AI for Real Estate

Most CRE sponsors treat AI as a collection of separate tools but the firms pulling ahead are building something fundamentally different: a single integrated stack where every layer of the operation, from deal sourcing to asset management, feeds the same system.   Adir Levitas, founder and CEO of Faropoint, has been building that for seven years across a portfolio now exceeding $5 billion in assets...

Most commercial real estate firms believe AI will transform their business. Only 9% have done anything about it. That is not a technology problem. It is a workflow problem - and no one is asking the right question to close the gap.   Eglae Recchia, CEO of Keyway, has been building purpose-built AI infrastructure for CRE for five years. Her read on the 91% is direct: the industry moved toward solut...

Most CRE firms say they're using AI. What they mean is someone has a ChatGPT tab open.   Michael Episcope, co-CEO of Origin Investments, has spent the last six months actually embedding it - across every division, inside a secure enterprise layer, with dedicated integration staff and monthly data audits by department. Here is what he found: Lead with the opportunity: Clean data is a competitive as...

CRE brokerages have spent tens of thousands configuring Salesforce. Nobody uses it. The data is stale, the pipeline is fiction, and the analyst is entering last week's emails at 8pm to stay compliant.   Yaakov Zar, founder and CEO of Lev.com, has spent six years building a system to fix exactly that. AI-native deal management, not a retrofitted CRM. Lev ingests documents, extracts deal facts, reso...

Most development firms are competing over 1.5% of US land.   The other 98.5% - 158 million parcels - exists. It just takes hours per parcel to analyze, which most teams can't afford to do at scale. So they don't. They fight over the same listed inventory everyone else can see.   Oliver Alexander, founder of Prophetic Software, built a platform to change that calculus. AI-interpreted zoning across...

Most hotel technology investment is stuck in a waiting room called Hilton approval.   Jake Wurzak, founder of DoveHill Capital - 20 hotel properties, 11 managed directly - has spent the past year mapping exactly where AI can and cannot reach inside his own portfolio. Brand lock-in is the actual bottleneck. Hilton, Marriott, and Hyatt control the core technology stack at every affiliated hotel. Rev...

Most commercial real estate brokerages are still running their operations on Excel, PowerPoint, and three separate tools that don't talk to each other. Every time data moves between them, something degrades. The broker pays for it in time.   Helen Calvin, CEO of Buildout - the platform that processes roughly 50% of U.S. commercial listings - sat down with me to walk through what end-to-end brokera...

Most CRE firms do not know how their data is performing. They know the assets. They do not know whether the numbers coming out of their ERP, their property management system, and their third-party data feeds are consistent, auditable, or actually connected.   When AI gets layered on top of that mess, it produces confident-sounding outputs nobody can verify.   LD Salmanson, co-founder and CEO of Ch...

My podcast/YouTube show guest today, Cameron Steele has spent the last several years tackling a problem most commercial real estate firms don't realize they have.   As the co-founder and CEO of Prophia, his focus is simple: turn the most important documents in CRE - leases - into usable intelligence.   The issue is that much of the economic blueprint of commercial real estate still lives inside le...

Most multifamily asset managers are still assembling reports.   Colin Green built software to eliminate that step entirely.   Colin is the founder of BubbleGum BI, a business intelligence platform designed specifically for multifamily asset managers. Before launching it, he built the tool for himself - nights and weekends - to solve the frustration of pulling rent rolls, cleaning spreadsheets, and...

The firms that win with AI in this cycle won't be the ones with the best models. They'll be the ones with the best data.   My Demo Day podcast/YouTube guest today is Michael Mandel, co-founder and CEO of CompStak.   Key takeaway: clean data is the moat - AI is the multiplier.   CompStak spent 14 years crowdsourcing lease and sales comps from nearly 50,000 brokers and research professionals. That f...

Most pitch decks are failing because PDFs no longer match how investors actually consume information, especially on mobile.   That is the problem Avi Solomon and his team at Pulse are solving with AI.   In brief: • Interactive decks increase conversions • AI now makes advanced pitch decks economically viable • Investors increasingly expect interactive, mobile-native formats   Pulse feels like a ca...

Hotels are not underperforming because demand is weak, they are underperforming because the economics of the guest relationship are still being managed manually.   That is the central takeaway from my recent Demo Day conversation with Luca Zambello, Founder, and Jason Lopez, VP of Revenue at Jurny.   [Full disclosure: I am an early investor in Jurny]   In brief: Hotels are leaving meaningful NOI o...

Want to screen (waay) more deal flow for your acquisition pipeline than you do currently? Here is exactly how to do that with AI (and I'm NOT talking about some clever new way to use ChatGPT).   𝘐𝘯 𝘣𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘧: 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘢𝘣𝘪𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘺 𝘵𝘰 𝘶𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘸𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘦 𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘦 𝘥𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘴 𝘢𝘤𝘤𝘶𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘭𝘺 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘣𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘦𝘹𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘤𝘦𝘴𝘴 𝘪𝘴 𝘢 𝘣𝘰𝘵𝘵𝘭𝘦𝘯𝘦𝘤𝘬 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘢𝘤𝘲𝘶𝘪𝘴𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴 𝘵𝘦𝘢𝘮𝘴. 𝘛𝘳𝘺𝘊𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘶𝘴, 𝘮𝘺 𝘭𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘴𝘵 𝘈𝘐 𝘱𝘰𝘥𝘤𝘢𝘴𝘵/𝘠𝘰𝘶𝘛𝘶𝘣𝘦 𝘴𝘩𝘰𝘸 𝘥𝘦𝘮𝘰, 𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘦𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘰...

AI in commercial real estate is usually framed around predictions and pricing.   In brief: Underwriting delays come from manual data extraction, not Excel. Institutional CRE teams automate the data layer, not the model. Parsing rent rolls and T12s is now a scale problem, not a staffing one. AI underwriting is being adopted first by lenders and servicers. Speed and consistency are emerging as under...

Most CRE teams are not losing deals because of capital, talent, or market access.   They are losing because they move too slowly because initial underwriting and deal marketing are still painfully manual across much of the industry.   Spreadsheets. Templates. Design tools. Email chains. Outsourced vendors.   All stitched together by habit.   That friction costs time, and time costs deals.   In my...

Introducing the Demo Day YouTube/Podcast   Demo Day is a new series focused on one simple idea: showing, not telling, where AI is actually revolutionizing commercial real estate.   No theory. No slide decks. Not a clever ChatGPT prompt.   Just live, on-screen demonstrations of AI tools you can use today to get a significant edge against your competitors.   If you think ChatGPT is all AI has to off...

My guest this week, Jeremy Roll, is a full-time professional passive investor with more than two decades of experience allocating capital across multiple real estate cycles. He is relentlessly data-driven, deeply immersed in macro and capital markets, and unapologetically conservative in how he thinks about risk.   That combination matters right now.   Jeremy is not trying to predict the next rate...

Mark Zandi is one of the few economists who can do two things at once: explain what is happening in the data, and explain why households experience it so differently. He is the chief economist at Moody's Analytics, and in our conversation, the last of my podcast series this year and the second of two Holiday Specials, he connected inflation, affordability, market structure, and geopolitics in a wa...

Ken Rogoff does not trade in headlines or market timing. He trades in history.   As Professor of Economics at Harvard and co-author of This Time Is Different , Rogoff has spent decades studying what happens when societies convince themselves old rules no longer apply. His latest book, Our Dollar, Your Problem , extends that lens to today's economy – and to the quiet assumptions underpinning U.S. f...