What if property became an MCP (Model Context Protocol)? Standardise every unit and plug it into systems that automate everything from rent to maintenance.

Here’s a weird thought: your apartment might work better as a data model than as four walls and a bathroom.

Stay with me.

Real estate today is still largely analog. Sure, you can list a property online or manage rent payments digitally. But the unit itself—the physical space—is effectively offline. It doesn’t really exist in any interoperable system.

Now imagine if every unit of property were modeled in a standardized digital format. Floor plans. Square footage. HVAC systems. Appliances. Security features. Lease data. Even the maintenance history tied to the light fixtures.

All plugged into a shared protocol that other software can access, interpret, and act on automatically.

Sound boring?

It’s not. If we digitized property at the protocol level—like plugging it into an API for the real world—it would flip the property industry on its head.

Let’s talk about what happens when physical spaces become structured data—and the serious implications for how we build, rent, manage, and even live.

Properties as structured protocols

Right now, every property is a snowflake.

That means every new tenant, every new property manager, even every service provider has to start from scratch. Want to automate inspections? Good luck decoding layout PDFs and ambiguous email chains. Trying to run predictive maintenance? You’ll be lucky if the property manager knows the age of the water heater.

Now imagine every unit had a common data model—a Model Context Protocol (MCP)—describing the unit, systems, layout, components, and dependencies.

A two-bedroom apartment in Boston? Same structural schema as a townhouse in Austin. Different attributes, same bones.

It’s like the difference between a PDF and a spreadsheet. One’s a dead artifact. The other can be queried, transformed, and plugged into larger systems.

What gets better?

Pretty much everything that normally relies on people emailing each other, copying outdated spreadsheets, or chasing paperwork through layers of bureaucracy.

Let’s break it down:

Leasing becomes instant. The property model already knows the square footage, amenities, conditions, even historical rent pricing. Tenants apply, lenders verify, and contracts auto-generate—all referencing the same source of truth.
Repairs stop being chaos. If the thermostat goes down, the smart maintenance bot knows the make, model, install date, and service history. It pings the right technician with the right part before the tenant knows it’s broken.
Portfolio management becomes scalable. A landlord with 1,000 units actually sees “1,000 structured assets,” sortable by age, risk, rent delta, upgrade needs, insurance gaps—you name it.
Valuation gets way smarter. Want to comp a unit? The system pulls every comparable with matching layout, condition, appliance age, and local performance metrics. That's lightyears ahead of relying on “similar” listings.

None of this requires new technology. It requires new structure.

The protocol layer is the missing piece

We don’t need smarter realtors or fancier Excel. We need a common way to describe properties in a machine-readable, system-compatible format.

Think of it like this:

Right now, property software is like trying to build a skeleton with no bones—just a bag of cartilage and hopes.

With MCP, you’re snapping puzzle pieces into place. The property itself becomes interoperable infrastructure.

In software, APIs are what let Stripe process payments, or Google Maps power Uber. In fintech, structured KYC (Know Your Customer) data lets apps verify users in seconds instead of weeks.

Real estate hasn’t hit that layer yet—but it’s ripe for it.

The industry is too big to stay this fragmented

The kicker? Real estate is the world’s biggest asset class.

Over $300 trillion in global value—more than stocks and bonds combined.

And yet it runs on PDFs, spreadsheets, voicemails, and shame.

Standardizing property data could unleash second-order effects across insurance, lending, design, construction, urban planning—and AI.

No, not the hand-waving “AI-powered property” fluff. Actual self-improving systems that monitor, optimize, and invest based on real-time footprints of property performance. Imagine GPT-17 analyzing millions of structured units to discover underpriced regions, systemic inefficiencies, or design flaws before they manifest as costs.

But that only happens if properties start speaking the same structured language.

Why now?

The weird part is, most of the tech already exists.

BIM (Building Information Modeling) systems already map construction detail to serious precision. IoT sensors know when your HVAC is sulking. CRMs track tenant behavior down to the minute.

The missing link is standardization at the context layer. A protocol that says: “Every property has a structure, and here’s how it’s described: spatially, mechanically, temporally.”

Once that’s in place, innovation stops being manual. It becomes systemic.

And systems beat humans. Every time.

This changes who wins

Let’s put it plainly: companies that digitize their properties at the protocol layer will outcompete those that don’t.

Because in a few years:

Maintenance costs will be algorithmically forecasted
Rent prices will algorithmically price themselves
Property performance will be monitored like a SaaS app
Loans will be underwritten by bots scanning digital twins
Tenants will select from smart contracts, not Craigslist listings

If your business is still trying to run on PDFs and gut instinct? The machines will eat you.

But if you model your assets with structure and expose them to intelligent systems? You create leverage no human team can match.

So what now?

No one’s saying you need to rebuild every unit from scratch. That’s not feasible—or necessary.

But here’s what smart operators will start doing:

Treat units not just as physical assets, but as digital products
Work toward a common property schema within their portfolio
Tag every system (HVAC, lighting, locks) with structured metadata
Build APIs internally—even just spreadsheets with structure—to get started

Think of it like planting GPS into every asset, not just for location, but for condition, history, and risk.

Final thought

Most companies get excited about AI, but forget that AI is only as smart as the data it can reason about.

If your properties are still black boxes, AI can’t help you. But structure them—give them a common language—and every layer of value creation becomes programmable.

Renting, repairing, insuring, even designing property becomes part of a real-time system that runs smoother, faster, and cheaper than any human team.

That’s not buzzword utopia. That’s just systems thinking applied to space.

Now ask yourself: Is my building a unit… or a protocol?

Big difference.