AI and the Future of Property Management: An Interview with Yardi

AI isn’t just a buzzword—it’s a game-changer for property management. From optimizing workflows to unlocking powerful insights, AI has the potential to revolutionize how real estate teams operate. But while the technology is advancing at lightning speed, adoption in the industry has been more of a slow burn.

So, what’s holding companies back? And more importantly, how can they harness AI’s full potential to drive real results? In this conversation with David Franklin, Industry Principal for Commercial at Yardi, we dive into the biggest hurdles, the smartest strategies for scaling AI, and the next frontier of intelligent automation in property management.

Q: AI is revolutionizing property management, but where do you think the industry is still dragging its feet when it comes to adoption? What’s holding real estate companies back from fully realizing AI’s potential?

Property Management as an industry has always been slow to adopt new technology. AI is an area where adoption will be especially difficult because it represents such a radical shift to the way of thinking of your average computer user. For example, until now, if you wanted to search for an answer you would need to put together a search term with just the right keywords. With AI, you can truly have a conversation with a chatbot to get to the answer you need. Companies will not be able to move forward until the average user becomes comfortable with interacting conversationally with an AI.

Q: AI often shines in solving today’s problems, but how can property management teams ensure they’re building AI strategies that can scale and evolve with tomorrow’s challenges?

The difference between today’s challenges and tomorrow’s challenges lies mostly in the level of complexity and amount of information that needs to be processed to remain competitive. AI is perfectly suited to augmenting a human’s ability to sift through vast amounts of data to find actionable insights and help inform critical decision making. Ensuring that users are adopting AI tools and learning to form a symbiosis with AI agents will help ensure success in the future.

Q: Many AI solutions promise ‘plug-and-play’ simplicity, but the reality can be very different. How does Yardi help real estate teams avoid getting stuck in the dreaded ‘AI implementation paralysis’?

Yardi has the glorious advantage of being a fully integrated single stack solution. This means that using the AI solutions that we provide will actually fulfill the promise of ‘plug-and-play’. Integrating third-party AI solutions will require leveraging the extensive integration tools that we provide to move data between Yardi systems and third-party systems. Our commitment to openness allows for easy integration via APIs, batch processing, or real-time database synchronizations

Q: What’s the most common mistake you see real estate teams make when integrating AI into their operations and how they can solve it?

The most common mistake is not understanding the security implications of incorporating public Large Language Models into sensitive business processes. For example, if you ask ChatGPT a question about a confidential new acquisition or sale, the information you share with the chatbot can be used to train the model and may be accessible by other users asking questions about the same property. This can be mitigated by utilizing enterprise licensing deals that explicitly forbid training off of query data, just as Yardi does with all of our tools.

Q: The AI race is on—but faster isn’t always better. How can real estate firms ensure they’re not just adopting AI for the sake of it but are using it to drive measurable ROI and operational efficiency?

Real estate firms can drive measurable ROI by ensuring that the return is actually a measurable quantity. For example, let’s say that you pay for an AI-based lease abstraction tool. You must first fully understand the costs of doing it manually. Account for all the person-hours of time, determine the human capital cost, and then measure the change before and after implementation. You can’t optimize something you can’t measure.

Q: AI is advancing rapidly, but what do you think is the next frontier for AI in property management? What emerging trends or technologies should real estate leaders be preparing for today?

The next frontier will be “agentic AI”. This means that a user will have access to various AI agents that each have expertise in different areas and a master AI that can act as the quarter back for solving problems. For example, you may want to pull some information from Yardi, move it into a BI platform, search some public records, bring it all together and generate a report. Each of those steps could be accomplished by a specific agent that has the correct domain expertise, and the primary AI can orchestrate the process.

Wrapping Up

AI is no longer a distant possibility—it’s here, and it is reshaping property management in real time. As Yardi highlights, the key to success isn’t just adopting AI for the sake of innovation but using it strategically to drive efficiency, security, and measurable ROI. The future of property management belongs to companies that embrace AI with a clear vision, ensuring that their teams, processes, and technology evolve together. With the rise of agentic AI and deeper automation, real estate leaders have a unique opportunity to stay ahead of the curve. The question isn’t whether AI will transform the industry—it’s who will be ready to lead the way.