A few weeks ago I wrote about a strange pitch showing up in property managers’ inboxes: data brokers offering six and seven figures for your company’s operational data. (Here’s the original article.) The replies came in fast, and one of them stuck with me long enough that I wrote a follow-up.
A quick recap: who’s buying, and what they want
Companies like micro1, Polyshares, and Mode want the record of how work gets done inside your business: SOPs, knowledge bases, CRM history, Slack, email, support tickets, call recordings. They anonymize it and sell it to the frontier AI labs, which use it to build training environments where agents practice real jobs.
The money is getting serious. In October, micro1 announced it will spend $1 billion over the next 12 months buying “enterprise operational data.” Four days later, Mode launched a “$5 billion” version. Some of these offers come with a 48-hour deadline attached.
My conclusion the first time around: you probably shouldn’t do it. Data ownership is muddy for us as agents, we owe our principals confidentiality, and a data sale could complicate things if you sell your PM company in the next couple of years.
The question Natalie asked
Natalie had received about five of these pitches. Her worry: if we hand over our SOPs, playbooks, and years of institutional knowledge, aren’t we selling our businesses to AI companies so they can figure out how to automate what we do? And once that work is automated and widely available, doesn’t it get devalued and commoditized?
She closed with the other possibility. Maybe this is going to happen anyway, so we might as well get paid for our knowledge while we can.
I think that’s a great insight and the right way to frame the decision. Unfortunately, I think her second instinct is correct.
Your data won’t be worth more later
I’ve seen several takes online that boil down to: “Don’t sell your data. It will be worth more to you later than you’d get paid for it today.”
Wrong. The idea that your company’s business process data will gain value over time, and that you’ll do a better job exploiting it than Anthropic, Google, or ChatGPT, is laughable. The data is valuable to them because they’ll use it to train frontier AI models that complete business tasks for millions of companies. What are you going to do with it?
There’s a timing problem too. As I wrote in the original piece, this is probably a short window. Once the models have enough information about how property management companies operate, the labs won’t need much more data. Waiting doesn’t improve your position.
Holding out won’t stop it
Several property management companies will almost certainly sell. That means the labs will get access to PM workflows and business processes regardless of what you decide. Keeping your own data off the market protects your principals, and that counts for a lot. It won’t keep the industry’s playbook out of the models.
The caveat hasn’t changed
None of this is a green light. If you go down this road, you need a way to do it that complies with your fiduciary duty and doesn’t violate privacy laws or other restrictions on what you can do with business data. Everything in my first article still holds, and I still don’t recommend most of you do this.
Before you answer one of these pitches, work through the basics:
- Ownership. We act on behalf of our principals. Does the data belong to them? There’s no clear legal guidance yet, and tenant screening data is off the table.
- Fiduciary duty. Remember OLD CAR: Obedience, Loyalty, Confidentiality, Accounting, and Reasonable Care. Anonymization has open questions.
- Your exit plans. If you might sell your company in the next few years, a buyer will want to know about any data sale.
- The exploding offer. A cold pitch with a 48-hour deadline deserves suspicion.
What this could mean for property management
I don’t know what the labs will do with PM data. I can see it going two ways.
The first: it gets easier for self-managing landlords to manage their own properties, which is what Natalie is worried about. Not what we want to see. But if it’s going to happen, withholding your data won’t stop it.
The second: we get better at building tools for ourselves, and companies like Claude and ChatGPT create much better automations and workflows for us to use in our companies. That sounds great. It also means AI-pilled companies (like most of you reading this) will be in the best position to take advantage of what these tools can do next.
This is not legal advice. Talk to your attorney before you sign anything.
Adapted from Tuesday Edition #41 of my newsletter. I write a no-fluff briefing for the property management industry twice a week. Subscribe here.