Mitrankur (Mit) Majumdar, Senior Vice President and Global Head of Services at Infosys.
With AI tools becoming more powerful by the day, a growing number of real estate players are adopting them for their ability to deliver tangible business benefits. The market for AI in real estate is estimated to reach a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 35% over the next five years, crossing $1,335 billion by 2029.
Applications For AI Across Real Estate Ecosystems
AI, along with augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), drones and predictive/prescriptive analytics, are enhancing operating efficiencies, reducing costs, improving customer journeys/experiences and unlocking new revenue streams across the real estate value chain. Let’s take a look at how a combination of these technologies is being utilized in different areas of this industry.
Realtors
• Generating Marketing Content: AI and drones can be used to create more attractive and detailed videos of properties and their surroundings. Generative AI can create marketing content, recommend online advertising options and create multiple listings to boost SEO efficacy. AI tools can also generate instant transcripts based on call recordings with prospects and customers. By combining what customers say with other data about them, realtors can create personas that more accurately reflect customers’ needs and preferences.
• Property Tours/Walkthroughs: With AI, buyers can remotely “walk through” properties, an experience you can further enrich by adding interactive features such as visualizing the effect of renovations, changing paint colors or placement options for furniture. In my experience, this can help save all parties time and money and speed up go/no-go decisions.
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• Faster Deal-Closing: AI tools can analyze large volumes of documents in a much shorter time, unearthing information around price points of recent transactions and flagging potential risks due to disputes or compliance issues.
• Speedier And More Robust Valuation: For a specific micro market, AI tools can forecast future price trends more accurately by integrating recent transaction values with other data, such as historical price movements, demographics, crime rates, zoning regulations, infrastructure development and economic indicators.
• Customer Support: AI-powered virtual assistants can provide personalized advice to clients, address queries in any language and respond on a 24/7 basis.
Developers And Builders
AI can enhance both the art and the science of developing properties. Finding a good location, mapping it for the right use, coming up with exciting designs, and then executing the project are all key steps of the process.
• Site Analysis: The combination of drones, computer vision and AI can speed up analysis of site topography, as well as geotechnical and hydrogeological conditions. AI models can also integrate site data with climate data, as well as draw upon prior project designs and execution experiences to improve project design and identify potential risks.
• Planning And Design: AI-based architecture tools can generate detailed 3D models using 2D plans or images in minutes. This can allow you to serve more clients at one time and at a lower cost. Creating 3D real estate models could itself be a new revenue stream.
• Site/Project Management: During construction, AI combined with computer vision can enhance the quality of remote supervision of project sites. Safety standards can be raised by detecting accidents and unauthorized access or pilferage. Using data from sensors mounted on various equipment on the site, AI models can predict the need for preventive maintenance. Digital twinning can validate AI output and thus enhance the ability to remotely manage projects.
• Sustainability: AI-enabled planning can reduce energy consumption by design. You can design AI models to integrate variables such as weather forecasts and occupancy patterns on an ongoing basis to optimize heating, ventilation and HVAC systems in buildings, thereby boosting sustainability.
Property Managers
• Tenant Screening: AI tools can be used to trawl a wider set of a potential tenant’s data, including the applicant’s records at previous properties or any run-ins with the law.
• Tenant Management: Once a tenant moves in, AI tools can help automatically track rent payments and defaults and issue past-due notices. You can also use it to capture maintenance requests from tenants through voice, email or other messaging platforms and, after due analysis, route them to relevant contractors, as well as generate an audit trail of actions taken for future reference. AI tools can also schedule periodic maintenance of properties and common amenities, communicate details to all tenants and answer queries. And having access to data like frequency of complaints or delays in rent payment can allow you to gain insights into the causes of tenant unhappiness and take steps to address them.
• Security: Computer vision integrated with AI can complement human security guards by providing efficient and accurate tracking of suspicious people or activities.
How To Maximize Your Real Estate AI Investments
Start by identifying where AI can add the most value to your business. This may be generating leads for realtors, ensuring project delivery within budget and on schedule for builders/developers, or optimizing occupancy and tenant satisfaction while minimizing costs for property managers.
Once you have outlined your priorities and existing AI investments, scale your pilot programs or scope out new ones. Do not go for a full-blown project without a pilot program. Apart from choosing the right AI models and tools, it’s important that you be able to make informed decisions around your IT infrastructure, its data integration capabilities with other systems, and cybersecurity. AI adoption may thus be an opportunity to upgrade other elements of your IT landscape so that legacy bottlenecks don’t erode your ROI from AI.
Looking into AI use cases from other businesses in your field can be ideal for the cross-pollination of ideas. Your IT team or advisors can draw upon these cases and their own AI experience to improve the design, implementation, training and management of your tools. Over time, this can also help your team uncover new enhancements and use cases and even create new customized models.
Depending on how much AI your business has already embraced, focus on the low-hanging fruit. Generative AI for marketing, customer support, tenant management, site management and architecture planning are all potential candidates for straightforward pilot projects. Finally, keep in mind that many people are naturally resistent to change, so take a steady approach rather than rushing in. When your customers and employees start to see the benefits of new AI tool integrations, their resistance will likely reduce. In my experience, this behavioral shift is crucial to sustaining the benefits that AI can deliver.
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