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AI-Powered Property Inbox Classifier

An n8n workflow that reads incoming property management emails, classifies them with AI, drafts a reply, and routes every ticket to the right team, automatically.

Tools & Integrations

n8nGroq AIIMAP Email Trigger SlackGmailAirtableGoogle Sheets

Workflow in n8n

Property Inbox AI Classifier n8n Workflow

The Business Problem

A tenant reports no heating at 11pm. By the time someone on the property team checks the inbox the next morning, hours have already passed. Maintenance requests, viewing bookings, tenant questions, and new enquiries all land in the same inbox, and one person has to read every message, decide who it's for, write a reply, and remember to log it, on top of everything else on their plate.

Why this matters: A missed maintenance request can turn into a bigger repair bill and an unhappy tenant. A slow reply to a viewing enquiry can mean a lost lead to a competing agency.

Solution Overview

Connects to the inbox via an IMAP email trigger. Long emails are trimmed. AI classifies each message into Maintenance, Tenant Query, Viewing, Enquiry, or Spam, pulls the property address straight out of the email, and routes it to the right team on Slack with full context. A Gmail draft reply is created for human review. Every ticket is logged to Airtable, with a Google Sheets backup if that write fails.

Key Automation Steps

1Read via IMAP: Connects to the inbox over IMAP and picks up new property related emails.
2Sanitize & Classify: Long emails are trimmed. AI classifies into Maintenance, Tenant Query, Viewing, Enquiry, or Spam, flags urgency, and extracts the property reference.
3Manual Fallback: A Fallback branch exists for anything the classifier can't confidently sort, instead of guessing.
4Route & Draft: The right team (Maintenance, Tenant Relations, Viewings, Enquiries, or Manual Review) is notified on Slack. A Gmail draft is created for human review, never sent automatically.
5Double Logging: Saved to Airtable. If that write fails, it's automatically saved to a Google Sheets backup and flagged.

Reliability & Error Handling

No Guessing: Tickets the AI can't confidently classify go to a manual review branch instead of a wrong routing decision.

Backup Write: If the Airtable write fails, a Google Sheets backup plus a failure notification ensures no ticket is ever lost.

Business Impact

Every maintenance request, viewing, tenant query, and enquiry is classified and routed the moment it lands, with no manual sorting. Property teams can focus on the tenant relationship instead of triaging emails.