AI Agents Are Shopping for Apartments

In 2023 Bill Gates said the biggest prize in AI would be the personal agent. "Whoever wins the personal agent, that's the big thing, because you will never go to a search site again, you will never go to a productivity site, you'll never go to Amazon again," he said at a Goldman Sachs and SV Angel event, as reported by CNBC.

Three years later, those agents are here, and they're shopping for apartments. Most property websites have no idea they're being visited by one.

Agents now browse for renters

On September 8, Meta introduced Muse, a personal AI agent that runs on its own secure computer with its own browser and works across the apps people already use. It doesn't just answer questions. It does the work.

That matters for every leasing team. An agent like Muse opens your site in a real browser, reads it, and tries to act on it. Muse doesn't always announce itself as an agent, and robots.txt won't reliably keep it out. If your pricing is hidden behind a form, or your tour booking only works for a person clicking around, the agent moves on to a property it can use.

Muse is the first agent of this kind built for billions of people. It won't be the last.

AI is spreading faster than phones did

Cloudflare sees a large share of the web's traffic, so its data is a good view of what's changing. In its July 2026 report on the agentic internet, Cloudflare found:

• Over 30% of humanity, about 2.5 billion people, now uses generative AI regularly.
• That adoption took 3.5 years, more than twice the speed of smartphones.
• Publishers are seeing referral traffic from traditional search decline quickly as people get answers from AI instead.

Cloudflare Radar tracks AI crawler and agent traffic week by week. Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and Meta now send a steady stream of requests to sites like yours. Most property websites can't give them anything useful to read.

Why I care about this industry

From 2012 to 2014 I was Vice President at RealPage. I led M&A diligence, product innovation, and growth across more than 50 real estate software products. Deals I worked on included Level One, Compliance Depot, MyNewPlace, ActiveBuilding, and Kigo.

That job showed me how property management really runs. The whole system was designed around friction: call during office hours, fill out the form, wait for a leasing agent, ask for the real price, come in for a tour. Every step assumed a human on both sides of the conversation.

That assumption is breaking now, in front of our eyes.

Investors are already pricing this in

On September 29, EliseAI raised $350 million at a $4 billion valuation, led by Andreessen Horowitz and Bessemer Venture Partners. According to EliseAI, its AI now runs on 6.5 million units, about 1 in 5 multifamily apartments in the US, and the company is past $200 million in annual recurring revenue.

That is the operator side of the shift: AI answering leads, scheduling tours, and handling renewals. The renter side is now catching up. When an agent is asking the questions and an AI is answering them, the leasing experience stops being human to human. It becomes agent to agent, with people stepping in for the decisions that matter.

Every property website now has five audiences

1. Renters on phones, comparing homes. They need pricing, floor plans, and a way to book a tour.
2. Search engines deciding who ranks for "apartments near me". They need crawlable pages with real titles and local relevance.
3. Ad platforms grading your landing page on every click. Slow, vague pages cost more per lead.
4. AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity. They need structured property facts they can cite, or they name someone else.
5. AI agents that shop and book for renters. They need inventory and actions they can read and use.

Most property sites serve one of the five well. That gap is the opportunity, and it's why I invested in Multisites.

Why I invested in Multisites

That's the problem I kept coming back to, and it's why I backed Multisites.ai through Outperform Ventures. It builds apartment and property websites that work for every audience that now decides who gets the lease: renters, search engines, ad platforms, AI answer engines, and the AI agents that shop and book on a renter's behalf.

Most property websites were built for one of those five. The other four are arriving fast, and the operators who adjust first will fill units the rest never hear about.

Multisites builds property websites that work for all five audiences at once: fast pages renters like, structure search engines can read, landing pages ad platforms grade well, facts AI answer engines can cite, and inventory and booking an agent can actually use.

You can start with a free scan. Paste your property's web address at multisites.ai and in about a minute you'll see what your site shows each audience today.

Where this fits in my work

Multisites joins the rest of my work at Outperform Ventures. If you want the background on why I back companies this way, read why Outperform Ventures exists. For how I think about where software is heading, start with Business, and for what changes about the org chart, read my latest articles.

Where the industry is headed

My view: within a few years, a large share of apartment searches will start with an agent instead of a search box. The renter says what they want, and the agent comes back with a shortlist, real prices and a booked tour.

When that happens, the properties that win won't be the ones with the prettiest photos. They'll be the ones whose facts are easiest to read and whose actions are easiest to take. Hidden pricing, office-hour phone lines and contact-us forms will read to an agent as a dead end.

Operators already use AI to answer leads. Renters are starting to use AI to ask the questions. The middle, where a person waits on hold or refreshes an inbox, is the part that goes away.

If you run apartments, scan your site today. The renters are already sending their agents.