BLOG: AI is creating havoc in US for estate agents so is Britain next?
Well-known American agent warns that while AI is causing significant verification problems in the US, agents here better tools - and should use them.
You’ve probably read these headlines recently – ‘£9,600 cost to landlords per fraudulent tenancy’ and ‘Fake employment references up 226%’.
So what’s happening? To cut to the chase, it’s largely that the cost and effort required to create fake documents is now very low since AI arrived.
I train property professionals in the US on AI, and this wave hit us first from the opposite side.
Not fake tenants. Fake rental listings. Somebody scrapes the photos off a live listing of a home for sale, posts the house simultaneously as a rental, and collects the deposits.
They even create a believable cover story about fighting the selling agent and please don’t contact him. It almost always is renting at far below market, so people chase the “deal” rather than verify anything.
Strangers
One of our agents pulled into a driveway and found a mother and daughter already sitting there, a hundred dollars gone on an application fee to a landlord who didn’t exist. Another watched strangers walk the garden of a house she’d just listed, all of them sure they had a viewing of this lovely property for rent.
Then there was one where an agent was sent proof of funds and a photo ID by a supposed high-end buyer. To prove they were forgeries, she had to research the security features on a real ID. She caught it. That’s genuinely good work.
She may not catch the next one.
Here’s the important part. A payslip or pay stub used to be proof of employment. Now it’s a picture of a claim. Back when forging one took skill, reading it carefully was a failsafe.
Now all it takes is a prompt. So, any check that ends with a human squinting at a PDF has already failed, because you can’t out-read a machine that never gets tired.
The answer isn’t better squinting. It’s getting the check off the paper and onto the source. Three we run in the US, with your local equivalent next to each. Fair warning, you’re ahead of us on two.
Verify income at source
What we do: A lot of US screening platforms have stopped accepting uploaded pay slips at all. They connect straight to the applicant’s bank or payroll provider, through something like Plaid or Truework, and read the deposits. No document changes hands, so there’s nothing to fake.
Your version: Open Banking, and it’s cleaner than ours, because you’ve got one national standard and we’ve got a patchwork of vendors. If your referencing provider offers it and you’re still accepting PDF uploads, that’s a mistake.
Verify employers AND referees
What we do: Before anyone rings a referee, we look the company up in that state’s business register. Free, public, about twenty seconds. Incorporation date, registered address, officers. A company formed six weeks ago at a mail drop, with one officer who shares a surname with your applicant, isn’t an employer. It’s a setup.
Your version: Companies House, and you win this one too, because you’ve got one register and we’ve got fifty. Then call a number you find yourself, never the number printed on the reference. That’s the whole check, and it’s the one everybody skips.
Verify their identity
What we do: Honestly, not much. There’s no national identity check for tenants in the US. The better offices attach a live video step to the application. Most don’t do anything at all.
Your version: You’ve already got the thing we don’t have, and you’ve filed it under paperwork. Run the Right to Rent check digitally through a certified provider, and it verifies the applicant is a person in real time instead of sending you a photo of one. That is your strongest fraud control, and it belongs in the beginning, not the end.
One more thing, and it costs nothing. Every US case I’ve seen came through whichever door had the least friction. Out of area. Never free to meet. Wants it all done electronically. Pushes hard on timing. Urgency isn’t enthusiasm. It’s the only real weapon they’ve got, because everything else in that file is built to survive a fast look and fall apart under a slow one. Slowing down is the best advice I can give you. Slow is smooth and smooth is accurate.
None of this is survey data, and I won’t dress it up as any. It’s what I see in the room, roughly 600 sessions a year. But it points in the same direction your numbers do. Our industry keeps shopping for tools that spot better fakes. I’d start asking sources.
Author bio: Jeremias “JMan” Maneiro is a licensed associate real estate broker with RE/MAX Realty Group in Rochester, New York and also Chief Edutainment Officer of JMan Seminars and co-founder of Big Brain Chatbots.
He has trained more than 50,000 property professionals on practical AI and hosts the AI Agent Advantage podcast.http://jmanai.com
