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Using AI in Commercial Real Estate

AI is one of the hottest topics of 2024 with AI-powered tools and assistants becoming relevant to almost every industry. This is no different with commercial real estate, as AI is making it easier to interpret data and documents as well as summarize information and provide key takeaways about the information it gathers. 

In short, AI just makes the job that you’re already doing easier. AI hasn’t entirely replaced your job, but essentially acts as a low-cost digital assistant that can augment the data collection, interpretation, and analysis that you do. While you’ve probably heard of some big names like ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot, and you can definitely use them for CRE work, there are other AI tools on the market within more specific niches. 

We’ll be going through some AI tools on the market, what they do, and some pros and cons of using them. By including them on this list, we aren’t endorsing them; rather, we’re listing them as worth learning about.

AI for Retail, Office & Industrial

Prophia is an AI tool specifically built for CRE in the retail, office, and industrial asset class. The tool is for lease abstraction, meaning that it assists in interpreting and analyzing legal documents related to real estate. This tool works with:

  • Lease agreements

  • Amendments

  • Acquisition agreements

  • Property management contracts

  • Investor reports

  • And more

After uploading a document, the AI finds key information like the terms of the lease, key dates, and other pertinent information that you want pulled. From there, the AI also can add missing information, identify discrepancies, and ensure overall accuracy. 

Prophia can be used for reviewing contracts that a third party drafts, or as a review tool for the documents that your organization builds. From there, the AI can extract dates and other data from your documents to create reports, charts, and schedules around documentation. 

Pros:

  • No limits on users; Prophia charges by account, not per user

  • Prophia performs human checks to ensure accurate AI reports for 99% accuracy in data

  • Compatible with older, difficult-to-read documentation

  • Data can be exported from Prophia as a CSV for transfer to third-party databases

  • More efficient and automated than traditional lease abstraction firms

  • Customers own and control all data on the platform

Cons:

  • Works only in the retail, office, and industrial asset classes (as of 2024)

  • Extracted data available in minutes, 1 to 3 days for a full report after human quality review

  • Payment is based on per tenant or square footage

  • May have slower output with newer clients

GPTs for CRE ChatGPT

ChatGPT is, in the modern era, the face of AI. Built by OpenAI as a realistic chatbot, ChatGPT is an impressive generative AI that can research, analyze, summarize, and more. ChatGPT works like a chatbot, where you write prompts and it provides information. But it’s much more than just that, as ChatGPT can read, summarize, interpret, and even analyze information that you give it. It can also take direction and iterate on answers — hence the “generative” label. See how it works in our post about writing prompts for CRE email marketing.

While ChatGPT Enterprise isn’t specifically built for CRE, with a bit of set-up, the AI can be trained on subjects like:

  • Acquisitions

  • Customer relations

  • HR and IT support

  • Property data analysis

  • Interpreting financial reports

  • Marketing communications

ChatGPT may be the most well-known generative AI, but there are others like Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, Perplexity and more. These GPTs can be trained using prompts, where you give the AI specific instructions on how to perform tasks. If you want to train an AI on evaluating potential cities to develop a retail center in, you may give a set of instructions such as: “Generate a list of 5 potential urban centers to develop a retail center in. This retail center will have a single large anchor store and needs to have an annual rent per square foot of $30.”

Pros:

  • Versatility — GPTs adapt to your prompts 

  • Price — GPT personal or enterprise accounts are significantly cheaper than paying another company to interpret your data

  • Accessibility — GPTs are usually accessible on your phone, computer, and other devices with an internet connection

Cons:

  • Requires set up — GPTs require knowledge of how to train AI bots based on given prompts. 

  • Accuracy — GPTs sometimes aren’t accurate or make mistakes in interpreting or pulling data from the web. 

  • Limitations with uploading data — GPTs have limitations on the kind of documents and data that can be uploaded and analyzed

  • Sources — ChatGPT doesn’t provide sources for its information (as of 2024); for that, see Perplexity, as it provides links to the sources from which it pulls information 

The feature we want to highlight with this AI-powered service is data extraction. As your firm receives documents from different sources, data often needs to be extracted and moved to your system for analysis. Leverton’s system mitigates human error and streamlines this process. 

The AI advantage comes from how Leverton can learn which data in documents are relevant to you. For example, if your firm is assessing different lease agreements, and you need to know the renewal dates, rent pay frequency, and other fees, you can train Leverton to extract and analyze that data. 

Leverton works with: 

  • Data extraction

  • Lease abstraction

  • Lease accounting

  • Preventing revenue leakage

  • Due diligence processes

Pros:

  • Works with more than 25 different languages

  • Marks custom data parameters for extraction and analysis

  • Syncs with your calendar for reminders and notifications regarding critical dates

  • Exports data as CSV automatically to many popular third-party systems

  • Marks data as needing review if it’s unsure of the data accuracy

Cons:

  • User reviews complain about bugs and inaccessible features

  • Slow-downs due to heavy traffic

  • Pricing is per document 

Real estate underwriting is a notoriously tedious process that involves gathering tax, income, credit reports, and other necessary borrower information for analysis. This can take a long time to compile and complete. DocSumo’s AI tool automates the CRE underwriting process with AI models trained on manual data digging. 

DocSumo allows you to bring data from your email, and other document managers in the form of images, PDF, and CSV for analysis. This service automatically categorizes and sorts the documents you feed it to start the underwriting process. 

DocSumo underwriting works with:

  • Loan application forms

  • Credit reports

  • Pay stubs

  • W2s

  • Tax returns

  • And more

This platform will also assist you in other financial, property, and insurance services. Whether you need to prepare a document or letter of your own or review other forms, this AI is highly flexible. 

Pros:

  • Free trial to try service

  • Works with image files and CSVs

  • Data is exportable as an editable CSV or JSON

  • Great API documentation on what the platform supports

  • Integrates into existing systems 

Cons:

  • Starts at $500 month for 3 user accounts

  • Can take longer, depending on the document types

  • Protracted set up and configuring process with the business

A more different item on our list, IKEA Place is a mobile app that streamlines the process of a particularly time-consuming and expensive process: Staging furniture in homes, offices, and studios. IKEA place uses augmented reality to let you take pictures of rooms in your properties and virtually stage them with different pieces of furniture. 

IKEA Place also scales furniture based on your square footage, so you can export realistic snapshots of staged rooms without having to physically move the furniture. This is perfect if you want to A/B test multiple room staging layouts on real estate platforms. 

Pros:

  • Stage rooms with virtual furniture

  • Shop for new furniture and order it immediately from the app

  • Integrates with other IKEA apps like IKEA Kreativ, which scans rooms using LiDAR to build 3D replicas

  • Collect accurate dimensions of rooms all through the app

Cons:

  • Works with only some smartphones

  • Can only stage with IKEA furniture

  • Slow startup

  • Some furniture may not look as realistic

AI Meeting Notetakers

AI notetakers are simple but incredibly powerful tools for all businesses. An AI notetaker is an assistant that automatically records your meetings and transcribes them into text. These AI tools often integrate with Google Meet, Teams, Zoom, and other popular video call platforms. They will also function with in-person meetings, as you simply need to upload the audio file for it to transcribe. 

Examples of AI notetakers:

These tools not only transcribe, but also summarize and analyze the meetings. If someone isn’t able to make the meeting, an AI notetaker will collect the key points from the meeting for you to easily send out to others. Whether you’re meeting with a client or just internally, AI meeting notetakers automate what would otherwise be someone’s dedicated role during the meeting. 

Pros:

  • Collects detailed, accurate summaries of meetings

  • Integrates with meeting tools as well as calendars, work management tools, and CRM software 

  • Some platforms can store past meetings for team review

  • Track keywords and action items

Cons:

  • Pricing can be anything from a monthly subscription to a per-meeting fee

  • Setting up AI notetakers can be tedious, especially for first-time onboarding

  • Can sometimes get lost in the accuracy depending on the audio quality

  • Summarizes everything, including side talk and off-agenda banter (which can actually be humorous to read later!)


 

ID 127437083 | Artificial Intelligence | Sompong Sriphet | Dreamstime.com ID 125784848 | Ai © Melpomenem | Dreamstime.com

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