How a student housing platform saves $30K per year with AI and automation

If you're a new student looking for housing in the city, you're probably full of questions. Should I move closer to uni? Am I better off near the city center? Which neighborhoods offer the best balance of cost and quality of life?

It can get overwhelming, fast. But Uniplaces—a Lisbon-based platform—makes the search easier. They help connect mid-to-long-term renters with trusted landlords all across Europe.

The platform's volume of student and landlord inquiries has grown over the years. To handle the influx, CTO Irineu Licks Filho knew they needed a scalable solution. "We receive thousands and thousands of messages, and many of these leads aren't highly qualified," says Irineu. We needed a way to classify them efficiently, so our agents could focus on the best opportunities." 

Irineu landed on the perfect solution: powering lead management with AI and Zapier.

Jump ahead:

• Automating lead classification and response handling

• Automating payment workflows with Stripe

• Enhancing customer support with Zapier Tables

• Cutting costs with Translate by Zapier

Automating lead classification and response handling

In the past, support agents at Uniplaces spent a lot of time manually assessing whether leads were worth pursuing. "Agents had to open each lead, review the details, and decide whether to engage—this took three to four minutes per lead," says Irineu.

To build a more sustainable process, Uniplaces created a Zap (what we call our automated workflows) that directs high-priority leads to agents while delegating lower-quality leads to AI.

Here's how that Zap works:

1. For each lead, AI assigns a qualification score based on variables like the tenant's country, inquiry details, and urgency.

2. If a lead is qualified, key lead details get pushed to Salesforce, and the correct agent receives a notification.

3. If the AI detects that a lead lacks key indicators of seriousness, it sends them an automated, but natural-sounding response with potential next steps.

"After implementing AI, we went from handling only a percentage of qualified leads to engaging with 100% of them," Irineu shares. "It also means our agents now focus only on the leads that truly matter."

Automating payment workflows with Stripe

Managing rental payments was another challenge for Uniplaces. Initially, generating and sharing payment links for tenants required manual effort—but with so many transactions, this process was in dire need of a little automation magic.

Here's how the new workflow unfolds:

1. A potential tenant chooses a rental plan through a web form.

2. Based on the plan they select and other details about the tenant, Stripe generates a unique payment link.

3. The tenant receives the payment link automatically by email, ensuring timely, error-free transactions.

This Zap has not only streamlined the payment process but also allowed Uniplaces to scale its operations efficiently, so developers can focus on core product improvements.

Enhancing customer support with Zapier Tables

In peak seasons, Uniplaces gets a surge in customer inquiries from students looking for last-minute housing. "This period is high-stakes," says Irineu. "Students want fast responses, and we need to ensure we're prioritizing the right requests.

In the past, Uniplaces relied on Google Sheets to manage and track inquiries. But the volume became unmanageable. "Google Sheets was too slow and unreliable when handling large datasets," Irineu explains. So Uniplaces switched to Zapier Tables, which offered a more scalable and structured way to store and query lead data. 

Now, the process works like this:

1. Incoming messages are automatically logged in Zapier Tables, which acts as the central data repository.

2. AI classifies each inquiry and assigns it a priority level.

3. High-priority leads trigger an automatic push to Salesforce, alerting an agent.

4. If a phone number is missing, AI determines whether to request one from the tenant.

This shift has significantly cut response times and improved customer satisfaction. "Zapier Tables fit our needs perfectly—it's fast, reliable, and allows me to query data easily," says Irineu. "We switched our entire database from Google Sheets to Zapier Tables, which solved our issues with handling large amounts of data without needing to develop a new database or use another third-party service."

Cutting costs with Translate by Zapier

Because Uniplaces serves tenants from around the world, multilingual communication is critical. But relying on external translation services was expensive. 

"We previously used paid translation APIs, which quickly became costly," says Irineu. "Now, we use Translate by Zapier, which allows us to translate messages before responding without paying per-character fees."

This workflow translates messages in real time, so there's clear and efficient communication between tenants and Uniplaces's support team.

The future of automation at Uniplaces

With these AI-powered workflows in place, Uniplaces has completely transformed the way it engages with leads—without losing the human touch that helps renters feel right at home. And now, it can rapidly accelerate in other areas too. "Zapier has been invaluable in speeding up our development process and validating ideas," says Irineu. "By quickly setting up workflows and launching MVPs, we can assess whether a project makes sense before fully committing to development."

"Every business has repetitive processes that can be automated with AI," says Irineu. "The key is using tools like Zapier to optimize time and focus on what truly matters."