New AI Rental Tech Shapes the Tenant Experience

• Automated Housing Assistance: New York-based property software EliseAI offers an AI housing assistant for tenants and landlords alike. The chatbot engages with residents over voice notes, text, email or webchat. Residents can submit maintenance requests, which EliseAI responds to with a temporary solution (guiding tenants on shutting off their water if they have a leak, for example). The tool also automatically submits a maintenance request. EliseAI will additionally send reminders for monthly payments or nudge tenants to submit lease renewal documentation.
  
  For prospective renters, the chatbot answers questions about the property, schedules viewings, and recommends units in a landlord’s portfolio based on tenants’ preferences (asked in-chat).
  
  
• Tenants Wary of AI Landlords: Features like tenant screening make some renters question AI landlords. Used by US property management software RealPage’s AI application and Hong Kong-based rental payment platform KeyChain Pay, AI tenant screeners use public data, AI and machine learning to create predictive models to determine whether a prospect is trustworthy and financially stable, which could result in biased predictions. Meanwhile, the thought of dealing with a large language model instead of a person makes some renters uneasy.
  
  Some US states are even banning AI rental software (including the aforementioned RealPage and fellow US AI property management software company Yardi, in San Francisco) after finding that they intentionally inflated regional rents.
  
  

See Forever Renters: Consumers' Real Estate Struggles to learn about tenant demographics and their reasons for renting.