AI for landlords under 10 units: six prompts and nine tools priced

How do you write a rental listing with AI without a fair housing problem?

A rental listing written by AI needs the same check as one written by you, because the Fair Housing Act judges the words, whoever typed them. HUD's page on the Act says: "The Fair Housing Act prohibits discrimination in housing because of: Race, Color, National Origin, Religion, Sex, Familial Status, Disability", and the statute itself, 42 U.S.C. 3604(c), makes it unlawful to publish any advertisement "that indicates any preference, limitation, or discrimination" on those grounds. The prompt below writes the listing and runs that check in the same turn.

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Write a rental listing for the unit below, under 180 words, for Zillow and Facebook Marketplace. Describe the unit and the terms only. Do not describe the ideal tenant, the neighbours, the local schools, churches or any group of people.

Unit: [BEDROOMS, BATHROOMS, SQUARE FEET, FLOOR, PARKING, LAUNDRY, HEATING]

Rent and terms: $[RENT] a month, $[DEPOSIT] deposit, [LEASE LENGTH], available [DATE], utilities [INCLUDED OR NOT]

Pets: [POLICY]

Nearby: [TRANSIT STOP, GROCERY, PARK, WITH DISTANCES]

Then check your own draft against the US Fair Housing Act. List every word or phrase that states or implies a preference or limitation based on race, color, national origin, religion, sex, familial status or disability, including "no children", "perfect for singles or young professionals", "Christian home", "no wheelchairs", "English speakers only", "no pets, no exceptions" (assistance animals are not pets), and "safe" or "exclusive" used to describe the people in an area. Rewrite each one and show the before and after.

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The complaint counts are why the pets line is the first thing to fix. The National Fair Housing Alliance's 2025 Fair Housing Trends Report (published 4 November 2025) counts 32,321 complaints in 2024, 27,007 of them (83.56%) in the rental market, and 108 filed specifically over discriminatory advertising. Disability led every other basis by more than three to one, and an assistance animal request refused with "no pets" is a disability complaint, not a pet dispute. The second thing to fix is the phrase listings reach for on their own: "perfect for young professionals" describes the tenant rather than the unit and touches familial status, which is why the prompt bans describing the ideal tenant before the model starts.

The prompt's check is a word filter, not an opinion, and the federal seven are the floor. Your state or city can add classes: the same NFHA report describes a Second Circuit decision against New York City building owners whose minimum income policies excluded renters with rental subsidies, brought as source of income discrimination under city law and disability disparate impact under the Fair Housing Act. Paste your state's and city's list into the prompt above, and treat any phrase the model flags as a phrase to remove rather than to argue with.

What does landlord software cost against a chat subscription?

Landlord software for a one to ten unit landlord costs $0 to $69 a month as of September 2026, and a chat subscription costs $17 to $20, and the two are not substitutes: the software moves money and signatures, the chat writes. We read nine landlord products' pricing pages on 27 September 2026. Five name an AI feature. For a landlord under ten units, only TurboTenant's is free; the other four sit behind $20 to $149 a month or a 25 unit minimum. About 70 percent of US rental properties are owned by individual investors and 46 percent of rental units sit in one to four unit buildings (2021 Rental Housing Finance Survey, HUD and the Census Bureau), so the table is priced for that landlord: US dollars, monthly, one to ten units, from the vendor's own page on that date.

Where a chat subscription loses: none of ChatGPT, Claude or Whizi collects rent, runs a tenant screening report or signs a lease, and TurboTenant's free plan and Baselane's Core plan both do the first at $0. Where the landlord software loses: its AI writes one thing (a listing, a transaction tag, a lease audit) and cannot be handed a tenant's email, a bank CSV and a lease clause in the same conversation. Under ten units the pattern that fits is a free landlord tool for the money and one chat subscription for the words, which is $0 to $20 a month in total, against $69 to $149 before DoorLoop's AI Assistant is even priced.

On Whizi the writing seat is $15.99 a month on Starter ($10.99 billed yearly) with GPT and Claude Haiku, or $29.99 on Pro ($19.99 yearly) if you want Claude Sonnet and Gemini in the same seat, and a project pins your lease, house rules and fee clause as up to 10 files of 10 MB each, so every tenant reply starts from them. Whizi has no rent collection, no screening and no e-signature, the same three holes as ChatGPT and Claude.

Can AI write a late rent notice?

Yes, AI can write a late rent notice, and the part it must not write is the legal one: the day the fee starts, its size and the eviction notice are set by your lease and your state, so you give the model those numbers and it gives you the words. Texas is the cleanest example. Property Code 92.019 lets a landlord collect a late fee only if "notice of the fee is included in a written lease", the fee is reasonable, and "any portion of the tenant's rent has remained unpaid two full days after the date the rent was originally due". It then presumes a fee reasonable at "12 percent of the amount of rent for the rental period" in a structure of four units or fewer and 10 percent above four, as amended in 2019. The statute's own arithmetic on $1,500 rent in a four-unit building is $180, and the clock starts after two full days; your lease and your county may add rules.

So the reminder sequence is three messages the model writes and one form it does not.

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Write three messages to a tenant whose rent of $[RENT] was due on [DATE]. Use only these facts. Lease late fee clause, quoted: "[CLAUSE]". State: [STATE].

1. The day after the due date: a two sentence text, friendly, asking whether the payment is on its way and naming the date the late fee starts under the clause.
2. The day the fee starts: an email under 120 words that quotes the clause, states the fee amount, gives the new total and the ways to pay, and asks for a reply by [DATE].
3. Seven days late: a letter under 200 words that lists the two earlier contacts by date, states the amount owed, and says the next step is the formal notice my state requires. Do not draft that notice and do not name a statute.

Plain, calm, no threats, no legal claims.

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The formal notice (notice to pay or quit, notice to vacate, the name changes by state) is a statutory document with its own delivery rules and waiting period, and a model that guesses the form gets the clock wrong. Take it from your state court's self-help pages or a local landlord association, and keep the three messages above as the record that you asked plainly first. The model writes the reminder. Your state writes the notice.

Can ChatGPT review a lease for a landlord?

For a landlord, ChatGPT reviews a lease the way it does for a tenant: it finds and quotes what is on the page and cannot tell you what your state allows. In the ContractEval benchmark (August 2025, 102 real contracts) the best GPT model scored 0.64 out of 1.0 at locating the clause that answers a question; the numbers and a five state deposit table are on can ChatGPT review a lease. What the landlord side adds is the check for what is missing, because a missing clause costs you a remedy: in Texas a late fee never written into the lease is a fee you may not collect, under 92.019(a)(1).

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Read the attached residential lease. I am the landlord, in [STATE, CITY], renting a [UNIT TYPE]. Do not tell me whether it is enforceable.

1. List every clause that sets an amount, a date, a deadline or a notice period, quoted word for word with its section number.
2. List anything a landlord's lease usually carries that this one does not: late fee terms, deposit amount and return timing, entry notice, maintenance responsibilities, pet and assistance animal terms, subletting, renewal and notice to end, and who pays which utilities.
3. List the clauses whose legality depends on my state, as questions to check, with the plain name of the rule to look up.
4. Flag any two clauses that contradict each other.

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What needs a lawyer or your state's own form: the deposit cap and return deadline, the disclosures your state requires, anything about ending a tenancy, and any clause you expect to enforce in court. TurboTenant says its "free Lease Agreement Audit tool powered by AI analyzes your lease for legal compliance within 15 seconds!", and a state check in 15 seconds is a screen, not an opinion; its output goes on the same list of questions as the model's. This page and both sibling pages are shared experience and primary sources, not legal advice, and the $660 a lawyer charges to read a lease (the average flat fee ContractsCounsel lists, per the sibling) buys the opinion once for a lease you will reuse for years.

How do you use AI for maintenance requests and expense summaries?

The maintenance job AI does well is the first ten minutes: turning a tenant's text into a severity call, the three questions to ask back, a reply, and the message to the tradesperson, before you decide whether the plumber comes tonight or Monday.

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A tenant sent this message about [ADDRESS]: "[PASTE MESSAGE]".

1. Classify it: emergency (no heat, no water, active leak, no power, lockout, gas smell, sewage), urgent (within 48 hours) or routine, and say why in one line.
2. List the three questions to ask the tenant to confirm, and one thing they can safely do now (shut a valve, flip a breaker, open a window).
3. Write my reply under 80 words: acknowledge, say when someone will come, ask the three questions, give my number as [NUMBER].
4. Write the message to the tradesperson under 60 words with the address, the problem, the access window and the tenant's number as [TENANT NUMBER].

Use only these facts.

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Classify by consequence and log the date of the tenant's first written message, because the repair statutes tenants use start their clocks at that notice. The tenant side of this page, a repair letter to your landlord, reads six of those statutes: Washington gives a landlord 24 hours to start work with no heat, water or electricity, Texas presumes seven days reasonable, California 30. Reading the letter your tenant's AI will write is the fastest way to see which of your replies count.

For expense summaries, export the year's transactions from the rental bank account as a CSV, delete the account number column, upload it and ask for totals by property in the lines of IRS Schedule E, the form that reports "income or loss from rental real estate". Baselane and Stessa do this continuously, and Baselane's Smart plan tags each transaction with AI for $20 a month; a chat does it once a quarter for the price you already pay.

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Attached is a CSV of my rental bank account for [YEAR], account numbers removed. Properties: [ADDRESS A], [ADDRESS B].

1. Total income and expenses per property, with expenses grouped into the Schedule E lines: advertising, cleaning and maintenance, insurance, legal and professional fees, management fees, mortgage interest, repairs, supplies, taxes, utilities, other.
2. List every transaction you could not place, with its description, so I can tag it.
3. Flag any month where rent for a property did not arrive, and any vendor paid more than three times.

Show the totals as a table and do not estimate anything.

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Keep tenant Social Security numbers, bank account numbers and application files out of every prompt. The never list applies twice to a landlord, because the data is someone else's. The rule the table leaves you with: below ten units, the money and the signatures go through a free landlord tool, the words go through one chat subscription, and the first $660 you save goes to a lawyer reading the lease once.