What Property Managers Should Look for in a Fraud Prevention Solution

Real estate fraud is a widespread problem in today’s U.S. housing market. This means that real estate fraud prevention is becoming mandatory for property managers and MLSs.

According to the FBI, Americans reported well over 200 million dollars in real estate–related losses in 2024 alone, making the sector a consistent target for cyber‑enabled crime. One important point is that many people hesitate to report being scammed, which means actual losses are much higher than the published figure.

In a market where thousands of listings are published every day, monitoring for fraudulent duplicates of your portfolio is no longer a “nice to have”, it is a strategic business investment. The integrity of your listings, your brand trust, and the income those properties are expected to generate are affected by how effectively you can detect and remove fraudulent copies before they do damage.

But… what exactly should you look for in a real estate fraud prevention solution?

Not All Fraud Prevention Solutions Are Built for Real Estate Fraud

Most fraud prevention tools were built for generic e‑commerce, banking, or brand protection use cases, not for the realities of real estate. They focus on logos, domains, login pages, or corporate networks, but they don’t understand how listings, MLS feeds, and transaction workflows behave across the housing ecosystem. As a result, you can have solid “fraud” or “security” coverage on paper and still be exposed where real estate fraud actually happens: copied listings, hijacked advertisements, impersonated agents, rental scams, and unauthorized subletting.

Generic tools also tend to treat fraud incidents as isolated events, without turning them into portfolio‑level threat intelligence that helps operators make better business decisions. For property managers and owners, that means more noise, more blind spots, and fewer insights about where exposure is growing inside the actual business.

Brand protection platforms are designed to spot misuse of your name, logo, and domains across the internet. They excel at finding fake websites, social media profiles, and look‑alike URLs, but that work is fundamentally asset‑centric at the brand level, not inventory‑centric at the property level. Cybersecurity and endpoint tools secure networks, devices, and user accounts from malware and intrusion, yet they are aimed at the IT perimeter, not at the external channels where real estate fraud plays out. Insurance and guarantees can offset losses from wire fraud and transaction‑level scams, but they only activate after the damage is done; they don’t reduce the number of incidents or the operational disruption they cause.

What Should a Real Estate Fraud Prevention Tool Do?

A real estate fraud prevention solution has to understand how the industry works. It needs to map listings to properties, properties to portfolios, and portfolios to the channels where those assets are actually exposed: MLS feeds, rental marketplaces, broker sites, and social media platforms. It must recognize patterns like duplicated listings, hijacked agent identities, and abnormal closing instructions that align with what regulators and consumer protection agencies are seeing in current real estate fraud schemes.

Just as importantly, it has to deliver that intelligence in a way that property managers, asset managers, and teams can act on. That means cross‑platform monitoring tied back to specific units, duplicate listing detection, identity misuse alerts, portfolio‑level dashboards, incident tracking, and checks aligned with MLS rules. But also specialized investigation regarding how real estate fraud behaves as a practice: understand the tendencies and platforms where fraud is conducted.

Real Estate Fraud Evolves, So Must Fraud Prevention

As technology gives property managers better tools to amplify their portfolio reach, fraud methods evolve just as quickly. According to a 2021 study by the Better Business Bureau on rental scams, 43% of users searching for rental properties encountered at least one fake listing, and more than five million consumers have lost money to this type of fraud. At that scale, if almost half of users are bumping into fraudulent listings, a manual approach that only reacts to reported schemes will always lag behind the real incident volume. Nowadays, Property Shield has noticed that fraudsters are likely to adapt to new social media platforms, like TikTok.

Speed also matters. The BBB reports that on platforms like Craigslist, their internal automated systems detected only 47% of the ads researchers had identified as fraudulent. Twenty hours after those ads were flagged by the Craiglist’s system, 40% were still live, and the estimated removal time was around ten hours. This means that a good amount of ads were detected but not removed, and a higher amount of them weren’t detected at all.

Every additional hour a fraudulent listing stays online is another hour in which a prospective renter or buyer can be diverted to a scammer and, if the scammer is impersonating your brand or reusing legitimate assets, it is an open exposure window for brand damage.

Each incident that remains live also carries operational costs for property managers. Team members have to spend time identifying fake profiles, reporting fraudulent listings across multiple platforms, and coordinating any legal or compliance steps once a scam has gone too far. All of that is time and money diverted from running the portfolio, which is exactly why scalable, automated monitoring becomes a business decision, not just a security choice.

Proactive solutions that scale and converge active monitoring for early detection become the better alternative for protecting your portfolio from scammers, and threat intelligence technology provides information that could be used to take real estate fraud prevention a step further, even before your assets get hijacked.

Measurable Impact: How Proactive Monitoring Protects NOI

Maymont Homes manages more than 10,000 single‑family homes across 26 cities and was facing a surge in squatters and illegal trespassing that translated into months of unpaid rent, legal costs, and reputational risk. After deploying Property Shield’s fraud prevention software, they shifted from reacting to incidents to blocking them at the listing level. In less than a year, the system identified and removed 2,207 fraudulent threats, including 71 fraudulent listings in the first two months, avoiding an estimated 53,250 dollars in losses in that early period and millions in potential renter losses over the year.

Using Maymont’s own assumptions (that 5–10% of fraudulent listings left live end in a squatter and each squatter costs about 10,000 dollars) this reduction in fake listings directly protects NOI by preventing high‑cost eviction events and keeping units available for legitimate residents. Proactive monitoring also lowers operational drag: instead of spending hours hunting scams across platforms, internal teams can focus on running the portfolio, while the system continuously shrinks the exposure window for any fraudulent listing that appears.