King Farm Citizens Assembly (KFCA) is a large self-managed community in Rockville, Maryland – 10,000+ residents across 3,400 units and 450 acres, consisting of townhouses, condos, rental apartments, commercial, and retail space. It’s amenity-rich, with two outdoor pools, a fitness studio, a clubhouse, shuttle bus services, and more.

The master association is run by an on-site team of five, led by General Manager Brandi. Garfield now resolves ~90% of the community’s inbound calls with a sub-one-second pickup time, around the clock.

[The Problem]

10,000 residents is enough to make any management office sound like a call center. As any seasoned manager would attest, it’s almost unbelievable how many eager residents can ask about the pool’s opening date in a single afternoon. Brandi’s team was proactive about keeping residents informed, maintaining an organized, information-rich website and a weekly email bulletin with the latest updates. The answers were there. Homeowners just kept calling anyway.

For Brandi’s lean team, the call volume was unsustainable – especially during busy periods like the summer pool season. The first hour of each morning was spent clearing out overnight voicemails – playing them back, looking up answers that already lived on the website, and returning calls one by one. And throughout the day, the phone set the rhythm. A manager mid-way through a budget draft would stop to field a call about pool hours, then find their place again.

[Considering the Options]

KFCA already had an IVR phone menu in place – the “Press 1 for Accounting”, “Press 2 for Covenants” system that was the gold standard for customer service technology just a few years ago. It funneled callers to the right extension, but it didn’t resolve anything. The homeowner still landed in voicemail or on hold, and a member of Brandi’s team still had to call them back.

Similarly, many “AI voice agent” providers were little more than dressed up IVRs – they could greet the caller, take a message, and pass it along, but they couldn’t resolve anything independently.

What KFCA wanted was something that could actually answer FAQs, resolve the call on the spot, and involve a person only when a person was genuinely needed – a 24/7 “first line of defense” that acted like a team member, not a call router.

[Implementation]

Garfield’s team was hands on with King Farm at each step of the onboarding process. Getting Garfield live was a light lift – most of it amounted to Brandi pointing the Garfield team to the KFCA website and emailing a few documents to fill in the gaps, namely the resident handbook and ARC guidelines. Because King Farm already kept its information organized and in clean electronic formats, Garfield had nearly everything it needed from day one.

From there it was working out edge cases together – the occasional spot where a document had drifted out of date, like a resident handbook still listing last season’s pool hours. Within 2 weeks, Garfield knew what King Farm knew. The cleaner a community’s documents, the faster that goes – and King Farm’s were in great shape.

Lastly, Garfield worked with King Farm’s IT team to get integrated into the community’s day-to-day systems, such as KFCA’s live community calendar. This way, Garfield could tell a homeowner whether the clubhouse is free and suggest open slots.

[The results]

Once live, Garfield picked up in under a second, every time, day or night – and resolved ~70% of calls entirely on its own. The remaining slice routed to the team with the context already gathered.

The calls Garfield handles aren’t trivial, either. It takes after-hours maintenance reports – gathering the homeowner’s name, address, and a description of the issue (including verifying whether the issue is an association vs homeowner responsibility). It walks residents through amenity pass applications, texting them links to the right form mid-call and answering follow-up questions about proof of residency. It directs title companies to the resale package portal for closings. These calls used to eat into the management team’s day.

Garfield keeps itself current with zero incremental effort from the KFCA team, automatically scanning KFCA’s website and newsletter for changes – no portal to log into, no update emails to send. Brandi’s team is in the loop on all resident communications – every call is followed up with an email to management with a summary and a transcript, so nothing happens in the dark.

The impact lands in two places:

For the management team. That first hour of voicemail triage is gone. Brandi’s team can work at their own rhythm. Time that went to the phones now goes to the work that actually moves the community forward – budgeting, managing vendors, planning programming.

For homeowners. Answers come 24/7, not just during office hours. And during office hours, a manager is still right there. Residents got more access, not less.

[Continuing to add value]

Garfield came on as the newest member of the team – and like any good hire, it kept taking on more.

With King Farm’s large Chinese-speaking community in mind, Garfield launched multilingual support so that more residents can get help in the language they’re most comfortable in.

Garfield is also working to implement a similar answering system for email.