While geopolitical and economic risks loom large for real estate executives, artificial intelligence has become the industry’s most powerful driver of change, reshaping how firms operate and compete.
Speaking at New York University’s annual REIT Symposium in New York on Wednesday, executives and investors provided a snapshot of how AI is rapidly becoming a core business tool. Allowing the technology to review stacks of legal documents helps speed up dealmaking, they said. Landlords can feel more confident playing hardball when it comes to raising rents. Properties are able to come to market quicker.
“You are at a competitive disadvantage if you aren’t using [AI]. It’s clearly making a big impact in terms of capital market advisory.”
When it comes to AI, “we think of speed,” said Brian T. Finnegan, chief executive officer and president of Brixmor Property Group, said at the event hosted by the Schack Institute of Real Estate. By using AI to automate lease generation and reduce the time its legal team spends reviewing restrictions, Brixmor has cut lease‑negotiation timelines by about 15% over the past two years. “We've seen some real efficiencies there,” he said.
The grocery‑anchored retail real estate investment trust is deploying AI to spot early signs of tenant stress, including identifying late rent payments that might signal operational issues. The technology is also being used to support rent collections by helping audit tenants and verify that online curbside pickup sales are properly reported. “We’ve seen some wins there as well,” Finnegan said.
Help with documents, self-driving cars
As adoption spreads, executives said AI is quickly becoming unavoidable.
Conor Flynn, CEO at Kimco Realty, cited an example where AI saved the retail REIT roughly three weeks during a merger involving about 200,000 pages of documents. Kimco is also studying how AI can help determine the highest and best use of parking lots as the arrival of self-driving taxis reshapes demand, he said.
Investors echoed the view that AI remains in its early stages, with companies that control large, high‑quality datasets holding a clear advantage.
“We are still in very early innings,” said David Roth, partner and co‑head of U.S. real estate at Ares Management, which oversees more than $620 billion in assets. “We look at enormous amounts of data. Being one of the largest owners of real estate, one of your largest competitive advantages is you can use data from your own portfolio, but you can only do that if you can access it,” he said.
“We’re building the tools … to make us better investors, better [real estate] owners … better communicators, internally and externally,” Roth said.
New level of efficiency
Ralph Rosenberg, chairman of real assets at private equity giant KKR, agreed. KKR is a major data center owner, with the property type representing about 15% of its infrastructure portfolio, he said.
The firm is using AI to “mine data and to aggregate information” from its properties to stay “front footed” on vacancy trends and supply‑and‑demand dynamics, enabling it to be “more aggressive” on rents, Rosenberg said.
AI also is changing how quickly capital markets firms and power brokerages operate. What once took four to five weeks to bring a property to market for Eastdil Secured now takes days, said Kristin Gannon, managing director at Eastdil, which recently agreed to be acquired by Savills. The firm has also been running internal analyst competitions focused on AI adoption, she said.
“You are at a competitive disadvantage if you aren’t using” AI, Gannon said. “It’s clearly making a big impact in terms of capital market advisory. We are just able to drive efficiency that didn’t exist before.”
Office leasing worries
Concerns about job losses tied to AI have weighed on brokerages and office landlords amid worries that automation could disrupt business models or reduce demand for space.
Newmark and SL Green Realty are among those that have pushed back on those fears. Newmark’s CEO Barry Gosin, for instance, has described AI as a business “accelerant” while SL Green’s CEO Marc Holliday has pointed to increased leasing from AI-driven firms.
“We are seeing underlying AI companies being aggressive and taking space,” Colin Connolly, president and chief executive of Cousins Properties, an office REIT focused on the Sun Belt, said at the event. “It’s a big catalyst for us.”
Cousins hasn’t seen any reduction in tenant demand tied to AI, Connolly said, adding the company currently has 1.2 million square feet of active leases in the works, the largest pipeline in its history.