|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
For years, apartment hunting meant scrolling through listings, calling property managers and scheduling tours. Increasingly, renters can do much of that without talking to a person at all.
A chatbot can answer questions about an apartment, suggest properties based on what a renter is looking for and schedule a tour. Some property managers are using artificial intelligence behind the scenes to handle inquiries and maintenance requests, while rental platforms are building AI assistants directly into the search process.
Now, California is starting to put rules around how artificial intelligence can be used to market apartments.A new state law, signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom on Sept. 29, will require disclosures when digitally altered images are used in rental advertisements, giving prospective renters a way to distinguish between an apartment as it actually appears and one that has been digitally altered. The newly approved law takes effect Jan. 1, 2027.
The law comes as AI is beginning to reshape real estate. The technology is already changing the rental process itself, from the way prospective tenants search for apartments to how property managers respond to inquiries and schedule tours.
At Palo Alto-based Wilbur Properties, property manager Jonathan Miradi is using AI to handle some of the routine work that can consume a manager’s day.
Miradi, who studied data science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, approached his boss in March about having the company invest in AI. Wilbur managers and agents oversee about 800 residential units in San Mateo and Santa Clara counties.
A lot of time, there’s a sentiment that AI can replace workers. That’s not what I’m trying to do.
Jonathan Miradi, Wilbur Properties
By July, managers were using Anthropic’s Claude in Chrome. Miradi also has set up a database that allows the AI to answer questions and check property managers’ schedules to help arrange apartment tours. If the AI cannot answer a question, it alerts a property manager.
Eventually, Miradi would like the system to work directly through the company’s website, allowing it to respond to tenants and prospective renters without a property manager handling every inquiry. But he said the goal is to reduce routine work, not replace property managers.
“A lot of time, there’s a sentiment that AI can replace workers,” Miradi said. “That’s not what I’m trying to do.”
He said he has also seen property managers use the free version of ChatGPT to answer questions about whether an issue needs to be brought to a lawyer or whether a new policy applies to their properties. He thought it was worthwhile to give managers access to more advanced tools and higher usage limits.
Wilbur is not alone.
Essex Property Trust, which manages 777 Hamilton Apartments in Menlo Park and Radius in Redwood City, uses an AI agent named Eva to greet prospective renters through the complexes’ websites. The complexes also offer self-guided and virtual tours.
The apartment search becomes a conversation
“The way people are searching for apartments is changing,” said Dan Bachelder, chief technology officer at San Francisco-based online rental platform Zumper.
Zumper launched its rental search assistant, Zoe, in 2025, Using information from a property’s Zumper listing, Zoe can answer questions about an apartment, its community and surrounding neighborhood and help schedule tours.
Instead of sorting through listings, a renter can ask questions such as whether a neighborhood is good for nightlife, whether it is quiet or how old an apartment building is.
Bachelder said younger people are increasingly accustomed to using chat for simple searches, allowing them to consolidate questions into one conversation rather than searching across multiple websites.
Other rental platforms are moving in the same direction. RentCafe launched its AI assistant, Ren, in August, while Apartments.com introduced conversational AI search in June. Renters can search for apartments based on factors such as the number of bedrooms, city, price range, specials and whether pets are allowed, as well as ask about nearby amenities and schedule tours.
It did a pretty good job of listing out apartments that fell within those parameters. Sometimes it would include things outside of that.
Renno Mihalis, apartment seeker
But AI assistants can still get things wrong.
Bachelder said Zumper designed Zoe to minimize hallucinations, or instances in which an AI system produces inaccurate or made-up information. But large language models can still make mistakes, and they are designed to be helpful and accommodating to users.
That can matter when the information concerns something as consequential as where someone is going to live.
Former Palo Alto investment banker Renno Mihalis, 23, took a different approach when he searched for an apartment after getting a job offer in San Francisco over the summer. He had just one week to find an apartment, so he thought AI might help him search faster. Rather than searching through an individual rental platform, he used Claude and ChatGPT to compile a list of property management websites and set search parameters for price, location and apartment size.
“It did a pretty good job of listing out apartments that fell within those parameters,” he said. “Sometimes it would include things outside of that.”
In the end, Mihalis found an apartment the old-fashioned way: through word of mouth. A family friend had a vacancy. He said AI might have been more useful if he’d had more time to search.
AB 2025: What renters see
The new California law addresses one particularly visible part of the AI-powered rental experience: the images used to advertise homes.
Assembly Bill 2025 requires disclosures when digitally altered images are used in advertisements for rental property. When an image has been digitally altered in a way that changes the appearance of the property, the law generally requires the original, unaltered image to be provided or made accessible to consumers. Routine edits such as lighting, color, cropping or exposure are excluded when they do not change the representation of the property.
California’s Department of Real Estate has also warned that real estate professionals remain responsible for information produced by AI. In a March advisory, the department said licensees must review AI-generated information for accuracy and comply with existing real estate, consumer protection and fair-housing laws.
Home & Real Estate Editor Linda Taaffe contributed to this article.
Most Popular
Guest opinion: For Menlo Park's Measure P or not for P, that is the questionOctober 4, 2026 11:02 am
