API Summit: Tech & AI That Make Residential Investable

• Tech stacks cut leasing, onboarding and approvals from weeks to minutes, unlocking scale without hiring sprees.
• Data-driven valuations and yields beat guesswork, guiding Airbnb vs long-term calls and matching buyers to finance and agents.
• Tenant fraud detection and rent guarantees de-risk cash flow for landlords while tenants get simpler, mobile-first onboarding and support.

Introduction

The annual API Summit hosted at Westin Grand on Thursday and Friday highlighted some of the best of Protech in South Africa.  
Residential Protech was one of the focus points, with co-living and student housing aren’t hard to love because of solid returns; however, they’re hard to operationalise.

At the API Summit panel on “Tech & AI Protech in Residential Property,” four operators showed how smarter stacks are stripping out friction, compressing timelines and turning operational discipline into investable returns.

The message was blunt: stop digitising old paper processes and rebuild the rail.

City Property - Carlien Storm: Co-living that runs on rails

What it is: City Property’s YETU co-living project combines smart design with a fully digital tenant journey.
Where the tech works: A browser-based tenant profile handles applications, approvals, access control, payments, utilities, rewards and comms. No clipboards, no paper.
Why it matters: Fast, traceable onboarding drove rapid leasing and early collections stability. Crucially, adoption wasn’t a luxury-market perk, affordable tenants embraced it (near-universal uptake of digital payments), proving great UX is not income-band dependent.
Plain English: One login. Everything in one place. Speed and transparency for tenants; fewer touches and cleaner data for managers.

Proply - Wesley Roos: From “nice area” to numbers that bank

What it is: A valuation and decisioning layer (“Deal Score”) that turns address-level data into valuation, yield and growth views—long-term vs short-stay included.
Where the tech works: AI as an inference layer fills gaps while integrations supply verified data (AVMs, market comps). The platform then routes users to bond originators or top agents at the right moment.
Why it matters: Investors stop guessing. In Cape Town, Proply’s side-by-side outputs show Airbnb isn’t always superior to long-term letting.
Plain English: Type an address, see what it’s worth, what it rents for, which strategy pencils and who to call to execute.

The Good People Data Company - JK du Toit: Lead-to-lease in minutes, not months
What it is: Onboarding automation that powers 12,000+ agents and large portfolios across SA and regionally.
Where the tech works: Identity/KYC/AML, open-banking statement pulls, affordability, credit, risk rules and auto-generated leases, all orchestrated in one workflow.
Why it matters: Clients collapsed a 13-system, six-desk process into one digital flow. Lead-to-lease in around 15 minutes; bond pre-approvals in ~4 minutes. Hyper-scaling portfolios from 5,000 to 20,000 units without extra headcount.
Plain English: Good plumbing beats moonshots. Standardise the workflow, and everything else - speed, cost, compliance that falls into line.

Preferental - James Perris: Cash-flow certainty for private landlords

What it is: A vetting and rental management stack aimed at private investors: tenant screening, rent guarantees, eviction and damage cover, plus management—end-to-end.
Where the tech works: AI-assisted screening detects doctored payslips/bank statements via metadata checks and cross-verifies employment and banking.
Why it matters: With high fraud rates in rental applications, automation shifts landlords from uncertainty to guaranteed first-of-month cash flow at an all-in cost lower than traditional full-service models.
Plain English: If the tenant can’t pay, or won’t, systems pick it up early; if risk slips through, guarantees and process take over.

What changes on Monday morning

• Speed is the new alpha: Applications, approvals and leases in minutes unlock absorption, lower vacancy losses and better IRRs.
• Data decides strategy: Address-level valuation and yield views end the Airbnb vs long-term myth-making.
• Fraud gets harder: Automated document forensics + open banking reduce bad debt and eviction lag.
• Scale without bodies: Interoperable workflows let portfolios grow without proportional payroll.

Way Forward

‍The panel agreed on a simple playbook: standardise workflows, instrument every step with data, and deploy AI to enhance, not replace core processes.

City Property proved that consumer-grade UX in affordable co-living drives adoption and collections.

Proply showed how decision-ready valuations reframe investor choices and connect them to execution.

The Good People Data Company demonstrated that orchestration, identity to lease to bond, shrinks timelines to minutes and enables real scale.

Preferental tackled the landlord’s real fear, cash-flow risk with AI vetting and guarantees that keep payments predictable.

The residential thesis is unchanged: demand is there. What’s changed is the cost and speed of delivering certainty. Build the rail correctly, and co-living, student and mainstream rentals move from “management headache” to repeatable, bankable product.

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