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AI’s Effect For PM Is Different Than Everywhere Else
Ending the Burnout Cycle- The Real Promise of AI in Property Management
The energy at the book launch last week was incredible. Thank you to everyone who came, shared their insights, and made it such a memorable event.
As I have recalled, it’s a room full of property managers, vendors, and innovators all wrestling with the same question: what does AI really mean for our industry?
Last week’s newsletter was about the celebration…the book hitting people’s hands for the first time. This week’s is about the idea at the center of it all: the one big takeaway from a year of research, hundreds of podcast conversations, and countless experiments.
It’s the thread that ties everything together: the biggest problem in property management, where it originates, how effective AI can be in solving it, and what comes next.
I’ll be the first to tell you that Cliff’s Notes got me through high school (remember those?) Now, as an adult, I find joy in reading, but I didn’t need to read those books to pass my tests. So I’m giving you the Cliff’s Notes version of the book because the stakes are too high to make you wait… but not for the reason we all thought.
Let’s start with the problem.
The Biggest Problem With Property Management Today
If there’s one thing we all agree on, it’s this: churn is the enemy. Owners leaving erodes growth, bleeds motivation, and makes it harder to grow as you scale.
Since coming into the industry, I’ve heard the same advice: prove your value. Speak in the language of NOI. Show owners the dollars you’re saving them and the returns you’re driving. If they see the financial benefit, they’ll stay.
It makes sense… until you look at what’s really happening.
When owners walk away, they’re rarely doing it because of math. They’re making emotional decisions based on pain. It’s the kitchen-table arguments after one too many small misses. It’s the frustration when a repair drags on for days longer than expected. It’s the anxiety of not knowing what’s happening with their property until it becomes bad news.
This leads them to give another property manager a shot, or worse, leave the asset class.
The data screams this at us. The latest PM Trends Report shows a massive gap between what our clients want and what our systems allow us to deliver. 73% of owners expect an answer within hours. More than half want repairs done in under three days, yet the industry benchmark is twice that.
The scariest demand? 65% of owners want more control.
These are the standards we’re being judged against. And let’s be honest: they’re impossible to meet with the way our industry was built.
So here’s the truth we need to confront:
- Owners don’t churn because of NOI.
They churn because of the pain of unmet expectations. - And those unmet expectations (instant answers, sub-three-day repairs, full transparency) are fundamentally unfair with the old playbook.
To survive in this environment, we were forced to standardize. We built systems to keep the messy reality of ownership off our clients' plates, making ourselves invisible in the process. And that’s the trap: they don’t see the twenty fires we put out, only the one that burns them.
We have been set up in an impossible game. And it is not our fault.
The good news is, for the first time, a fundamental shift is making it possible to win.
A New Way To Give Owners What They’ve Always Wanted
Once we see churn for what it really is - unmet expectations - the path forward becomes clearer. Owners have told us exactly what they value:
Faster communication.
Quicker issue resolution.
A sense of control.
That’s why the buzz around AI matters: we’re seeing, in the early days, a completely new way to deliver on them.
And it’s not theory. This is what AI is already doing:
From Work Order Diving To Instant Answers
There is an AI assistant that lives inside your PMS that is already able to give updates on anything from work order status to renter sentiment to vendor experience. This eliminates the hours that property managers used to spend “work order diving” to give owners answers to their maintenance queries, collapsing response times to just minutes.
From To Do Lists To 24/7 Responses
There is an AI agent trained to triage, troubleshoot, and create work orders 24/7, which helps residents fix their own issues or creates perfect work orders the moment the resident reaches out (even if it’s 10 pm on a Saturday). This combination of 24/7 availability and capacity to handle multiple calls at once reduces renter wait times, gets issues reported correctly, gets vendors there quicker, and often solves the problem on the spot - collapsing the average days of open work orders.
From One Size Fits All To Mass Customization
There is an AI agent that creates custom workflows from voice requests, immediately sets them as the new standard, and can remember endless variations according to the conditions you design. Eliminating the time and cost of creating workflows and training the team on them, without the impossible demand of a human sorting through multiple processes, can give owners more control without breaking your operation.
FULL DISCLOSURE: I’m speaking directly about Vendoroo’s AI agents because I have seen their efficacy firsthand, but we fully expect other vendors to develop similar solutions, and this to become the norm across other functions (like leasing).
What makes it even more interesting is the fact that we’re still on the “first date” with AI, and it’s improving at a pace that is hard to wrap our heads around.
The New Mandate: We Are All Managing Change
Part of my research this year was looking outside property management to understand how AI is reshaping everything.
One signal is the pace itself:
- Classic tech followed Moore’s Law (doubling roughly every two years)
- AI is compounding closer to every six months.
That’s 4× faster. It’s why 2030 could feel as far from 2025 as 2005 feels from today… and in 2005, we were debating whether to buy ads in the Yellow Pages or build a website.
The other signal came from three internal CEO memos (Shopify, Duolingo, Fiverr) that leaked earlier this year. Different companies, same conclusions after hands-on experimentation:
- What was hard will become easy; what was impossible becomes the new hard.
- We are all managing change now. Not just assets, not just teams—change itself. Making your org comfortable with iteration is leadership.
- You can’t wait to figure it out before you start. You have to start in order to figure it out. The feedback loops only appear once you’re in motion.
That’s why this matters to PM today. The expectation gap (faster answers, quicker resolutions, more control) won’t be closed by another static SOP or a “someday” roadmap. It will be closed by teams that get hands-on, encode their way of working into AI, and iterate in real time.
And the reason this mandate is so urgent is that when a shift this big happens, history has taught us what will happen:
The First Will Win, The Last Will Lose
We’ve seen this movie before. Blockbuster could have bought Netflix. They didn’t. When they finally tried DVDs-by-mail, they saw it eating into their stores, pulled the plug, and doubled down on the past. We know how that ended.
That’s the innovator’s dilemma: success today makes you blind to tomorrow.
But the field is leveled right now.
This is week one of freshman year of college. It doesn’t matter how cool you were in high school. The scoreboard just reset.
- The first companies to give owners faster answers, quicker resolutions, and a sense of control will become the undisputed leaders in their markets.
- The ones who hesitate, waiting for AI to be “ready,” will lose crucial ground.
The choice is stark. But the opportunity in front of us is bigger than market share or competitive advantage.
It’s about fixing the very foundation of how we work.
But The Real Prize is The End of Burnout
For us in property management, the promise of AI runs even deeper. Lately, I’ve been seeing industry leaders calling out the burnout epidemic we’ve accepted as normal.
If you search property management memes, it’s depressing—burnout, stress, endless firefighting. The dirty secret isn’t just owner churn; it’s employee churn.
We’ve normalized it. We’ve accepted that giving people jobs that chew them up and spit them out is just the way it is. We joke about it, but it’s not a funny joke.
Humor is just a coping mechanism for the fact that we put good people in jobs that grind them down.
Here’s where we’re different from the rest of the world. While others worry AI will take their jobs, our reality is the opposite. Our jobs have been brutal. AI is finally giving us the chance to make them sustainable. By automating the mundane and absorbing the 24/7 firefight of “to-dos”, we have the chance to free people to do meaningful work: relationships, trust, proactive guidance.
That’s the real shift.
Not just faster answers, not just quicker repairs, not just more control, but an end to the burnout cycle that has plagued our industry for decades.
This is where the story of AI in our industry becomes unique.
The real promise of AI in property management is not just meeting owner expectations, but to finally give people jobs that are sustainable, strategic, and deeply human, so we can focus on what truly matters.
We can stop talking about AI replacing humans and use AI to make property management more humane.
This is the conversation I hope we can all start having, and it’s already begun.
The book is the product of a year of these conversations with property managers, operators, and technologists across the country. The book was created to be a cornerstone for this dialogue. And the conversation continues with you.
We are now opening an official waitlist for the second edition, which will be launched on Amazon.
To be the first to know when it’s available, you can either shoot me an email at pablo@vendoroo.ai to be put on the list or you can sign up directly here.
If you're heading to any of the big fall conferences, we will also have some copies with us at the upcoming PMI summit, the RPM reunion, and NARPM Nationals.
Let’s end the cycle of burnout, together.
—
Pablo Gonzalez,
Chief Evangelist at Vendoroo
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