Could Your AI Tools Get You Sued?

Jay HarrisWhat do you do when the consumer is providing more information about herself or himself to your chat bot in the transaction and asking not just is there a pool on the property, but also I earn this amount of money, I have this kind of credit score. Would I qualify at your property? Yeah, it definitely helps. Now, I would say the other thing, though, to your point, it also helps enforcement. We do see that this is being used by testers to make their job more efficient and enforcement counseling to make their job more efficient. You and I may be dead by the time we get a comprehensive federal privacy law.

Jonas BordoI think our children might have passed on by that point, Jay. That's Jay Harris, and I'm Jonas Bordo, founder of Dwellsy and host of Net Effective. Welcome back for another week of good conversation about AI in the residential rentals industry. Today we have Jay Harris, who is a partner with Hudson Cook, fantastic legal brain focused on the residential property management industry. Jay, so glad to have you on the show. Welcome. Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Jay HarrisThanks for having me, Jonas. delighted to be here today. So I'm in the Washington, D.C. office with Hudson Cook. I run our property management practice there. I'm in the rental housing space, focused on operations issues for a few decades now, both as regulatory counsel and as a lobbyist for the industry. So I'm delighted to talk about artificial intelligence issues and data privacy issues. One of the key issues that affect each part of the rental housing lifecycle today. Conventional wisdom is that the law lags what's going on the technology side. and yet we have seen things, for example, in the marketing area, where the law is maybe running ahead in some states and imposing some new obligations on marketing background screening that arguably are already addressed under existing law. I'm not sure we need a new statute. We've got several attorneys general out there who say, let me tell you how existing fair housing laws and other laws that are out there cover AI-enhanced transactions. And New Jersey has done this, Massachusetts has done this among other states. That doesn't mean they won't continue to legislate in these areas. But I think we've seen, in states like California, Wisconsin, and some others, questions about obligations that in the marketing process that apply to a landlord who's modifying the image that they have in the marketing process. and so some of the starting the for sale space continues into the rental space in California, for example, where as of the first of the year, if you've modified a picture of a unit, a property, the features on it, then the expectation is that you'll also post with the enhanced image the original image of the unit or something like that. And we've talked to more than one housing provider who's pretty sophisticated, and they said, Yeah, we've used this same image for five or ten years. We got it when we bought the property, we made some modifications. where did this come from? What's the benefit? Who does this help? And so forth. and so it'll be interesting to see. California starts it, Wisconsin also has maybe a slightly less restrictive law, but it'll be interesting to see how both advertisers as well as the ad channels handle this beginning early next year.

Jonas BordoYeah, that one is wild. That one feels to me like the you know, it's kind of like the photographer employment bill, if you will, because there's nothing is shown out of camera. It would be irresponsible for a professional photographer shooting a property to deliver untouched images to the client. Like that's just not done. So all of the images should be, if professional photography has been done, should be retouched in some way to look their best. And that's just the reality of photography, whether you're doing property photography or wedding photography or portrait photography or whatever it is. So I feel like everybody needs to go shoot new photography as a result of this. It's such an odd thing.

Jay HarrisIt may be, it may be a full employment act, like you say, for rental housing photographers everywhere. But I think it does point out that just because you thought you could continue to do it this way with the new technology, in fact, expectations are changing. And, I candidly, some of the egregious examples are just that, you know, that the modification of what a property, single-family rental property looks like, you know, that a small housing provider puts out there, what it actually looks like is very different than what was advertised. So, yeah, we understand the intent. Yeah, but it this is just a new area. Is it the end of the world? Absolutely not, but it's a new area to be aware of. The other has been, you know, that's it's also marking, has been synthetic performers, right? You know, so we use voiceovers, we use automated individuals. we see it, you and I have probably worked at companies where this would be in the training, for example, employee training. And similarly, you know, this is a good, efficient way to advertise rail properties. here as well, some disclosures are expected, and hopefully, vendors are on top of this, whether it's on your site or through an ad channel, that you're gonna be disclosing that you're not talking to a real dealer, but that you're talking to some sort of synthetic performer.

Jonas BordoIs that happening now? Is that being required on a regional or national basis, or is it just coming?

Jay HarrisCalifornia has always led in this area, but there have been other disclosure requirements in other states. you taught us had a chatbot disclosure obligation for where you're giving the chatbot is giving certain kinds of professional advice that has been around for a couple of years now and that's been modified over time, as have other states as well. So I think the practical issue is in the game of property operations compliance whack-a-mole, these are just new things to look for, keep your eyes out for, and stands off of it.

Jonas BordoYeah, I feel like already with the cookies requirements, with everything else, we're gonna end up in a situation where there's like 17 disclosures you need to accept just in order to, look at an apartment on a website. Right. Doesn't feel in total consumer friendly to me, but perhaps I'm not thinking of the big picture or I'm not representative.

Jay HarrisThere's a consumer interest in fairness in advertising, and these get at that fairness concern. And some of the egregious cases really are egregious. And to solve for some of these things is not the hardest thing in the world necessarily depending on the law. But we are seeing situations where plaintiff's counsel will decide to bring suit for sharing information in the advertising context for, under some law that was designed 40, 50 years ago to handle a very different kind of transaction that was written with very broad language. And, they'll trot it out again because the liability scheme under the statute is pretty, pretty favorable. California did this and improved a little bit an anti-wiretap law from the 70s, CIPA, that has been over the last few years used by plaintiff's counsel in kind of a shakedown routine to go after unauthorized sharing of quote wiretapping by a vendor that a property operator might be using. And so, you know, it's it there was some good that came out of Sacramento to address this. But fact is that some of these old statutes were written pretty broadly, and there's always an opportunity to recast them when new tools come out.

Jonas BordoAbsolutely. And there are a lot of new tools, that's for sure. So why don't we take just a quick step back and look at the broad scope? as you think about AI for property owners and operators, from a legal perspective, what do you think are the main implications that people should really be thinking about, worrying about right now?

Jay HarrisSo we talked about marketing a little bit. I think another area has been around sort of eligibility, both as it relates to fraud prevention as well as just eligibility using automated decision-making tools, scores, and things like that under the law in states like Colorado and California. So what's to think about? I mean, I think kind of the through line on all this is you need to be aware of it. You need to understand, have done the analysis before the effective date about what kinds, what parts of the property operations are really going to be affected. and then the degree to which the housing provider is responsible for compliance, they have, to give a disclosure notice or something like that, or they have to provide a certain appeal right in the review process or something like that, versus what's the vendor's obligation, right? I remember you and I were talking about this a couple of weeks ago, because often the housing provider is the one who may not understand the rule, and maybe not understand how to use the tool. And, even though they have the role, and even though they signed up and said, yes, I'll comply with the applicable law, they're not aware enough, haven't done the internal training enough to carry out that function. So I think making sure that the, you know, if you're a housing provider, that you understand what states, what type, what parts the transactions or your operations are affected by this, and then whether the you know the operator or the vendor owns the risk is sort of minimum table stakes to understand how you're following the law and doing and performing your role. Because you've got it, you've got a bunch of functions where artificial intelligence can be super helpful and the, let's say, the privacy interest of the consumer is not that strong. There may be there are several beneficial uses as it relates to sort of the operations of the property where you don't need to know on an individualized basis about the identity of the people who are involved in the transaction, but it's very useful to know if there's some sort of leak detection tool where detecting that pattern on your utility usage can be incredibly helpful. Or the rate of usage in the parking lot or things like certain features in the property and how frequently they're used. I mean, the ability to analyze, especially across a larger portfolio, these relative usage rates of different features in the property can be tremendously helpful to see how we're going to build the next one, how are we going to reposition certain parts of the asset when it comes to asset management so that it can be maybe more attractive to the consumer. And then on operating costs, you know, where's the leakage really coming from in a way that we can do something about?

Jonas BordoYou know, it's interesting as you talk about some of those things. It's very easy to come to the wrong conclusions when presented with new data. I remember this one property that I delivered when I was an operator where we had this beautiful gym, beautiful, and nobody ever used it, but it sold the heck out of that property for us. And if we made decisions based on the utilization of the gym, we would have come to the wrong conclusion because I guarantee you we were getting significant additional rent and less vacancy as a result of having that gym on property that nobody used, but everybody thought they were going to use it. Everybody dreamed of using it because it was just gorgeous, right? So got to be really careful about how you how you make use of that kind of new information.

Jay HarrisI think that's absolutely right, Jonas. What's your decision-making process? And frankly, you know, how frequently are you teeing this issue up again that you already have decided last quarter? We're going to do it a certain way. We've decided to stick with the gym. It's a great asset. It sells well, even if it doesn't get as much use as maybe we thought when we built the property. And instead of having to revisit that issue, let's make sure we understand what we're trying to change this quarter and move on. So, yeah, I mean I'm a lawyer, not a business guy, but clearly when it comes to business operations, you do need to have buy-in from all the stakeholders to the asset about what you're trying to get done with the property and frankly, what you know, what battles you're not fighting this year. You already went through that in budgets, and you're not going to revisit that for another six months. Yeah, absolutely.

Jonas BordoJay, from a legal perspective, one of the things that really interests me about this era that we're in is that the application for an apartment is one of those rare cases where you do actually need to disclose a lot of PII. Right. It's kind of like your employer and your landlord get everything. And those are two of the only circumstances in which that's the case. So then how do you overlay the interaction with AI in that situation? If you have, say an application process that incorporates AI into it, if you have a chatbot that's following up with applicants on behalf of the property manager, you haven't submitted your social security number yet, and we need that in order to check your credit. What do you think the implications are of that overlay of AI and that kind of information in this context?

Jay HarrisIt's a good question, Jonas. we, we know obviously data security is going to be paramount in terms of how the transaction is conducted. I think that the standard of practice in the industry and the awareness of data security obligations and taking PII and the transaction is well understood, and at least among the known names that are widely used, rental housing inquiry, application process, and so forth, there's good understanding about that. You know, if you were to when you type in your income information, your social information, date of birth, and so forth, that information, generally speaking, is pretty well contained in your transaction environment through the vendor and through the property operator. a new edge case of this has been what do you do when the consumer is providing more information about herself or himself to your chatbot in the transaction and asking not just is there a pool on the property, but also, hey, I'm I earn this amount of money, I have this kind of credit score, would I qualify at your property? You know, what kind of security deposit would I pay? and so that is a real issue where smart limits on what the bot can and can't talk about and whether it would, in that case, depending on what the acceptable use policy is, depending on how the product is designed, depending on the level of risk that the housing provider has. Is that a question you're going to refer to a live agent to answer? Is that something that can be addressed appropriately by the bot with a decent answer? particularly when a question often comes at 11 o'clock at night when nobody else is working in the leasing office and somebody just wants to know the answer to see if they should be looking further at the property or not. So, those are kind of the bot questions, but really those are the kinds of questions we've had for years in terms of can I get in, let me know, tell me what's going on. And I think so relatedly we've seen more a push from states, especially to disclose more information about what are the criteria? You know, what do I need to get in at this property? how does the process work? And are units generally available? So there are a lot more disclosure obligations in the marketing process that used to be left until the consumer had already gone through all the application process. So that I think I think is beneficial. So that's a little bit about the edge case. I think that the core activity that you're talking about, I'm going through the transaction, I trust that it's secure, but you know, what happens with the data? How is that governed? I want to make sure just because I applied to your property that, you know, you're not going to send me 75 marketing emails if I don't want them. And not just you, but whatever related businesses that might be shared with. So I think the key here is that for decades, federal and state privacy laws have covered wide source of these transactions. As an example, the Fair Credit Reporting Act is one of the original Goldies Bagutis from federal law that's a consumer privacy protection that gives notice and dispute opportunities, appeal rights to consumer for where information about them is inaccurate, or they want more information about the information that's held about them in the eligibility process background screening process. And the Fair Credit Reporting Act is so well established that as states over the last 20 so years have passed state data privacy laws, typically they have exempted transactions that are covered by the Fair Credit Reporting Act or a related other federal law that applies to financial institutions, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act's privacy provisions. And so the good news is that in many states, they're aware of the existing overlay at the federal level. You and I may be dead by the time we get a comprehensive federal privacy law.

Jonas BordoHopefully, I think our children might have passed on by that point, Jay. I think you're right.

Jay HarrisYeah. That's a very long-term game, I think. but we have federal privacy laws. We have state laws that sit on top of them and that accept their exempt transactions that are clearly covered as consumer reporting transactions. And so in this case, it's the application information you're talking about, it's the decision you're talking about. And so now we see some interesting wrestling matches going on between federal law and then states, Colorado being recent example of this, that said, well, you know, where this is an automated decision, where a score is a key component, materially influences the decision whether to admit an individual and at what price as it relates to, let's say, a security deposit amount that might be risk-related. for that kind of question, they've said, well, we think the state should have some additional laws. Colorado should have some additional laws. And it will be interesting to see how that plays out. There are clearly some preemption arguments that the federal law preempts the state. and 27, I think if you're operating in Colorado, 27 will be a time when quite possibly you'll need to provide some additional disclosures if you're using a score or certain kinds of fraud tools in the screening process. And again, is this the end of the world? No. Is it another thing to put on your checklist of how do you manage these things? You know, it's sort of, I don't know, AI trivia night on Tuesday nights at the bar. And you got to make sure that you've covered each of the trivia nights. This is this is an area. And yes, it's in Colorado and California now, but would not be surprising, 12 months from now, if we're back here again to be talking about this in a couple other states that have had their data privacy laws, but have said, hey, wait a second, this doesn't cover this use case of automated decisions, not just in REL, but in other in other situations including employment eligibility and pricing mortgage products and things like that.

Jonas BordoYeah, that's such an interesting, just trying to figure out the right path through all of that is gonna be really interesting for all of us to wrestle with as time goes by. just the, related privacy issues, everything else, it's gonna be challenging.

Jay HarrisWell, yes. I mean, some of these we thought we had pretty well under control, and then regulators, litigators wanted to do it a different way. And it does elevate the importance of a topic that a few years ago was could be delegated to the site level, let's say, or just to one certain marketing function, and maybe something to call back and say, no, we need to make some decisions about this, at a corporate level, look at this, review the contract language with our vendors in more detail. I think, you know, you and I were talking about this oh, over a year ago is related to pricing information, right? Then, we have antitrust expectations under the Sherman Act and guidance under that. So what's going on in that area, but then increasingly state and local laws that are each different and probably likely to stay around for a while and not be preempted by a uniform standard that we could all live by, but instead be a locally specific rule that you really need to handle given the potential exposure and the impact on business operations at the executive level in order to get it right.

Jonas BordoYou know, it's funny because I'm both worried and optimistic about AI's impact in this area, because on one hand, there are all of these new compliance requirements that are going to come through as a result of this. But on the other hand, I feel like AI might make it easier to comply with the existing requirements. I remember looking at compliance with a certain body of laws for business I was responsible for. And we had 55 different jurisdictions, 55 different sets of laws. It felt nearly impossible to be compliant with all of those. And I feel like now we could have fed that into AI and said, okay, what are our responsibilities here? How can we make sure that we've got the right data, that we've got the right reporting, and there's a way that we could have taken care of it that we couldn't then? So is that a cause for optimism in all of this, that it might actually make it easier to be compliant, even if the regulatory burden is going up, even if the reporting burden is going up?

Jay HarrisI think you're on this up to out of that, Jonas. I mean, we, as a as a law firm, we have found the application of AI that consistent with our professional responsibilities helps improve the tracking of state and local obligations. and I would say, not just laws and regs, but also settlements that are out there that are material that involve multiple industry providers and one to ones to watch when an industry operator or two will agree not to engage in a certain Practice that isn't clearly prohibited under the law, but as a way of settling and resolving the matter and avoiding the distractions so we can get on with the business of providing safe and affordable housing. Operator may say, yeah, this is this is nuts to fight this some more and settle out. And it's useful where you'd have a couple of providers doing that and the same plaintiff's counsel bringing these suits. It is useful to look at and see to look at that trend too, not just at the legislative agreement sort of trends. So yeah, I think there is some room for optimism in using compliance tools. Yeah, we're familiar with what we provide in the market, that not only do we have the information, but also are able to work with clients who are saying, we're really trying to operationalize this and say we've got new laws in these two states that went into their going into effect in 60 days, that they understand where they are on the workflow of implementation. So compliance management, this is sort of not new for other industries that our firm and others work with in terms of how you stay on top of compliance on a multi-state basis. But I think for rental operators, it's good to move from awareness of the law to really how are we going to operationalize this and how do we stay after a new law, a new state where they're multi-you know it affects the marketing process, it affects the billing process, it affects the what the collection process and some contractor process. So good workflow management for compliance, good compliance management system is going to help you stay after that and stay on top of it. So I think, yeah, it definitely helps. Now, I would say the other thing, though, to your point, it also helps enforcement, right? And so, yeah, we've seen situations where we talked a little bit about total price disclosures, right? And so Federal Trade Commission currently in the process, we think, of doing kind of a 180-degree turn on two years ago deciding to exclude conventional rental housing from coverage under rental fee disclosure. Short-term rental was covered, hotels were covered, but they made a balanced, economically sound decision that there's plenty of landlord tenant law out there right now already covering rental housing. We don't need to have additional fee disclosure rules. and then 30, 60 days later entered into, filed another suit, entered into a settlement. So that now we have both Invitation Homes, the Greystar settlements in this case, and we're waiting on a rule from the federal agency, from the FTC, over rental fee disclosure. And we'll see when we get that proposed rule. If you were to ask me, I say it might have been out by now, but I don't have a perfect crystal ball, obviously. But you know, it's a way of saying today to go to an ILS and look and see the properties that are disclosing total price and those that are not, it's much easier to see some of these badges and be aware of who's meeting that standard and who isn't. So we do see that this is being used by testers to make their job more efficient and enforcement counsel to make their job more efficient, not just to make compliance more efficient.

Jonas BordoThis is one of those areas where, as much as it hasn't been a great experience for our friends in the industry who've had to go through this with the FTC, I think the outcome for the consumer and honestly for the property manager is a good one because I think full disclosure just makes it easy at the finish line to get the lease signed. There's no surprises at that point, less likelihood of churn as a result of that, happier resident. people just know what they're getting into earlier on. And I don't think there was any intent to not include those things. I think it was just, people think about the high-level price, and that's it in most cases. And so I think this is good progress. But I actually want to change gears a little bit and cover a different topic for a minute, which is data. We had another guest on the podcast a couple of weeks ago, Carol Enoch, who's an owner representing about 6,000 units, and she was talking about ownership of data. And we're seeing some very different utilization of data in this AI era than we had before. And you know, it's interesting how data can kind of jump the fence now. You know, you ask a question to your AI, and all of a sudden now OpenAI has all of your data about your portfolio and about your tenants. And what's your thinking on that? How do we think about ownership of data? How do we think about data compliance, data management in this era?

Jay HarrisYeah, so it's probably another podcast under itself, but yeah, a lot to I would I've not heard Carol's remarks. I'd be interested. I'll I promise I'll go back and hear that one. but I'd be interested to hear that. But you know, so I think sometimes there can be a tension between the operator and the vendor in terms of additional uses that the vendor might have for data in the transaction. And so it's good to make sure that the owner and the vendor are on the same page about how the data is going to be used. And if the vendor is a co-controller of the data with rights to then productize it and make additional offers as a controller with comparable rights to the property manager, that happens sometimes. Certainly, vendors who have the business model, and there are a lot of good reasons for it. think they can that this helps the valuation and the opportunity the company where they have data assets as a controller, not simply as a processor of the data. But often, we will see that for many transactional services supporting VRP operations, that the vendor is simply the processor of the data who is carrying out whatever transactions that authorized, which is everything from parking services to other fulfillment, let's say, related to the lease that may be possible. So you need to understand, the operator needs to understand and make sure that you're on the same page about whether this is a traditional vendor relationship as a processor, whether there's some or co-controller right that the vendor is claiming. And if so, then how to resolve any issues come up where the consumer has to be exempted out of any marketing offers going forward or has to do the deletion of their data.

Jonas BordoYeah. How do you think about data deletion when it's been mentioned to a chatbot that just, as a matter of course, internalizes that information as part of its context going forward?

Jay HarrisSo increasingly, we are getting more, a wider set, a richer set of communications outside of just the employee context, employee to applicant, employee to consumer context. We had this before, we've had this for years with call centers and things like that. we've had this with a property website vendor or third-party ad channel that's capturing information about, tell me more about the property and even identify, help you to identify properties that fit with the criteria that the consumer has. But yeah, you're there's no question, more information is being captured on behalf of the property by a vendor that the housing provider would want to know, yeah, would want to know more information about queries about the property, where are they showing up, how does that fit into the marketing process, queries, and what kinds of questions people are asking as it comes to this property to help refine their marketing characterization and positioning. but then also, as it relates to, I want to make sure that I'm not providing to a vendor this set of proprietary data that's going to be used by my competitors, used by others in the space. There again, you know, the deletion rights at the end of the relationship, to the degree possible, at least to anonymize the this data are important. Does that get you 100% of the way? Often it doesn't. Often it is difficult to unwind this. Even if you have a local instance of the application, specific to your company, and you ask to delete the information. often anonymized learnings are kept or not protected by applicable law and may or may not be addressed in your vendor agreement. So, you know, it's important to understand if the relationship breaks out, what is the anonymized or otherwise data that's going to be left with the vendor that they continue to have rights in? So you have some of the considerations. and obviously they to the degree that there's a strategic relationship, a lot of this information is shared with the vendor, and then potentially can be shared with another competitor in the marketplace. It's important that the sanctions and the enforcement provisions are well thought through with council as well. Those are some considerations. I mean, we do see some vendors who really pay close attention to the data protection agreement and terms in the contract, and then others where basic language is a little more affricative and doesn't handle the complexities that an institutional operator might expect.

Jonas BordoThere's a lot in those complexities for sure. I always, I think in this context too, it's interesting because there are partners who the owners and operators have the ability to really create a distinct relationship with. But I always remember having to work with Craigslist back in the day, and Craigslist was incredibly important to my business as an operator, but they wouldn't return a call, they wouldn't return an email. If there was something we didn't like, there was absolutely nothing we could do about it under any circumstance. It was use the service or don't use the service. And I feel like, an open AI or an anthropic are in that same bucket. I don't know that there's anybody in our industry who has the scale to get a call back from those organizations right now. Probably isn't anyone, to be honest. And so given that, they're kind of at the mercy of whatever the policies of those organizations are and they have to just live with it.

Jay HarrisI agree with that. And I so therefore you're very careful about what you share. You know, you may ask questions rather than provide the whole agreements, for an analysis of what to do. You obviously want to agree that there are local versions with additional privacy protections rather than the standard inextensive version. You want to take the additional steps to protect yourself. But you're right. I mean, these larger institutions that are offering AI products are often on a take it or leave it agreement basis.

Jonas BordoYeah, very much. Well, a couple of quick questions for you, Jay, as we wrap up. First, I'm curious, what are the top three AI-related queries you're getting as you're talking to people, as you get clients calling you? What are the biggest topics that you're hearing about?

Jay HarrisI would say right now, one is marketing issues. So we covered before, sort of new laws that affect marketing generally. Second one goes to some of the fee disclosure laws, fee transparency, fee permissibility laws, which I think are as much how do I present this? Can I do this? And a lot of these are sort of compliance questions that are that vary at the state and local level. They're partially AI questions, but they're also really going to the basic question, can I do this? So that's the second category. I think the third go to the data rights that we talked about, as between me, the operator and the vendor, how do I show this on my privacy policy on the website? How do I handle a consumer who comes to me and says, hey, I want all my data back, give me a copy of what you have. And importantly, then how if the relationship breaks off with the vendor and I'm not going to use him any anymore, what are my rights to make sure that the proprietary data I have isn't widely shared and is you know, that I've got some protection in case that happens.

Jonas BordoThat's fantastic. Thank you. Curious from a tools perspective, what are your favorite AI tools that you're working with right now?

Jay HarrisRight now, we're using co-pilot within the firm. and then individually outside of that, I'll use Chat GPT for just little Skunkworks projects that I'll have to better track what's going on in our industry and use that for trying to make my life simpler and do that. Increasingly, I will tell you, we get clients whose initial analysis of an agreement is I ran this through generative AI tool and it said, look for this, this, and this. What else do you see here? And sometimes it's a sophisticated prompt with a lot of pointed questions, which we can add to, and other times it's kind of off the mark and not well prompted. So I do think there's probably a basic hour or two lesson for executives in the industry about how to use the tools better, how to think about not just prompting, but creating loops and other recurring approaches to leverage the technology to make life easier and improve recurring questions and recurring search terms. There's a lot we can all learn from that.

Jonas BordoI think that'd be a fantastic seminar for you guys to offer. I would love to go to that one myself because it certainly is easy and convenient to toss a contract you've just received into one of those tools and just see what the top line is on it and go from there.

Jay HarrisYeah, I've seen more product specific training on a certain tool. There's certainly anecdotal information out there on that. Some people are using Claude or some tool like that. But it I have not seen a lot of rental industry specific use cases that could be adapted and could be the a source of just doing this smarter and coming up with persona and characterizing deliverables with certain language sets to make it more readable and less AI lingo and more readable.

Jonas BordoSo yeah, absolutely. All right, last question for you. Personal use of AI. any favorite tools or projects or hacks that you found for your personal life from AI?

Jay HarrisOh, that's a good question. So it's certainly useful for travel planning. I will tell you, I'm conservative in unleashing a tool to book for me, and I've not gone down that route yet. But certainly in travel planning, figuring out time of year to visit different places, preparing to pack, preparing a rough outline of places to go on a certain trip and itinerary, that's in one helpful area. So I think that's probably the personal use I like most. I don't know. I don't know. What about you?

Jonas BordoWell, I've definitely done that. My son and I had a great weekend in Los Angeles a couple of months ago now, I guess. The entire thing was planned by AI, which was just fantastic. And really, like, plotted out travel times between things and what the best mode of transportation was, and helped us find things to do. And it was really quite elegant. My favorite one right now is actually I was looking for a book on my bookshelf yesterday, and I knew it was there, could not find it, took a picture of the bookshelf, gave it to Claude and said, Where is this book? And it was like third shelf from the left, about seven books in. I was like, wow. Impressive fantastic. That made my evening, I have to say.

Jay HarrisYeah, the image detection, image detection combined with just synthesizing the information. Yeah, it's remarkable.

Jonas BordoYeah, it's just it's amazing. some of these things are seemingly magical. Well, Jay, it's been such a pleasure to have you on the podcast. Thank you again for coming on. really appreciated the conversation.

Jay HarrisJonas, this has been wonderful. Thanks for having me. Look forward to staying in touch on this.

Jonas BordoHow can people get in touch with you, Jay?

Jay HarrisSo I'm in our Washington, D.C. office with Hudson Cook. Hudson Cook's a national law firm, but my profile is there on the website under HudsonCook.com. And happy to talk to people. I run our residential property management practice, so our focus is entirely on operations issues for multifamily and single family operators. So happy to talk to people about this. I'll be out at the OpTech conference coming up here in a few weeks. So good chance to talk some more about these issues with a lot of thoughtful opinion leaders in the space.

Jonas BordoFantastic. Well, again, thank you, Jay. Really appreciate you coming on the podcast.

Jay HarrisThanks, Jonas. My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Jonas BordoThat's Net Effective, new episodes weekly. If you're running rentals and figuring out AI, hit like, subscribe, follow, or whatever your app makes you do to get more of the show. And if you'd like to come on as a guest or subscribe to the weekly updates, go to neteffective.show. I'm Jonas Bordo. Thanks for listening.