Two days before this recording, Gita Faust got a call that's become routine for her. An investor with mixed self-storage units, pulling in roughly $100,000 in rental income, needed their books reconciled, fast. Gita asked for the fundamentals: prior-year tax returns by property, depreciation schedules, K-1s, bank statements, credit card statements, loan statements. The investor didn't have any of it. Nobody had ever downloaded it. The assumption, as always, was that the bookkeeper was handling it.
Gita calls this group "DIYers," not because they lack help, but because the help they have, whether it's themselves, a family member, or an under-resourced bookkeeper, never actually closes the loop between raw statements and usable numbers. The information exists somewhere. It just never gets pulled together into anything an owner can trust.
Short-term rentals complicate the picture further. A platform like Airbnb hands an owner one lump payout, and most people record that number and move on. Gita's point is that the lump sum isn't the real gross rent; it has to be broken down by income category before anyone actually knows what they earned versus what they were paid.
There's a second, quieter failure point buried inside property management software itself. When tenants are responsible for entering their own payment details, they can remove or swap a bank account whenever they want, sometimes because an account is overdrawn, sometimes because they've simply decided to stop paying. If nobody is actively monitoring the notifications that flag this, the gap goes unnoticed. Budgets stop matching actuals. Rent rolls stop matching actuals. And any forecast built on top of that data is wrong before it's finished.
So where does AI fit in? Gita doesn't hedge: it's a real tool, capable of collecting, categorizing, and summarizing transaction data faster than any person could. What it can't do is make a judgment call, whether a cost is billable to a tenant, which unit a repair belongs to, decisions that start as far back as the repair order itself. That responsibility stays human.
Her advice for measuring whether a portfolio is actually working boils down to one uncomfortable question, one she'd put in the headline if she had the chance: "The rent is coming. Do you know how much you're keeping?"
