Five jobs that letting agents won’t hand over to AI

Letting agents have revealed a handful of jobs that they insist won’t be handed over to AI.

A survey of lettings professionals by Propoly suggested five areas that AI is least suited to – and they all involve people or complex circumstances.

They include building relationships with landlords, handling difficult conversations or disputes, dealing with sensitive tenant circumstances, assessing situations with no clear-cut answer, and building relationships with tenants.

Other areas flagged included resolving complaints, advising landlords on pricing and strategy, and making the final decision on who should rent a property.

However, agents do see value for using AI in administration, the survey suggests.

AI assistance

Compliance admin ranked as the area that AI could help with most, followed by processing and reviewing documents, fraud detection, and summarising long email or message chains.

However, trust in the technology working independently is low.

Only 19% would be comfortable letting AI draft a routine email without checking it, while 14% would trust it to review a document for missing information.

At the same time, 12% would trust AI to produce a property description independently, with the same proportion trusting it to flag potential issues in a tenant application.

Asked what they would do with five hours freed up each week, 21% said they would use it to improve their work-life balance, 14% would spend more time speaking to tenants and another 14% would focus on solving complex problems. A further 12% would concentrate on winning new business.

Propoly suggests that the findings point to AI supporting agents rather than replacing them, taking on repetitive administration while leaving people in control of decisions requiring context and experience.

AI has the potential to remove a huge amount of friction from property management.”

Sim Sekhon, Group Chief Executive of Propoly, (pictured), says: “AI has the potential to remove a huge amount of friction from property management, particularly when it comes to repetitive administration and processing information.

“But the purpose of that technology should be to give agents more time to do the things that technology cannot replicate as effectively.”

He adds: “Lettings is ultimately about people. A difficult conversation, a sensitive tenant situation or a decision where there isn’t an obvious right answer cannot always be reduced to a set of instructions. These situations require context, experience and sometimes compassion.”

Sekhon says the most useful AI is not the AI that does everything, but the AI that knows where it can and cannot add value.

He says: “The goal of AI in lettings should be to make the sector more human, not less.”