AI will have a profound impact on the world as we know it. As we move beyond basic machine learning and into a world of Generative AI, the potential is virtually limitless. I’m not going to pretend that I know the future but I do have some suspicions on how AI and Machine Learning could affect our beloved industry of commercial real estate. Here they are:
Property Management
While fixing clogged toilets will need human intervention for years to come, many of the administrative duties including answering phone calls and sending messages and emails to tenants will be performed with AI bots. With a ton of data points to use, large property management platforms are already implementing AI solutions which could drastically cut human labor hours on the administrative side.
Advertising
A no brainer which is already affecting every industry but advertising in real estate will see a huge transformation with the ability to spit out content, edit videos and SEO optimize copy at lightning speed with high quality outputs. Who better to understand SEO than the bots who created it!
Market Analysis
Already equipped with masses of data both public and private, company’s such as Costar, Crexi as well as the big brokerages will have incredible insight that may have been beyond even the brightest of human analysts. However, like the stock market, I’m bearish on AI’s ability to consistently produce accurate market forecasts. No doubt its analysis though will affect market peaks and troughs as humans become ever more reliant on the technology.
Property Inspections
I’ve done a 180 on this one, I used to be of the belief that property inspections will always be done by humans as there are too many variables in physical spaces. However just seeing what some of the current AI technology is doing, I have no doubt this process will become machine learning assisted in the very near future. Inspection does require physical aspects such as testing equipment, however a lot of the trade is visual. With millions of data points to learn from, an AI system could conceivably spot potential issues from visuals (photos) alone.
Much of AI’s progress in the Real Estate world will come down to data. In our industry, data is not always available or shared – but as entities such as CoStar, brokerages like CBRE and JLL, local MLS’s and even Hedge Funds, start to collate more and more data on real estate, we will see the greater impact of Machine Learning and Generative AI on all our daily lives.
