeding up these kinds of tasks and leveraging AI innovation with Haven and AppFolio saves property management valuable time and allows staff to keep their attention on the tasks that require their human expertise and keen judgement. For K3 and Alpine, that’s exactly the point of integrating all this technology in the first place: maximizing the efforts of its staff and giving them more time to focus on tenant needs.

“By integrating AI-driven operational support,” says Kadisha. “K3-backed platforms are able to maintain institutional-grade responsiveness while operating across thousands of units. Maintenance issues are logged, categorized, and escalated intelligently. After-hours emergencies are identified and addressed in real time. Leasing inquiries are handled efficiently, reducing friction in top of the funnel while preserving human judgment where it matters most.”

Rapid response

This suite of technological advancements in property management is about more than convenience, according to Kadisha. While it’s true that they save owners and tenants money in the long run, the reality is that as Los Angeles steps up its regulations around property ownership, the kind of instant responsiveness that this kind of technology provides is starting to become a true necessity for legal compliance, as well as tenant comfort.

“Los Angeles is a 24/7 city operating under increasingly complex rules,” Kadisha says. “Regulatory compliance, habitability standards, emergency response expectations, and tenant protections do not pause after business hours. For owners, delayed response times are no longer just an inconvenience—they are a liability. They expose assets to safety risks, regulatory scrutiny, legal exposure, and reputational damage.”

Given the conversations about AI platforms replacing human jobs that are currently dominating the tech and business industries, it’s tempting to look at all this speed and innovation enabled by technology and imagine a world where property management is almost totally automated. But that misses the point, according to Kadisha: technology is about enabling their talented property managers to do more, not less.

“For K3 Holdings, technology is not a replacement for boots-on-the-ground execution,” Kadisha says. “It is a force multiplier. It allows our partners to deploy labor more efficiently, reduce response-time risk, improve documentation, and protect the long-term value of the underlying real estate.”

This outlook that technology is a way to maximize human effort, according to Kadisha, is what gives K3 its competitive advantage and what makes it and Alpine perfectly positioned for the LA market.

“We prioritize platforms, partnerships, and systems that reflect where the city is going, not where it used to be. In Los Angeles, resilient returns come from disciplined operations, political awareness, and infrastructure that works at all hours—not from wishful thinking.”