TL;DR
Letting agents across Britain report a surge in lengthy, legally-worded complaints that tenants have drafted with AI assistance, some citing housing provisions that never reached the statute book. Propertymark says responding to them is straining agents and landlords. One senior figure wants the Property Ombudsman to require complainants to declare when a submission was AI-assisted.
From a phone call to a legal document
The change is one of form as much as volume. Greg Tsuman, lettings managing director at Martyn Gerrard and a former ARLA Propertymark president, estimates that nine in ten complaints now arrive as emails running to several pages, frequently containing multiple separate grievances and quoted passages of legislation. Two or three years ago, most of these matters were settled in a short conversation.
His objection is not that tenants are better armed. It is that the drafting tool flatters them. A model inclined to agree with its user can persuade someone that grounds for complaint exist where they do not, producing what he describes as a spike in intricate submissions that sometimes have no merit at all.
Ben Stokes, a lettings director who is also ARLA Propertymark’s president-elect, has seen a specific failure mode: complaints built on earlier drafts of housing legislation. Provisions proposed during the passage of what became the Renters’ Rights Act, but dropped before it passed, are being cited by tenants as though they were in force. His summary is that these tools are encouraging people to escalate minor issues out of all proportion.
Both sides are now automating
Agents have not responded by hiring. Propertymark notes that firms were already applying AI to administrative work to hold down labour costs, and Martyn Gerrard now runs incoming complaints through a model to summarise them before a human drafts the reply. Tsuman is explicit that the machine does the reading, not the answering, with a defined route from branch to department head to compliance.
Shelter’s position complicates any temptation to treat this as tenants behaving badly. Chief executive Sarah Elliott points out that renters campaigned for these protections and need to understand how to use them — while the charity’s advisers have encountered chatbots making false, incomplete or misleading claims about what the Act actually changed. It steers people towards fact-checked sources such as Gov.uk or its own guidance.
Looking forward
The proposed remedy — declaring AI assistance to the ombudsman — would be simple to state and awkward to police, since nothing distinguishes an AI-drafted paragraph from a well-written one once submitted.
The pattern is spreading faster than any of the sector bodies can respond to it. We reported yesterday on employers being warned about AI-drafted grievances ahead of the 2027 employment rules, and the mechanics are identical: a free tool produces confident, statute-citing prose, and the recipient carries the cost of establishing whether it is right. Complaint systems built for plain-language disputes are now processing legal briefs, and the professional judgement needed to answer them has not scaled to match.