Editorial policy
About the Proppely Research Desk
One original, cited briefing a day on national real-estate news, written for the people who actually run rental property. This page is the whole process: what the desk reads, how a piece is made and checked, what it will not do, and who to tell when something is wrong.
What this is
One briefing a day, for operators
Proppely Insights publishes one piece every morning: a news brief when something in the last 72 hours changes what a landlord or property manager should do, a market-trend piece when several sources point the same way, and an evergreen guide when neither clears the bar.
It is written for the people holding the portfolio — independent landlords, small and mid-size management companies, the person who has to decide what a rate decision or a new deposit rule means for next month’s renewals. Not for investors looking for tips, and not for a general audience.
Every piece ends up in the same shape: what happened, why it matters for a portfolio, what to do this week, and what the desk is watching next.
What it reads
Curated national sources
The desk ingests a fixed, curated list of trade, research and government feeds. It does not crawl the open web for material to rewrite. The list currently includes:
- HousingWire
- Multifamily Dive
- Bisnow
- Commercial Observer
- Propmodo
- Construction Dive
- Realtor.com
- Redfin
- RentCafe
- Zumper
- Rent.com Research
- Yardi Matrix
- RealPage Analytics
- ATTOM Data
- BiggerPockets
- Mortgage Professional America
- HUD
- the Federal Reserve
- the Bureau of Labor Statistics
- the National Apartment Association
Sources are cited and linked in each article. Where a primary document exists — the original report, the agency page, the bill text — the desk goes to it rather than to coverage of it.
The process
How a briefing is made
Six steps, in this order, every day. A piece that fails any of them is held as a draft instead of published.
- STEP 01
Curated feeds, refreshed all day
An ingest worker pulls roughly two dozen national trade, research and government feeds every few hours and scores each headline for how much it matters to someone running rental property. No model writes anything at this stage — it is a reading list.
- STEP 02
The source articles get read in full
Once a day the writer picks one story off that list and opens the underlying articles — the report, the agency page, the bill text — rather than working from feed excerpts. A link that will not load is dropped as a source instead of guessed at.
- STEP 03
Original analysis, every number linked
The briefing answers what happened, what it means for a portfolio, and what to do this week. Every rate, rent, percentage, dollar figure and date carries an inline link to the source that reported it. No source, no number — and at most one short quoted phrase per source.
- STEP 04
Automated Fair Housing screen
The same denylist that screens listing copy on Proppely runs over every title, dek and body before anything publishes. A piece that describes a property, area or offer as being for any group of people is held, not published.
- STEP 05
Independent fact-check against the citations
Before anything publishes, a separate reviewer re-reads every source the piece cites, in full, and checks each number, quote and legal statement against them: fabricated quotes, claims the sources do not support, rules described more broadly than they are, legal advice stated as certainty, and anything defamatory. Everything it finds is corrected first. If that check cannot be completed, the piece stays a draft.
- STEP 06
A person reviews, corrects and can remove
Held drafts wait for a human. Published pieces stay editable by one: a person at Proppely owns this desk and can correct a figure, add a missing source, or take an article down entirely. Corrections go to them directly through the contact form — a person, not a queue.
The byline
Who writes this, plainly
Articles on this desk are researched and drafted with AI tools and published under the Proppely Research Desk byline, with human review. There is no newsroom behind it and no reporter whose name we could put on the page, so we do not invent one — an organisational byline is the honest way to sign work made this way.
What the tools do: read the curated feeds, read the full source articles, draft the piece with every figure linked to the source that reported it, and run the Fair Housing screen and the independent fact-check described above. What a person does: sets the editorial rules, reviews what the screens hold back, and owns every correction. Publishing is automatic only for a piece that passed every check; anything else waits for that person.
Disclosure is deliberate. Search engines penalise mass-produced content and fabricated bylines — not disclosed AI assistance on work that is original, cited and useful. If a piece here reads like a summary of somebody else’s reporting rather than an operator’s read on it, that is a bug; tell us.
Limits
What this desk does not do
The boundaries are as much a part of the policy as the process.
No legal or financial advice
Briefings describe what a rule generally requires and say to confirm with local counsel. Nothing here is advice about your property, your lease, your taxes or your portfolio, and reading it creates no professional relationship.
No paid placement, ever
Nobody can buy a mention, a link, a favourable read or a spot in a briefing. There is no sponsored content, no affiliate link and no advertiser input on what gets covered. The desk exists because Proppely sells software, and that is the whole business model behind it.
No reprinting other outlets
The desk does not republish, syndicate or rewrite other publishers’ articles. It reads them, cites them, links to them, and writes something that did not exist before — the operator’s read on what they reported.
No invented people or quotes
The byline is an organisation because the work is done by AI tools under human review — inventing a reporter would be the dishonest part. No article quotes a person unless the cited source quoted them first.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, we fix it
Tell us and a person looks at it. Point at the article and the sentence, and say what you think is wrong — a figure that does not match the source, a source that was misread, a rule described wrongly for your state, a link that goes somewhere else than it should.
What happens next: a factual error is corrected in place and the article’s modified date changes, so feeds and anyone who cached it see the update. A piece that cannot be supported by its sources is taken down rather than quietly edited. Requests to remove or amend a mention of a named person or company get the same treatment as any other correction — we check it against the cited sources and act on what they say.
Send a correction request — it reaches the person who owns this desk.
Machine-readable
For AI assistants and developers
Every briefing is published in formats you can parse directly. These are file addresses, not links to click — copy the one you need.
https://www.proppely.com/insights/feed.xmlRSS 2.0 — twenty newest briefings, full rendered body in content:encoded.
https://www.proppely.com/insights/feed.jsonJSON Feed 1.1 — the same twenty, with content_html, tags and ISO dates.
https://www.proppely.com/insights/llms.txtMarkdown index — one line per briefing, each pointing at its markdown rendition.
https://www.proppely.com/insights/llms-full.txtThe newest briefings in full, as one markdown document. It is capped, and the file says how many it carries; anything older is still at its own /index.md.
https://www.proppely.com/insights/<slug>/index.mdAny single article as text/markdown, citations intact. Append /index.md to any article URL.
Licence
This work is free to read, quote and cite — no paywall, no login, no registration, for people and for machines alike. Quote what you need and link back to the canonical article URL on https://www.proppely.com/insights, which every format above carries for exactly this purpose. Republishing a briefing whole, under someone else’s byline, is the one thing that is not allowed.
Crawling
Assistant and search crawlers are allowed explicitly in https://www.proppely.com/robots.txt, and the site-wide agent guide lives at https://www.proppely.com/llms.txt. Each article carries JSON-LD (NewsArticle or Article, plus the desk as author and this page as its publishing principles), so structured extraction should not need to parse the HTML at all.
Read what the desk published today.
One cited briefing a day, newest first.