Launching the Next Wave of Innovation in Commercial Real Estate with AgentMile

Jaco Swanepoel
Natmin Pure Escrow
Published in
3 min readApr 16, 2019

This is a guest post from AgentMile about their Innovation in Commercial Real Estate.

A backbone of every economy, commercial real estate (CRE) is one of the largest global asset groups. It amounts to a staggering $3385 trillion globally, according to IBISWorld.

But there’s even more to it. This industry is growing dynamically, with investors keen to seek value in CRE. The latest JLL report shows that global commercial property investment just hit the highest Q1 level in 10 years at $165 billion, 15% higher than the same period last year.

When you think about an industry like this, you probably picture sophisticated technology and software that helps commercial brokers manage their diverse portfolios. And yet that’s not always the case — in fact, the CRE industry is notorious for its hesitancy in adopting new tech.

According to the International Data Corporation’s global survey of CRE executives commissioned by Argus Software,

‘‘nearly one-third of the global CRE industry is still using spreadsheets as their primary tool for asset and portfolio management functions. As a result, there is potentially US $11 trillion globally of CRE assets managed within inefficient and error-prone spreadsheets.”

And this is not the only challenge CRE professionals are struggling with…

  • Property search via MLS is lengthy and inefficient. There is no process to verify data that brokers list for accuracy and the information is often dated.
  • Pre-lease due diligence checks are time-consuming. Verifying the property history, previous owners and tenants, compliance records, etc. is done manually and often depends on the physical availability of documents.
  • Disparate and inefficient property/cash flow management. Each party in a CRE transaction — and there are a great many — depends on others to commit to their transactional obligations which is time-consuming.
  • Industry data is kept behind closed doors. Brokers are reluctant to share industry data such as lease comps for fear it could be commoditized.
  • Decision-making is getting increasingly complicated. Brokers lackindustry benchmarks, valuation and cash flow analysis, investment and debt management to build good models and identify the most promising locations.

AgentMile: Revolutionizing Commercial Real Estate

AgentMile is on track to transform the CRE industry by introducing the first decentralized CRE leasing platform powered by AI.

Having worked with real estate professionals since 2015, we have seen first hand that this industry is ripe for blockchain adoption. This inspired us to come up with a solution to transform the CRE experience for brokers, landlords and tenants. AgentMile platform is on track to deliver:

  • smart and efficient property search via a blockchain MLS;
  • digital identities of people and properties on the blockchain to facilitate due diligence checks;
  • Smart Contracts to simplify property/cash flow management and reduce transaction dependency;
  • industry benchmarks and data open for all, yet incorruptible and not subject to commoditization;
  • AI for better decision-making;
  • immutable reviews, ratings and much more.

Deploying blockchain for real estate transactions and land/title registries is also gaining increased support from governments in North America, Europe, Dubai and Japan. All these positive signs indicate that the commercial real estate world is ready to embrace a faster, better and more affordable way of doing business.

If you want to be part of this exciting change and join the next wave of innovation in the CRE, join us by visiting: https://agentmile.com/.

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