Real Estate & Property Operations · Cortland's Property Operations Automation: Closing the API Gap Under a Renewal Workflow
Cortland's Property Operations Automation: Closing the API Gap Under a Renewal Workflow
Automating renewal work where the core property system could not support the workflow alone
The Client · Cortland
Overview
Cortland is a leading real-estate firm operating across the U.S. multifamily housing market, with a property-operations stack centered on RealPage OneSite. Cortland engaged Taller to automate its lease-renewal process end to end, then build a custom API layer to support AI-driven operations across its property-management platform.
The Problem
The client’s lease-renewal process required manual tenant outreach across the whole portfolio, the kind of high-volume, repetitive work automation that pays off quickly. But their property-management system did not offer the APIs — the standard connection points that let software systems integrate — needed to support the automation the client wanted, which blocked the strategy at the platform level. The client engaged Taller to find and implement a solution.
The Solution
Taller used web scraping (software that reads data directly from a system’s screens when no API is available) to automate interactions with the property-management system, added event-driven task management to coordinate the renewal workflow across teams, and integrated third-party providers using infrastructure-as-code on Terraform (defining the setup through version-controlled files) in a hub-and-spoke pattern that kept the integrations manageable as the portfolio grew. Web scraping is a deliberate engineering choice when the underlying system does not yet expose adequate APIs, and what makes it sustainable is the abstraction layer that isolates the scraping logic from the rest of the code. The build drew on several technologies, each mapped to a specific job: Node.js, TypeScript, JavaScript, and Python together covered the scraping, the coordination layer, and the integration code that talked to the third-party providers (including a renewal-marketing platform), while MongoDB held the operational data.
The Impact
Taller’s automation delivered fully automated lease renewals across the portfolio, with real-time data exchange and better-informed operational decisions. Before, staff had to contact every resident individually — by phone, with manual tracking and repetitive data entry — to find out whether they intended to renew, transfer to another unit, or move out. The new workflow replaced that with an automated, system-driven process: residents received lease-expiration notices by SMS and email, their responses were captured and recorded automatically, and renewals were processed end to end without manual intervention. That eliminated the individual outreach calls, removed manual data entry from the renewal cycle, and created a single source of truth for resident status — turning a slow, error-prone administrative process into a scalable, measurable operational pipeline.
