Consent and disclosure rules vary by state, and they are worth walking properly rather than assuming.
Published August 4, 2026
Usually, with consent, and the consent requirement is the part that varies in a way that matters operationally.
Some states require only one party to a call to consent to recording, which in practice means you can record your own calls. Others require every party, which means the caller has to be told and has to continue.
For a property manager this is not academic, because callers do not stay inside state lines. Somebody relocating calls you from where they live now, not from where your property is, and the stricter rule can apply. Most operators handle that by disclosing on every call regardless, which is simpler than deciding per caller.
A transcript is a recording in a different format. If you may not record, you may not transcribe, and a transcript is arguably more sensitive because it is searchable in a way audio is not.
It is also more useful, which is the tension. A searchable record of every conversation is exactly what makes auditing possible and what makes the weekly tuning work.
That last point is why payments run through hosted checkout rather than card numbers being read aloud. A recorded call where somebody reads out a card number creates a storage problem that is entirely avoidable by design.
You do. Transcripts, contacts and conversation history are yours to export at any time, and they are written into your own PMS or CRM as they happen rather than held somewhere you would have to ask for them.
That matters for the compliance question as much as the commercial one: if you are ever required to produce records, or to delete them, you need to be able to act on your own data without depending on a vendor to cooperate.
Recording law is state specific, it interacts with your lease terms and your privacy notices, and it is not somewhere to rely on a general answer. We describe how the system behaves and will walk your specific requirements on the call. The legal sign-off should be your counsel's.
Worth thinking about concretely, because the content is less predictable than the policy suggests. People say more than the question requires.
A maintenance call can include a health detail explaining why heat matters urgently. A collections conversation can include somebody's financial circumstances in more detail than anybody asked for. A leasing inquiry can include family information volunteered in passing.
None of that was requested and all of it is now in a searchable record. That is an argument for deciding retention and access deliberately rather than keeping everything indefinitely because storage is cheap. The least risky data is the data you no longer hold.
If you disclose on every call, the placement matters more than the wording, and the common mistake is putting it in a long greeting nobody listens to.
And it needs to survive a transfer. If a call moves to a person, whatever obligation applied to the automated portion still applies, and that is a configuration detail worth checking rather than assuming.
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