Exploring AI's Role: Institutional Real Estate, Inc. Spotlights Prophia

San Francisco, May 1st, 2024 — “AI’s role in real estate revolves around data. It’s an industry-wide challenge—even the largest firms in the industry don’t have the technology to solve this problem,” Prophia Co-Founder, Cameron Steele, concluded in a recent feature in Institutional Real Estate, Inc. (IREI), “Scaling is crucial.”

CRE leaders are becoming increasingly aware that technology is the answer to better portfolio data management. Specifically, AI adoption. But this has persistently caused challenges for CRE organizations—no matter team size or portfolio complexity.

But why? CRE portfolio data is extensive, and no one technology provider has discovered the best way to organize and structure it all. Additionally, CRE leaders can’t rely on public data the way other industries can for their AI solutions. These are just some of the challenges casting a shadow on widespread AI adoption in CRE. Then you factor in market and economic challenges, and suddenly it no longer feels like the time or place for taking a risk with what seems like a technology trend.

While that may be true, many of the CRE experts in Lewis Dayton’s piece for Institutional Real Estate, Inc. acknowledge that playing the waiting game could get costly. “[CRE leaders] are realizing they can’t operate the way they’ve been historically — they have to think differently. Couple that with the question consuming events and cocktail parties, ‘what is your AI strategy?’, commercial real estate leaders better have a good answer and a strategy in place if they want to remain competitive,” Cameron Steele explains.

It’s uncertain exactly how far AI’s novelty will carry adoption in industries like commercial real estate, but many CRE organizations have successfully adopted and integrated AI into their important business processes, and they aren’t looking back.

Radom Capital, for example, has been a Prophia user for a few years now, and every quarter their team uncovers a new efficiency thanks to automation and predictive portfolio intelligence, from CAM reconciliation to onboarding new team members.

So what makes Prophia different? For one, Prophia’s AI is trained exclusively on private CRE data. This makes Prophia’s training dataset the most accurate database in the market today. Additionally, Prophia works differently than other technology platforms; it treats portfolio data as dynamic. Critical lease data is never siloed. When a new document is uploaded it interconnects with previously uploaded documents to create a data network, increasing accuracy and the speed of business intelligence.

It’s only a matter of time before tools like Prophia start to create ripple effects throughout the industry, revolutionizing the speed of CRE business, and making leasing faster, valuation more accurate, and portfolio performance easier to track. And this is just the tip of the iceberg for AI.

“Five years from now, I think you’ll be able to point at a parcel, tell it in prose what it is that you want to see it design, and have it know what the current cost is of all of those inputs,” describes Zigg Capital’s founding partner, Dave Eisenberg, “We’re going to have so many more ways to visualize and even just understand what the options are for creating physical assets.”

CRE remains a very in-person business today where many deals are still signed in an office on physical paper. However, with AI powering business intelligence in the back end and upstream of these important conversations, it feels like the possibilities for business innovation are endless and this technology trend feels more like a mainstay.
You can find Lewis Dayton’s full piece, and additional insight from Cameron Steele, on Institutional Real Estate, Inc.

About Institutional Real Estate, Inc.:
Institutional Real Estate, Inc. is a global media firm sharing insight about the institutional real estate and infrastructure marketplaces through publications, events, and services. IREI routinely publishes special reports, investment guides, and publications that keep subscribers informed with news and perspectives on the trends happening in the real estate investment and private equity sectors.

About Prophia:
Prophia is the leading provider of AI technology for lease abstraction and commercial real estate data management. Trusted by top CRE investors nationwide, Prophia empowers landlords with real-time data and portfolio insights, providing a competitive advantage in mitigating risks and revealing business opportunities.