The Weaponization of AI in Property Management
Published On: September 10, 2026 Posted by: Jeremy Peterson
Our office has noticed an interesting phenomena over the past six months as AI has gained increasing use in the general public. It has been interesting for our office to meet tenants, get accustomed to their voice, and then receive written communications from them that seem completely foreign to the person that we know.
In one instance, a tenant moving into a unit had a list of repairs they wanted completed before they moved in. Instead of submitting the list to us, a text message was constructed with AI that incorporated the list into a message that appeared like a home inspection report. We actually thought it had been copied from the report of a professional home inspector. The tenant later admitted that AI had written it for them.
Recently we received a request for pest mitigation at a unit experiencing an unusual infestation of small bugs. We had sprayed the unit not to long ago and our vendor felt it would be unhealthy to spray again so soon. The tenant was very upset about the issue, understandably. In an interesting exchange between the tenant and our office, we received AI generated instructions the tenant shared as part of their request to resolve the problem. Here is a screenshot of part of those instructions:
This was quite an adversarial tone. The issue at hand here is that technology should be helping improve service and by extension human relationships. However, technology’s drive to automate so much of our existence has moved us into an area where all of us are tempted to dismiss the human relationships that make our existence possible. Hopefully we see fewer AI agents trained to combat people and more human interaction. To this tenant’s credit, they did visit us personally and we created a plan of action together in our office. That was refreshing.
It is important to remember that property management companies exist to solve problems, manage risk, and provide livable housing as a service that benefits both tenants and the property owners. Nevertheless, the old stereotype of landlords as greedy and exploitative oppressors lives on…formerly in Dickins novels and this time in the AI universe.
