Summary

Artificial intelligence has significantly transformed the real estate industry, streamlining processes like property valuations, marketing, and customer interactions. Agents and firms that fail to adopt these technologies risk becoming obsolete as AI-driven platforms offer faster, more accurate, and cost-effective solutions.

Highlights

• AI is now integral in property valuations, providing more accurate and instantaneous pricing insights.
• Chatbots and virtual assistants are reshaping customer service by offering 24/7 support and personalized property recommendations.
• Predictive analytics help investors and agents anticipate market trends, improving decision-making and profitability.
• AI-powered tools like virtual staging and automated photo enhancement are revolutionizing property marketing.
• ⚠️ Real estate professionals who resist AI adoption risk being outperformed by tech-savvy competitors and platforms.

Look, we all know AI is here. That’s not the story. The story is that 95% of real estate investors are using it wrong or not at all. Meanwhile, the smart operators are quietly slashing payroll, automating leasing, or getting deals underwritten in minutes, not days. So, if you want to know how AI is actually being used right now in property management, leasing, and acquisitions, these are five trends that nobody’s talking about, but they should be.
AI is quietly revolutionizing property management. So, I’ve got 300 employees and if I automate 30%, that’s a win. From automated leasing to maintenance requests to underwriting and rent comps, AI is already reducing payroll and increasing tenant satisfaction. The big players are already using it and have been working on this for years, but the mid-level operators are asleep.
There’s a huge first mover advantage here if you take the time to integrate it now. Property management used to be boots on the ground. calls, emails, spreadsheet, paper forms. Now, the operators that are using and embracing AI are cutting all that workload in half. Let me give you a real example.
One of my properties used to require three full-time staff in the office just to handle all the workload, including maintenance and tenants and all of that. That’s work orders, vendor calls, scheduling, tenant updates, tours of the property. Now, we’re down to two people with AI support. and eventually we could be even going to one.
AI is doing things faster and quicker and our customer satisfaction is going up. So currently the AI systems are logging our maintenance tickets automatically and in sequence and they’re prioritizing them based on their urgency and we’re routing them to the correct vendors or inhouse. And of course we’re tracking our service times and the customer satisfaction and that’s just maintenance.
We’re also using AI to pull full rent cops automatically to see what the competition is doing at all times. We’re flagging underperforming units. In other words, it can reach into our rent rolls and look into the locations and how long it’s been on the market, for example. And then, of course, it auto notifies the current residents of any lease renewals or pending notifications that they might have.
The bottom line, we’ve got 300 employees. If I can automate 30% of their daily workflow, that’s a win and it’s already happening. Most landlords still have people answering leasing calls during the business hours. That model’s done. Today’s tenants want answers now. Sunday night, 9:00 p.m. from their phone. The leasing bots can respond instantly to inquiries, schedule tours, pre-qualify renters, even answer questions about pets, deposits, school zones, and all those kinds of things.
And here’s the kicker. Bots never sleep. They don’t take lunch breaks. They don’t have bad days. They just convert leads. On one of our test properties, we had AI handle all leasing inquirers for 30 days. The bookings went up over 40%. Now, this is not because we didn’t have great people.
This is because many times they’re out showing units and they’re not always available to answer the phones. So, we got more customers. We leased units faster. The customer was satisfied and our occupancy went up. And guess what? We didn’t have to hire an extra person to handle it. This is the difference between full occupancy and 10 units sitting vacant.
AI is exposing bad management in real time. This is one of my favorite cases. So AI doesn’t lie. It shows exactly where your team might be falling apart. So we’re using AI dashboards that track occupancy trends, delinquencies, renewal rates, work order backlogs, and utility costs per unit. And this is just a small piece of what it can do.
and that compares it across the entire portfolio. So when one property starts to slip, even by a few percentage points, it lights up. Let me give you an example. One of our buildings in Phoenix was running just fine, or so we thought. AI flagged two things. One, a drop in renewals and customer complaints. Turns out the on-site manager had some internal issues that needed to be solved.
So we caught it early, dealt with the situation, and we avoided higher vacancy as a result. Without that data in real time, we’d be blind for an entire quarter, maybe longer, because you can’t fix what you can’t see. So, back when I first got started, we had to physically go visit properties, meet brokers, and look at the comps.
And oftent times, we were looking at old data. Now, we can get a full market read in less than an hour just by using AI bots. The AI tools today can scrape things like moving truck data. So, think of U-Haul, North American van lines, those kinds of things. How many people are actually moving to an area? utility hookups, job postings by company and sector, Google trends and Yelp activity, outofstate driver’s licenses being turned into the DMV, and permit and construction data.
These are all things that AI can scrape and analyze and give you data on. So now I can see things like where people are moving, how fast rents are rising or falling, where inventory is growing too fast, or maybe even where there’s not enough, and more importantly, what neighborhoods are getting overpriced. So, here’s an example.
We were looking at a deal in Nevada. The rent comps look great on paper, but AI flagged a huge amount of new supply about to hit that subm market. That data was not available on some of the national databases, which is normally what we look at. So, we passed and shortly after concessions exploded in that area, which would have affected our rent revenue projections on the project we were looking at.
So, today, of course, you can do more with fewer people. AI is not just replacing tasks. It’s making your people 10 times more effective. This is the hidden win. Instead of hiring 10 employees, you can hire maybe half that and just give them great AI tools. Just think about it. One person with AI can manage leasing for 100 plus units.
One analyst with AI can write over 20 deals a week. And one property manager with AI support can handle more residents and solve problems faster and better, creating a better customer experience. So we’re already restructuring teams to be smaller, more specialized, and of course more tech enabled, which requires less overhead, more output, and this way, of course, it’s more scalable.
So the people that are going to figure this out now, they’re going to dominate later. So think of it when the internet started. There are people that embraced the internet and people that didn’t. The people that didn’t, they fell behind. Exact same thing right now. There are people that are going to embrace AI and the people that don’t.
the ones that are still building bloated teams with outdated systems, they’re going to get crushed when this next correction hits. And it will. So, let me bring this home. AI is not a fad. It’s not a luxury. It’s not a someday tool. It’s here and it’s working. And if you’re not using it to buy better, lease faster, manage leaner, you’re at a massive disadvantage.
And I’m not saying you need to become a tech expert here. I’m saying find the tools, train the people, and stay ahead of the game because real estate is a game of margins, and AI gives you your margin back. If you want to see how experts are predicting that 17 million people could lose their jobs to AI, watch this video