Reflecting on the presentation I did last week for my Southern Nevada SIOR
Chapter and wanted to share a few things about AI in CRE.
I get why people think this will pass.
Every few years something shows up that is going to change the industry forever:
blockchain, the metaverse, some new proptech platform that promises to
automate your entire pipeline. And then it quietly doesn’t…and then you’ve
wasted hours learning it for no reason. The hype cycle runs its course, and the
people who waited it out look pretty smart for sitting it out in retrospect. The tide
rolls in. The tide rolls back out. So the skepticism I hear from senior CRE
professionals about AI is not irrational. It is, in a lot of cases, pattern-matched
experience.
Here is what I think is different this time, and I will keep it to one observation:
the outputs are already showing up in people’s work. Not just in demos and
vendor pitch decks but actual client deliverables, in how fast people come back
with analysis, in how a follow-up email reads when it lands in a client’s inbox.
The tool is already in the room whether you brought it or not.
That is a different conversation than whether AI will eventually change
commercial real estate. It is already changing what your clients are receiving
from your competition. And that is a personal brand question.
What your deliverables are actually signaling
Every time you send a client a comp pull, a follow-up memo, a market summary,
or a simple email recap after a meeting, you are communicating something
beyond the content of the document. You are signaling how you work. How fast
you move. How much care went into it. And increasingly, whether you are
running the tools that are available to you or not.
The broker who comes back with a sharp comp analysis the same afternoon a
client asks for it is saying something different than the one who takes three days.
The developer who returns a pressure-tested pro forma with the top five risk
flags clearly articulated is having a different conversation than the one who says
they will get to it. The advisor who has a clean, well-written client recap in the
inbox before the morning ends is operating in a different gear than the one still
drafting it.
None of that is about talent. Most of it is about setup and the discipline to learn
new things.
I have sat with a lot of senior CRE professionals and watched them work in these
tools. What I see consistently: they are running on factory defaults. Every session
starts from scratch. The AI does not know who they are, what market they work
in, what their voice sounds like, or what they are actually trying to accomplish. It
is guessing, and the output reflects that.
This is not a skills problem. These are not people who are bad at technology. They
are people who picked up the tool and started typing, which is exactly what most
of us do with anything new. The issue is that there is a setup layer that almost
nobody does, and it is the layer where most of the leverage lives.
A custom system prompt is your standing brief. You write it once, and every
conversation starts with the AI already knowing you are an industrial broker in
Las Vegas, that you want complete sentences and no markdown, that it should tell
you when it does not know something rather than guessing, and that for complex
work it should ask you two or three clarifying questions before it starts. That
brief changes the quality of every output that follows. Not marginally.
Substantially.
Memory turned on means the tool builds a picture of you over time instead of
starting from zero. Project folders mean that when you open a deal, everything
the AI needs to know about that deal is already loaded. The client priorities. The
LOI draft. The relevant emails. It knows the deal cold before you type a word.
One evening. That is realistically what the setup takes. And on the other side of it,
the outputs are different enough that clients start noticing, even when they
cannot name why. This is what a rising tide actually looks like in a profession: not
a dramatic shift, but a floor that quietly moves up and does not come back down.
The two workflows I walked through at the SIOR lunch last week are good
illustrations because they are not theoretical.
Example 1: Client research. Before heading into an important meeting with a
Buyer or Tenant, I try to understand everything I can about their business, who
their ideal customer is and what trends are affecting them. When I was selling a
building to a med spa user, I researched every component of that business model
and asked my LLM for a current SWOT analysis on the industry, nationally and
locally. I’ve always felt more vested in that client’s success because I understand
what the business owner is facing and I enjoy providing value that could help a
person that buys from me continue being successful. It’s a social contract really…
we are providing services and being paid handsomely so why not invest what
knowledge we have back into the person that hired us?
Example 2: LOI redlines. Upload your original (if you are concerned about
privacy, simply redact the parties names or give them an alias) and the landlord’s
redlined version, run a structured comparison prompt, and get back a table:
every material change, the direction of risk, the magnitude, and a one-sentence
recommendation on whether to accept, push back, or counter. The same analysis
that used to take hours of careful markup, done in a few minutes. Multiple
brokers who ran this told me they found things they had glossed over. That is not
the tool replacing judgment. That is the tool making sure your judgment is
applied to everything, not just the sections you had time to focus on.
These are not edge cases. They are repeatable, in any deal, starting tonight.
AI fluency shows up in your deliverables before you say a word about it. JLL has
Hank. CBRE has Ellis. Cushman has their own internal platform. The national
firms are not experimenting anymore. They are operationalizing, and the brokers
there are being handed tools whether they asked for them or not. The question
for those brokers is whether they are driving how AI shows up in their practice
or just along for the ride. How effective are the tools if only a few learn them and
use them?
For the independents and regional players, the math is actually interesting. The
national platforms are deploying enterprise-wide, which means standardized. A
well-configured individual setup, built specifically around how you work, your
deals, your clients, your voice, can be more effective than a generic firm-wide
rollout. That is a real window, and it is open right now.
Being tech-forward used to be a differentiator in this business. It is becoming
something closer to table stakes at the top of the market because the gap between
a well-configured setup and a default one is now visible in actual work product.
The tide is already in. Clients are not going to tell you they noticed. They are just
going to keep calling the broker who turns comprehensive, important items
around faster
I do not think anyone needs to overhaul how they work. The setup I described
takes an evening, not a transformation. Write a real custom system prompt (ask
your LLM to write you one!), one that actually describes who you are and how
you work, not a generic one. Turn on Memory. Build one project folder for your
most active deal and put three files in it.
Then run something you would have done anyway: an LOI comparison, a follow-
up email, a client recap. See what comes back.
That is a low-risk experiment with a high upside. If it is useful, you have just
changed what your deliverables look like going forward. If it is not, you are out
an evening.
I know which bet I would make.
A rising tide lifts all boats, so if more of us are using AI effectively, the collective
improvement of services being delivered helps us keep thriving in the short term
and wards off threats of technology replacing us in the long term. And make no
mistake, this is an existential threat that will wipe out incompetent people from
the bottom of the bell curve, commoditize the middle and hoist top performers to
“unstoppable” mode. It is my hope that more people in my industry will use this
tech competently because that behavior protects ALL of us from severe
disruption…except the lazy ones…they can leave. 😝Just remember, AI is just the
means to enhance and amplify what you are already doing every day to create
your success. If you are already in the top of the curve its your time to shine and
cement that position forever.
