
UtilityWatch is an open-source AI agent platform that solves a real and painful problem for property managers: manually checking dozens of utility portals every month to track bills, balances, and due dates across multiple properties. Property management companies typically handle 20 to 100+ properties, each with separate accounts for electricity, gas, water, trash, and other services. Today, this process is entirely manual — someone logs into each portal one by one, copies the balance, and records it somewhere. A missed payment can mean a service cutoff at an occupied property, which is a serious operational and reputational failure. UtilityWatch replaces this with autonomous AI agents that navigate utility provider portals, authenticate, extract current balances and due dates, and write them to a central database. The live dashboard gives property managers a single view of all obligations, color-coded by status: current, due soon, overdue, or paid. The platform is built on Node.js with Playwright for browser automation, and uses Bright Data's Scraping Browser and Web Unlocker to bypass anti-bot protections that block conventional scrapers — including Akamai-protected portals, sites with reCAPTCHA, and portals requiring MFA flows. This makes the platform generalizable: any utility provider portal can be added as a new agent module. The system is already running in production for 30+ properties in Southern California, covering 13 utility providers and 116 billing obligations. The hackathon deliverable focuses on packaging this as a reusable, open-source tool that any property management company can deploy, with Bright Data as the infrastructure layer that makes it work at scale without IP bans or CAPTCHA failures.
31 May 2026