Outsourcing Your Brain: How I Use NotebookLM to Revolutionize My Property Management
Managing properties, particularly short-term rentals, quickly becomes complex as you scale your portfolio. Keeping track of every single detail for multiple locations can feel nearly impossible. With just one property, it might be easy to remember every item’s location or how things work, but managing or owning nearly 30 properties makes retaining those specific details challenging, especially when also balancing a full-time job, other life responsibilities, family, etc.
This is where leveraging technology becomes essential to make property management more “sane” and “easier to do”. One such tool is NotebookLM, an AI tool powered by Google’s Gemini AI. While useful for many tasks, including writing and drafting, its particular power for property management lies in its core function: it trains the information it provides exclusively off documents that you feed it.
Unlike a general AI that pulls from a broad database, NotebookLM focuses solely on your uploaded source material. Google also notes that it doesn’t share your data externally and doesn’t use your personal data to train its main model.
The central concept behind using NotebookLM for property management is to “outsource your brain”.
As a property manager or co-host, when your own capacity for remembering every detail is full, you need a reliable place to store that information. This involves creating detailed documents about your properties and standard operating procedures (SOPs), often using tools like Google Docs.
These documents, and even links to explanatory YouTube videos, serve as the source material you upload into NotebookLM.
Once your property guides and SOPs are uploaded, you can query the AI with specific questions. For instance, if a guest needs the guest key code, you can ask NotebookLM, and it will search your document for the “key code for guest” and provide it. If you forget the location of an item like a pack and play or ironing board, you can query the tool, and it will tell you based on what’s documented.
NotebookLM is also incredibly effective for handling less common, but important, situations. If you have an SOP document detailing how to respond to a wildlife encounter, you can ask NotebookLM to draft a message for a guest who has seen a bear, and it will generate a response that follows the steps outlined in your SOP. This ensures consistent adherence to your established protocols, even for infrequent events.
Beyond retrieving information, the tool can assist in creating new documentation. If a situation arises that isn’t yet covered by an SOP, such as a power outage, as an example, you can use NotebookLM to help draft one. You can instruct it to create an SOP template or even suggest potential responses for you to review and add to your main SOP document.
There are two primary benefits to incorporating NotebookLM into your property management workflow:
- Outsourcing Information Storage: As managing multiple properties fills your mental capacity, NotebookLM provides a reliable, easily searchable place to store and retrieve detailed information about each one.
2. Team Training: It serves as a crucial resource for training team members, particularly virtual assistants (VAs). Instead of VAs needing to constantly interrupt you with questions, they can access the necessary information directly from the source documents via NotebookLM. This empowers them to handle guest inquiries or situations efficiently, even late at night, without needing to contact you.
Leaning into technology like NotebookLM has been described as essential for managing details as a property portfolio scales quickly. For those who manage properties while on the go, the expected Android and iOS app for NotebookLM, anticipated in May of 2025, promises the ability to access and use the tool from mobile devices as easily as from a desktop.
In essence, NotebookLM helps property managers and co-hosts by providing a centralized, searchable database of property-specific information and procedures, all directly sourced from the documents you provide. It truly enables outsourcing the mental burden of remembering every detail, allowing focus on scaling and growing.