Using AI to Explore What Landlords Care about in Promoting Housing Stability

Background/Purpose: In the U.S., approximately 35% of people live in rental housing, with the majority of rental properties owned by individual investors. These landlords play a dominant role in housing management decisions, such as selecting tenants, setting rent prices, and initiating evictions. Despite this, most research on housing stability, eviction, and tenant rights focuses on tenants—the demand side of the rental market—while giving limited attention to landlords, who represent the supply side. To fully understand the dynamics of the rental market, it is crucial to consider landlords’ concerns and perspectives. Doing so may also reveal shared goals between landlords and tenants that could inform policies promoting housing stability. This study aims to explore the most common topics landlords raise in housing-related discussions and examine how these topics vary over time and across states.

Methods: This study collected data from the subreddit r/Landlord, which has 173,000 members and ranks in the top 1% of Reddit communities by member size. After excluding empty posts and those submitted by tenants, the final sample included 20,826 posts from 2008 to 2023. We applied advanced AI methods—such as large language models (e.g., ChatGPT)—to create an automated pipeline that extracts location data and summarizes short-term topics from posts. We then used unsupervised machine learning (i.e., cluster analysis) to group the AI-generated summaries into broader topic categories. This allowed us to analyze topic trends over time and across U.S. states. Human reviewers were also actively involved, verifying the accuracy of the AI-extracted and summarized information using a random sample of posts.

Results: AI achieved 98% accuracy in extracting locations and 90% accuracy in summarizing topics, as validated by human reviewers. The top five topics most frequently discussed by landlords were: Leasing & Tenant Agreements, Eviction Processes, Property Maintenance & Repairs, Communication & Conflict Resolution, and Tenant Screening & Selection. Most posts came from California, New York, Texas, and New Jersey, and the distribution of topics varied across these states. For example, 25% of posts from New York discussed Eviction Processes, a higher rate than in other states. In Texas, 15% of landlord posts focused on Property Maintenance & Repairs, compared to about 10% in other states. Over time, Leasing & Tenant Agreements emerged as the dominant topic, with noticeable peaks in 2016 and 2022. Eviction Processes began to rise in 2019 and briefly became the most discussed topic in 2021, during the nationwide eviction moratorium.

Conclusions/Implications: This study introduces an innovative method using AI to analyze unstructured, text-heavy data for information extraction and summarization. Findings reveal landlords’ key concerns, including lease clauses, maintenance costs, and challenges in identifying responsible tenants. The topic of Communication & Conflict Resolution highlights shared goals with tenants, as many landlords seek to resolve disputes but lack the skills. These insights can inform balanced interventions—such as training in property management and conflict resolution—while also helping tenants understand their rights, ultimately promoting a more stable and sustainable rental market.