Caro had recently moved back to Cluj to be closer to her ­family while in the midst of finishing her dissertation on interwar feminist ­labor histories. Struggling to pay her expenses, she had managed to land a night shift job at an Office call center. She thought it was just some regular tech outsourcing firm from the United States. Soon though, she discovered that it was in fact the property technology firm, Yardi. Her job also entailed serving one of Yardi’s major clients, Invitation Homes—­the United States’ largest landlord of single-­family homes. A former subsidiary of the half-­trillion-­dollar multinational com­pany the Blackstone Group, Invitation Homes owns over eighty thousand properties and has been rapidly expanding throughout the covid-19 pandemic ­under the logics of crisis capitalism. It employs unique-­sounding shell companies to purchase its properties, often making it impossible for tenants to even know who or what their landlord is.1 Invitation Homes also mobilizes surrogate ­labor and digital platforms to perform property management, creating new technocultural and technopo­liti­cal abstractions for its tenants. At the same time, ­those working for Invitation Homes through Yardi strug­gle to understand who their employer actually is. “It’s all confusing,” Caro explained while we w ere having lunch one day. “I ­don’t know, do I work for Invitation Homes, or for Yardi, or maybe for their clients? Maybe if Invitation Homes is Yardi’s client, then I work for the clients of the client?” she puzzled.

Yardi first emerged in 1984 in California, yet, like much of the so-­called proptech industry, it ­really blossomed in the aftermaths of the subprime crisis amid the rise of corporate landlordism.2 Yardi is but one of countless proptech companies today reshaping the provision, consumption, and management of rental property. Proptech, or what tenants might better understand as “landlord technologies,” includes every­thing from tenant screening software to bio- metric facial recognition building access systems, from landlord-­and property man­ag­er–­controlled rental payment platforms to automated eviction notifications.3 Desiree Fields nominates this turn the rise of the “automated landlord,” 4 where corporate landlords effectively mobilize data capitalism in order to expand and manage their portfolios.