AI-Powered Property Management is Becoming a Reality (BOMA 2025 Preview)

Artificial intelligence has evolved quickly, changing from a buzzword to a real force multiplier in property and facility management. AI tools aren’t perfect, but they can help you tackle certain tasks so that you can spend more time on the parts of your work that need the human touch.

David Franklin, industry principal for commercial real estate and artificial intelligence for Yardi, will present “AI-Powered Property Management—Smarter, Faster, Better” on Sunday, June 29, at the 2025 BOMA International Conference & Expo. His session will introduce the landscape of AI tools that are already out there to help you with property management challenges and help attendees identify what types of tasks are appropriate for AI assistance.

Types of AI That Can Help with Property Management

When you think of artificial intelligence, your mind may immediately go to large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. These have their place—using natural language processing for tasks like lease administration, where it can parse through your various leases in a few seconds and extract meaningful information for your review without you having to enter source data manually. “What is the rent schedule? Are there escalations? What concessions are being made? What are the various options—like, can I terminate, or can I renew, and under what conditions?” Franklin asked. “Those large language models are getting strong enough that we can do that meaningfully.”

Generative AI refers to technologies that can create new content. Large language models are a subset of generative AI. Property professionals could use generative AI tools for help writing reports or property listings, building better tables in Excel, and more.

AP automation platforms deal with the process of electronically ingesting, coding, and approving payables. AP tools use machine learning to look at data sets that are relatively simple and structured, such as an invoice, and identify patterns among how this data has been dealt with over time. AI can either approve the data for you or at least code it and break it down so that a human operator can give the final say.

Agentic AI is a growing subset of artificial intelligence tools. Essentially, you would use different AI “agents” that are good at doing particular tasks—perhaps one is good at understanding leases and giving you information about them, while another is better at understanding invoices. It’s more advanced than the AP automation platforms, Franklin explained.

“If I ask the system, ‘Who has an option to terminate if their sales drop below $1 million this year?’, the system can read the lease and say, ‘I understand what you’re talking about, and here are the five tenants you have who have that particular clause in their lease,’” Franklin said. “Going back to the idea of machine learning for AP automation that says, ‘Let me ingest that data,’ that’s one tool. Now we can layer another tool on it that’s better at making informed decisions that have more complex rules—understanding existing budget thresholds, whether I’m over certain numeric thresholds, what kind of flow that should have, and who I need to pull into a workflow based on those conditions.”

How to Use AI Tools for Work Tasks

AI tools are still improving, but they can be used to streamline some tasks today. There are two paths that property professionals can go down to explore AI, Franklin said.

First, look at what you can accomplish with off-the-shelf technologies like ChatGPT or Microsoft’s Copilot. You may have your own tools or processes that could be made faster or more efficient by adding AI. “Microsoft’s not dictating, ‘Here’s a real estate business process-related task that we built a tool around,’” Franklin explained. “You build your own tool and customize it to the needs of your job, your organization, and the types of tasks you have.”

Alternatively, you can partner with vendors who are building AI capabilities into their software offerings rather than building tools yourself, Franklin advised.  “If you’re a property manager or facility manager, go see what’s out there and what kind of third-party support has been built for a particular challenge you’re facing,” Franklin said. “If it’s preventive maintenance stuff, look at Angus or Building Engines and see what they’re doing. On the Yardi side, we’re building better predictive models around replacing old technology and equipment, because we can look at patterns over time of repair and the cost associated therein and start giving AI-driven advice.”

The most effective property managers will use a combination of these two strategies, Franklin added.

“Think about how to wrap your business processes around off-the-shelf software, plus custom stuff you’re doing that makes people in your organization more effective,” Franklin said. “Where you’re going to get the most bang for the buck is probably some combination therein.”

Check out David Franklin’s session—along with many more learning opportunities—at the 2025 BOMA International Conference & Expo. Still need to register? Sign up today!