AI Solutions in Commercial Real Estate

Artificial intelligence (AI) tools have changed the way commercial real estate teams approach data management and administrative projects. Content development and ‘chatbot’ programs can help to eliminate repetitive, mundane tasks to allow employees to focus on critical analyses, creative solutions, and person-to-person interaction and relationship building. While AI can certainly shoulder some of the most time-consuming work, it should not be looked at as a tool to replace jobs, but rather to support and enhance an employee’s daily output. AI programs still require human guidance and review to ensure emotional factors are considered and data is interpreted and prioritized appropriately.

AI in Real Estate

All phases of the commercial real estate cycle can benefit from AI to optimize processes and increase efficiency:

• In architecture and design, AI programs can leverage employee movement and interaction data to suggest layouts that will enhance collaboration, productivity, and wellbeing among employees.
• Construction and project managers can utilize AI tools to track budgets, generate contracts, and issue purchase orders based on defined sourcing criteria.
• During legal reviews, AI tools can process and summarize real estate documents through search, text generation, extraction, and translation.
• Chatbot programs can also support property management teams by monitoring rent payments, streamlining maintenance requests, and, in the future, tracking energy usage and providing related insights and recommendations.

Best Practices for Adoption

Before leveraging AI to streamline your data or administrative processes, be sure to audit your inputs so that databases are organized, accurate, and consistent. Starting with clean and updated data will improve the quality of the AI program outputs. You’ll also want to review proofs of concept before investing in any AI technology to ensure the program is feasible, and then define goals, milestones, and metrics for success to monitor the initiative. Once you have your databases ready and an AI program in place, consider piloting it first for a high-impact process with limited variables that can be replicated across a large group of assets. Minimizing the variables for your first attempts will avoid adding new risks or confusion to the program. Finally, be sure to engage employees early in the adoption and rollout and obtain feedback on how the program can be improved or can better assist your teams.

AI is incredibly powerful and rapidly evolving, and forward-thinking teams are experimenting to unlock its full potential in real estate. With the right guardrails and guidance in place, AI can perform a company’s monotonous, tedious tasks to free up employees’ time for creative problem solving and ultimately streamline business processes and decision making.