Question 1

How is Hobson different from general-purpose AI like ChatGPT or Claude?

Accepted Answer

Hobson, ChatGPT and Claude all use the same underlying technology: large language models.

The difference is what happens after they read a document.

ChatGPT and Claude read documents to help answer questions. Hobson reads documents to build and maintain a property record.

When Hobson reads a lease, deed, notice or certificate, it turns the important information into structured property facts and stores them against the property. As new documents are added, Hobson can update that record so it reflects the latest position.

That means Hobson can do things a general-purpose AI is not designed around:

It keeps a permanent property record.
The important facts are stored against the property, rather than simply sitting inside the original document.

It understands changes over time.
If a later document changes the rent, tenant or another term, Hobson can show the current position as well as the history behind it.

It uses fixed rules where accuracy matters.
Dates, figures and calculations can be handled using set rules rather than left to the AI to work out each time.

Every fact stays linked to its source.
You can see the document and wording behind an answer and check it quickly.

It is tested for property work.
Hobson is measured against real property documents where experts have established the correct answer.

So the difference is simple: ChatGPT and Claude are general-purpose AI tools that can read property documents. Hobson is a specialist property system that turns those documents into a structured, permanent and up-to-date property record.

Question 2

Will Hobson give me the same answer twice?

Accepted Answer

The facts and figures, yes. Once your documents are read, the recorded facts stay as they are unless the record itself changes, and any calculation follows fixed rules — so the same question gives the same figure, with the same workings.

The wording of the reply may vary slightly, because AI is used to write the response. What it isn't used for is deciding what's true.

So the answer and the evidence behind it stay stable, even if the sentence around them reads a little differently.

Question 3

Is Hobson built for my industry?

Accepted Answer

Hobson is built around property documents and property obligations, not around one business sector.

A restaurant group's operations director and a law firm's facilities director are reading the same clause. Both leases say "full repairing and insuring", and both create the same obligation and the same cost at exit.

That holds across the documents that matter: leases, deeds of variation, side letters, licences, guarantees, certificates and notices. Retail, offices, industrial, landlord or occupier — what changes is the volume and the context, not what the documents oblige you to do.

Question 4

Is Hobson only for large portfolios?

Accepted Answer

No. Ten units and five hundred are the same problem at different volumes.

In a smaller business, one person covers the lease, the gas safety certificate, the rent review window and the break notice, and needs Hobson to answer anything without them working out which file to open. In a larger business those jobs are split across teams, and each needs its own corner in precise detail.

The document library is the same in both cases. The smaller the team, the more Hobson has to cover; the larger the team, the deeper it has to go.

Question 5

Do I need to be a property expert to use Hobson?

Accepted Answer

No. Ask in plain language and you get a plain-language answer. Where a property term is unavoidable, Hobson explains it rather than leaving you to look it up.

You also don't need to know which document holds the answer. A finance analyst can ask which units have index-linked reviews rather than open market; an operations manager can ask which EPCs expire this quarter. Same document library, different questions, each answered with the clause cited.

Question 6

What's Hobson like to work with?

Accepted Answer

Direct and low-effort. It gets to the point rather than padding answers, and it won't bury a simple answer in advice you didn't ask for.

It tells you plainly where things stand — including when something is uncertain or missing — and takes responsibility for its answers rather than hedging.

Question 7

Am I dealing with one assistant, or a team?

Accepted Answer

One assistant: Hobson. Different specialist capabilities work behind the scenes, and you may see which kind is helping while work is underway, but every answer comes back as one considered response.

You never have to coordinate separate tools, repeat yourself, or work out who's responsible for what.

Question 8

Will Hobson tell me things I didn't think to ask?

Accepted Answer

Where it genuinely helps, yes. If a deadline is approaching or a consequence follows from your answer, Hobson mentions it briefly.

It won't lecture, speculate, or invent a worry to look useful. When your answer is simply the answer, that's all you get.

Question 9

When Hobson gives me an answer, how do I check it's right?

Accepted Answer

Every answer comes with an evidence pack.

The pack shows the document, the page, the clause and the wording itself, quoted rather than paraphrased. Nothing in the extracts is summarised, so what you read is what the lease actually says.

What makes that reliable is when the evidence is captured. Hobson doesn't produce an answer and then go looking for a citation — the figure and the wording it came from are recorded together at the moment the document is read, and stored as one thing. A reference can't be composed after the fact to justify a number.

Where a lease doesn't settle the question, the pack says so.

Question 10

What happens when Hobson doesn't have enough information?

Accepted Answer

It says so. Hobson reports what your documents establish, and is equally clear about what they don't.

Where something is missing, it tells you what it can answer, what it can't, and what it would need. "The lease records no rent deposit" is a real, checked finding, not a failure — an absence is an answer in its own right.

Rent is a good example. A lease may set the figure payable now and a rule that changes it later — a review, an index-linked uplift, a fixed step. Where that rule hasn't yet produced a number, Hobson says the future figure isn't established rather than quietly carrying today's forward.

Question 11

What happens if documents contradict each other?

Accepted Answer

It shows you both sides. Property documents disagree more often than you'd expect: a lease sets one break date and a later deed sets another; a figure is stated one way in one place and differently in another.

Hobson sets out both positions plainly, each with the document and wording it came from, and tells you they conflict. Where one is the safer position to rely on until the matter is settled, it will say so — but it never quietly picks a winner or splits the difference.

Question 12

When Hobson works out a figure, can I see how it reached it?

Accepted Answer

Always. Any number Hobson calculates — a reviewed rent, a deadline, a notice date — arrives with its workings: the figures it started from and when they applied, the rule it followed, any cap or floor that changed the result, and the figure that came out.

Calculations are done in one place using fixed rules, so the same inputs produce the same result. If the workings can't be shown for some reason, Hobson tells you rather than handing you a bare figure.

Question 13

How do you know Hobson is accurate?

Accepted Answer

Because it's measured rather than assumed. AI that sounds sure of itself is easy to build, and it fails quietly — a wrong figure arrives looking exactly like a right one. So Hobson is tested against a library of real property documents that property experts have gone through by hand to establish the correct answer for every detail, from a simple residential tenancy to long commercial leases with formula-driven rents.

The testing covers the whole journey, not just the reading. Each step is checked in its own right: did it go to the right unit and pull the right documents, was each fact extracted correctly, is every statement actually supported by wording that exists, were the figures produced by the fixed rules, and does the final answer say only what the documents support.

When something does go wrong, the record of how the answer was reached shows which step failed, so it can be fixed precisely — and anything your team flags becomes a permanent test case.

Question 14

How do you stop an update breaking something that already worked?

Accepted Answer

Before any change goes live, Hobson is run over the whole test library again and compared question by question with the current version — accuracy, sourcing, completeness, cost and speed.

Anything that got worse has to be explained and accepted before release, rather than discovered by you three weeks later. That's how Hobson improves without the "fixed one thing, broke another" problem.

Question 15

Will Hobson ever act on its own? How much control do I keep?

Accepted Answer

Complete control. Hobson proposes; you decide; the record only changes when you confirm it.

When it spots something urgent and says "tell them today", it prepares the message — but the send button is yours. It isn't asked to hold back from consequential actions; it's simply never given the ability to take them.

Hobson also separates "nothing to report" from "I couldn't check". A green light means it looked and you're clear, never that it quietly gave up.

Question 16

How does Hobson know when to follow a fixed rule and when to use judgment?

Accepted Answer

Three kinds of work, treated differently.

**Answering** reports what your documents establish, with figures from fixed rules. AI helps understand the question and write the reply — never to decide what's true.

**Recording** changes the record, and only after a person decides. Nothing is erased: the old position is kept and dated, so you can always ask what was true earlier.

**Noticing and proposing** is where Hobson behaves like a co-worker — spotting what's missing, judging what matters, recommending what to do next. It still changes nothing without you.

Question 17

What happens to what I share with Hobson?

Accepted Answer

It's kept confidential. Hobson answers from your documents and your defined property rules — not from another customer's records, and not from generic assumptions imported from elsewhere.

Question 18

How does Hobson organise my portfolio?

Accepted Answer

Three levels, and that's all it takes.

**Unit** — the smallest occupiable space: an office suite, a shop, a warehouse, a flat, a parking space.

**Unit group** — a set of units in the same place. Location is the only thing that makes them one group, not a shared lease, landlord or tenant.

**Portfolio** — the whole estate. Not somewhere you can stand, but a reporting view: how many units are vacant, which leases expire this year, what the total contracted rent is.

You can ask at any level. A unit gives you the tenancy detail, a group gives you the place, the portfolio gives you the estate view — built from the records beneath it, so the headline reconciles with the detail.

Hobson avoids the word "property" underneath, because it can mean either a single occupiable space or a whole building. You can still speak naturally; the precision matters in the data, not in how you ask.

Two groups can also sit at the same address and stay entirely separate records — one group's fire risk assessment says nothing about another's.

**Documents attach to the structure; they don't create it.** You define the real-world structure and it changes when the property changes — not because a PDF arrived. One lease covering units at three addresses doesn't fuse them into one place.

Question 19

How does Hobson make sense of all the documents?

Accepted Answer

Three things are settled about any document, and none of them is a guess.

**Where it belongs.** A document names an address, and that address resolves to an actual location. The same building gets written a dozen ways across a stack of paperwork, and matching two spellings proves nothing — resolving to a location is what makes two records provably the same place.

**Which level it sits at.** A single unit, or the group it belongs to. That's your decision, recorded and stable, so a later reconfiguration doesn't shuffle documents around after the event.

**What kind of document it is.** Some create a tenancy; some modify one already in existence; some are about the asset itself. That decides how it's used: anything modifying a tenancy is applied in the order things happened, while asset documents are tracked by date so Hobson knows which certificate is current, superseded or about to expire.

Question 20

After years of variations and assignments, how does Hobson know where a lease actually stands?

Accepted Answer

By reading the whole record. Hobson takes the original lease, then applies every later document that changed it — variations, assignments, licences, review memoranda, notices — in the order they happened.

Nothing is thrown away. A replaced position becomes history, kept permanently, so you can always ask what was true at an earlier date.

That's the difference between reading the lease yourself and asking Hobson: the lease tells you how a tenancy started; Hobson tells you where it is.

Question 21

When a lease reaches its end date, does Hobson assume the tenancy is over?

Accepted Answer

No. A term end date is a milestone on paper, not proof of what happened. Tenants routinely stay on after a term expires.

A notice doesn't settle it either — a notice records an intention, not an outcome.

So Hobson reports a tenancy as ended, or a unit as empty, only when something confirms it. Where nothing does, it marks the position unconfirmed and says so.

Question 22

How does Hobson think about the different kinds of money in a lease?

Accepted Answer

It keeps four things apart, because treating one as another is a classic source of wrong numbers:

**The price of being there** — rent or a licence fee, recurring.

**Reimbursing the landlord's costs** — service charge and insurance, kept separate from rent.

**One-off deal money** — a premium, a fit-out contribution, a surrender payment.

**Money that may never be paid** — overage, clawback, profit share, due only if a future event happens.

So a one-off premium is never reported as recurring rent, and a contingent overage is never presented as a certain liability.

Questions, answered.

Why Hobson

Who Hobson is for

Using Hobson

Accuracy & evidence

Control & security

Your portfolio

Your documents

Still have a question?