Move-in Checklist for Tenants in the Digital Age

Co-authored by Mayu Tobin-Miyaji and Jasmine Omeke

Are you or someone you know moving into a new apartment?

Are you concerned about surveillance technology in real estate?

Do you live in a rent-controlled apartment, but are concerned about getting pushed out?

Did you know there are 2000+ companies that sell tech solutions for properties and receive over $31.6 billion in investments? More than half of them focus on the residential property space.

Here’s our guide to navigate these concerns

The real estate industry was materially impacted during covid-19, changing the habits of renters and landlords alike. Simultaneously, the industry has new tech companies within the field, revolutionizing how property management is conducted. The impact of this is rather complex, and technology is gaining the potential to provide increased convenience while also potentially enabling behaviors that are not renter friendly, exacerbating their toll on renters. As the field rapidly changes with new startups that automate monthly rent payments to those introducing virtual real estate agents, tenants’ rights are worthwhile discussing. From key fobs for entry to facial recognition, these new technologies are collecting vast amounts of data and make the very trust driven industry (between tenants and landlords) faceless, putting tenants’ futures at the whims of technologies that may replicate current biases in the space.

Understanding this issue, that’s where we’ve come in, creating a comprehensive pocket guide to help tenants understand the sights and sounds of landlord tech. Additionally, we give them a set of questions and prompts to guide them as they interact with landlords while inquiring about real estate technologies they may spot at different parts of the rental funnel: move in, residence, and move out.

We made a guide to help tenants speak up or find help when they feel uncomfortable with the usage of technology. Keep reading to learn more about how we created this resource.

Pocket Guide Designed by Melissa Higareda

[Click here to view the content as a pdf with a screen reader]

Below, we’ll discuss how we developed this as part of the Impact Labs’ fellowship and give stats and figures about the growing momentum in the residential property tech space.

Approaching the intersection of housing and technology

As part of 2021 Impact Labs Code for Equity fellowship, which took place virtually during the covid-19 pandemic, we took a look at how technology intersects the urban planning space and who the technology benefits. After months of research and interviews, we created a pamphlet focused on giving renters a greater awareness of technology that helps landlords manage properties. In this resource, we describe the types of technology, their potential to harm, and outline what renters can do to understand the role of technology at their residence and determine if they need to act to protect their rights.

The primary ask for the Code for Equity fellowship was to understand and work on contemporary issues caused by technology, which can be exclusionary, discriminatory, or harmful in some cases. As a team, we chose the broad space of urban planning and housing, and started off with three key pillars:

• A desire to focus on community organizations
• The treatment of housing as a human right
• The aim to create a final deliverable that provides resources for at-risk communities

As we got started on our research, we first looked at social determinants of health, the rise of smart cities, and whether increased data collection can improve quality of life. As we delved deeper into what data already exists within the realm of housing, we discovered that there was a lack of consistent and transparent data around evictions and housing stability across the United States.

We found four major reasons for this problem:

• Some states have eviction data at the county level that makes it hard for cities to access.
• Some states seal eviction court details.
• The data that gets recorded is not consistent across states.
• Informal evictions occur without records.

An informal eviction can happen when a landlord threatens the renter with eviction without a formal eviction notice. The renter may vacate the property without fighting this form of eviction for many reasons. They may lack legal help or be afraid of the eviction court case being added to their record. Other factors such as immigration status or a language barrier may also contribute to a renter deciding to vacate without due process.

With the urgency of that the pandemic added on to the issues of evictions and the power imbalance that renters often face, we noticed a pattern of technology being increasingly influential in the case of eviction and gentrification and often unevenly accessed between landlords and tenants. As a result, we dove deeper into the causes of eviction related to technology. Looking to learn from those in the field, we interviewed urban planners and anti-eviction champions across the country. We appreciate their time in answering all of our questions and sharing their knowledge with us.

One of our interviewees brought our attention to the Landlord Tech Watch website created by the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project. This initiative helped us put a name on the technology that is used by landlords to screen, surveil, and wield control over tenants: Landlord technology (also called real estate technology, PropTech or ReTech).

What is Landlord Tech?

Landlord Tech consists of technical products and platforms that have facilitated real estate processes in novel ways, from the ways tenants enter buildings (key fobs, biometric entry, smart locks, etc) to the way they pay rent or seek out amenities. This technology focus area has gained quite a bit of traction since 2008 and is continuing to grow.

Given the relative new state of this industry, it is difficult to comprehensively quantify its scope, reach, and how pervasive it is employed by different types of entities in the real estate space. In our research, we focused on the United States, examining primary and secondary resources that highlight the industry’s reach from different vantage points.

In 2021, 2234 (and counting) PropTech companies operate in the United States. In 2019, Unissu, an organization focused on PropTech research, estimated that 60.4% of them focused on the residential sector, 49.84% focused on the commercial sector, and 11.5% focused on retail. In terms of the property lifecycle, property management is a dominant focus area, outpacing selling and building. About half of these companies target other businesses while 44.4% target the B2C market. 5.92% focus on both.

Drilling further into the B2B market, it is not straightforward to discern if these companies heavily target large real estate corporations or mom-and-pop entities, a statistic that would be very relevant to a potential tenant. As a way to obtain this data, the Landlord Tech Watch crowdsources data directly from tenants in an attempt to quantify this information.

IMAGE: LANDLORD TECH WATCH

Through the use of these technologies, landlords are gaining power through the increasing ability to leverage data, surveillance, and insights to understand their properties, select tenants, and even potentially expedite eviction.

After reading through the work of the Landlord Tech Watch and speaking with Wonyoung So, an MIT researcher who worked with Anti-Eviction Mapping Project [check out their map that visualizes tenants’ reports of landlords using tech to exert increasing power over tenants], we reflected on the fact that many technology products that are touted as perks or safety measures to some tenants and landlords can actually be used at the same time to push out tenants, allowing landlords to exert increased control over who lives in the building and potentially speed up gentrification for higher profit.

The most illustrative way to understand these technologies is to understand how they have impacted tenants across the country:

• Tenants living in the Atlantic Plaza Towers, a rent stabilized building in Brooklyn, NY, came together to fight the installment of facial recognition technology in their building. They were successful in their fight, but many tenants across the country do not have the same resources or awareness to fight such changes. The video surveillance industry is poised to be a $109.62 billion industry by 2027, and it is estimated that 4.6 million new rental units are needed in the United States by 2030. Some states and local municipalities have enacted regulations on facial recognition and biometric data collection, but as a country, we lack cohesive and comprehensive set of regulations in this area to protect tenants. In another Brooklyn apartment complex, the Fort Greene Brownstone Commune, tenants also fought against surveillance, coordinated tenant lockouts, and harassment from their landlord.
• In May 2019, a group of tenants won a settlement after voicing concerns about their landlord requiring them to use a key fob system. The judge ordered that the landlord provide physical keys to any tenants was not comfortable using smart locks. Key Fobs system records may store the time a tenants leaves and accesses he entrance, giving landlords an idea when you and your family are at home or not. A few years after this case, in May of 2021, the New York City Council passed a bill to require “owners of multiple dwellings that utilize keyless entry systems, including but not limited to key fobs, biometric identifiers and electronic technologies, to provide tenants with a data retention and privacy policy.” If the mayor of New York City signs this, it would be enacted starting June 21, 2021.
• Landlord tech also can negatively impact employees at residential complexes. Employees at an Illinois apartment complex are suing a landlord who used biometric data without previous consent to track their work shifts. The collection of this data, in this case fingerprints, violated the stipulations of the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), enacted in 2008.
• While it is understood that facial recognition technology is less accurate at identifying individuals with darker pigmentations, surveillance tools like Clearview are being used by big box retailers, the FBI and ICE. Detroit’s roll out of an extensive surveillance campaign in 2016 serves as one example of the usage of surveillance technology despite its shortcomings and a lack of a comprehensive acceptable use policy. This program installed thousands of cameras stationed at apartment buildings, schools, churches and other communal areas despite outcry from residents.
• A smart intercom company boasted that it could help New York landlords destabilize and evict tenants. Additionally, Smart home systems give access to tenants’ Wi-FI, electricity, and heat usage rates, potentially empowering the landlord to harass specific tenants to lower rates.

These examples above only hit the surface of the issue, but highlight how private and public actors are mobilizing to act in favor of or against tenants rights.

How we developed this deliverable

In approaching this topic, we found that there is not a single, cohesive source that alerts tenants about the role of landlord tech at various parts of the rental process. To create a deliverable, we first identified the three parts of the rental funnel relevant to renters: move in, residence, and move out.

We then researched tenants’ rights at each part of the funnel, paying particular attention to the types of questions tenants can ask landlords to establish the baseline for how their data is being collected. We also looked to the websites of tenant boards and legal firms which outline what burdens of proof a tenant would need to make in order to protect their privacy. We also took time to think about our target audience: those living in subsidized and market rate housing. In order to make the guide general purpose, targeting both audiences, we chose to leave off pointed legal advice, which could vary state by state.

To speak to both audiences, we chose to have a general checklist of what to look for when renting, such as surveillance, key fobs, etc. We also create two scenarios for the tenant in subsidized and market rate housing, outlining how they approach situations that make them wonder if their data is being used in a way they don’t intend. We interweave prompts to help the reader of the guide understand how they can use the scenarios to advocate for themselves by asking questions of the landlords or to current tenants.

After identifying our audience and outline of the guide, we chose to create it as a pamphlet that could be easily disseminated by community organizations. We also chose to make it editable in case they’d like to custom tailor it to their community or translate it into another language.

Thanks for learning about our journey to creating this resource.