AI For Faster Operations + Better Decision-Making in Real Estate
Even though the real estate market is a hard nut to crack, as it has been slow in adopting new technologies, the vibrant discussions in media by PwC, Forbes, and numerous online PropTech blogs all come to the same conclusion: The emerging multi-billion-dollar PropTech sector is ripe to disrupt the multi-trillion-dollar real estate industry, and will do so in the next 2–5 years.
Artificial intelligence is the decisive buzzword in this momentous development. The term describes smart technologies that consciously perceive their environment and can learn from it in order to react autonomously to signals and make decisions. Those computer programs are able to understand, plan, think, and correct themselves. Thus, they can carry out tasks that would normally require human intervention.
Artificial Intelligence Will Change Real Estate
For the real estate industry this will have striking implications. Algorithms will increasingly adapt and evolve to more complex areas. At the moment these are used primarily in the realms of speech recognition and decision making. Artificial intelligence can automate manual/cognitive and routine/non-routine tasks, help people to accomplish tasks faster and better, help to improve decision-making, or automate decision-making processes without human intervention. In the long term, systems could significantly reduce poor decisions that currently occur due to a lack of data.
In the real estate industry, using artificial intelligence will not only improve the efficiency of operational tasks, but also change decision-making, PwC predicts in its Real Estate Asset Manager Benchmarking Survey of 2018.
Artificial Intelligence in Real Estate
This is already proven by the different PropTech startups, that offer various services with revolutionary potential. Those companies use artificial intelligence to:
- break down a growing index of information regarding variables that could affect the quality and the price of a property.
- offer property appraisals of large portfolios for automated valuation.
- recognise relationships and patterns in large data sets, in order to examine effects of possible future scenarios.
- replace subjective assessments by actual data and insights, so that sound, property-specific decisions can be made.
- review diversified architectural qualities automatically to facilitate decision-making.
- check fit accuracy of property to the portfolio matrix.
PropTech Application Examples
To give more precise examples, artificial intelligence can be used to:
- simulate actual living conditions of planned sites. The data of view, daylight access or visual axes, calculated automatically, can help to better grasp a property’s quality.
- to calculate maximum construction volumes for a site or check if a building design is conflicting with regional building codes or standards.
- to translate architectural features to qualitative psychological impacts in order to find best practice architectural solutions.
- assess architectural qualities to improve price calculations, with positive outcomes for investors, landlords, tenants or owners.
Do you think artificial intelligence can improve operations and make better decision than humans in real estate? Comment if you have some examples where this is the case!
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