Real Estate Really Wants to Use AI, But It’s Not Fully Ready: Survey

On Tuesday, investment and deal management platform Dealpath released the results of its survey of how real estate investors perceive the role of artificial intelligence in the industry. The survey indicated that the respondents increasingly see AI as a must-have, but that organizations aren’t fully ready for the technology’s uses.

The commissioned survey, which included 100 institutional investors managing more than $500 million in assets, revealed a significant shift in attitudes toward AI, with 96 percent planning to increase investment in AI despite certain barriers.

Along with the nearly unanimous intention to increase investment, 90 percent have or are actively implementing AI leads/teams, but 93 percent cited significant barriers to adoption. The top challenges included lack of internal expertise (43 percent), regulatory/compliance concerns (42 percent), budget constraints (39 percent) and decentralized data (36 percent).

The disconnect highlights that while the industry is eager to adopt AI, many firms still lack the infrastructure and capabilities to effectively leverage it, suggesting that the industry’s bullish sentiment is outpacing preparedness, Dealpath said in a statement.

“Our goal with the survey was to understand how we could meet the market we serve and where users are right now in terms of their AI journey,” said Ursula Sage, senior director of product and design at Dealpath. “We’ve built our own vision and strategy for the platform and how we want to enable our users’ workflows with AI, but we also wanted to understand where our users and the market is today. The survey gives us insights into how they’re thinking about their investments in AI, where they’re focusing and what the barriers to adoptions are, so that as we evolve our platform we can keep those in mind and design AI functionality in a way that will make adoptions really easy and deliver value.”

Among the survey’s findings is that 100 percent of the respondents are adopting or planning to adopt AI; fragmented data across multiple platforms is slowing down AI readiness; and 36 percent are actively scaling solutions, with 13 percent piloting bespoke tools and 43 percent already using AI tools like ChatGPT, Copilot or Claude for basic tasks.

In addition, the survey found that there is a data infrastructure push, with 98 percent saying improving data systems for AI is a top priority for the next two years, while 74 percent already have AI governance policies in place. Leading uses include document analysis (67 percent), portfolio monitoring (61 percent), investment memo creation (56 percent), and offering memorandum/flyer information extraction (49 percent).

Looking ahead, 96 percent plan to increase AI investment in the next year, while 68 percent see AI as critical to their long-term strategy. The expected return on investment focuses on faster deal evaluation and closing (61 percent), increased efficiency (61 percent), more accurate underwriting (50 percent) and higher deal velocity (43 percent).

Dealpath commissioned the survey of senior-level and C-suite executives at leading institutional real estate investment firms across North America with assets under management (AUM) ranging from mid-market to global institutions because it saw a shift in attitudes toward AI use.

“In the last year, there’s definitely been a shift in our clients’ posture toward AI,” Sage said. “There was skepticism, or maybe even fear, particularly of its accuracy. And accuracy in data is our business. The technology has had great advancements, even just in the last few months. Probably since March, a lot of institutional and real estate investors have, especially at the executive level, changed their positioning on AI and are accelerating their funding and even introducing mandates.”

The attitude shift came around the first half of 2025, she added. 

“There’s an interesting dichotomy there,” Sage said, “because they’re saying, ‘Let’s invest more.’ But, at the same time, there’s a lot of headwinds. And, so, we wanted to understand that better.”

Itself a self-proclaimed AI-powered investment management platform for real estate, Dealpath says it is used by 300-plus institutional firms and has supported more than $10 trillion in transactions across leading global institutions. These include Blackstone, Nuveen, LaSalle, CBRE Investment Management, MetLife, Newmark, Oxford Properties, New York Life, UBS, Manulife and DWS — as well as numerous mid-market and regional organizations.

“I will say that where the ROI is tangible at this point, is still an open question for all of these investors, but there’s definitely a sense that there must be an investment in AI right now,” Sage said. “And we’re seeing that across the board. Whether they’re investing or not, they understand that there’s a big change coming and they need to be thinking about integrating AI more. As a matter of fact, most of the respondents indicated that it’s a top priority for the next 12 to 24 months to invest in AI.”

Certain sticking points remain in investors’ concerns about AI, though.

“Where they are still wary is really on the underwriting front,” Sage said. “I think that in terms of handling numbers well and reducing hallucinations, AI still has issues. We are seeing improvement up front, but that’s probably where people are being more cautious. But the technology is doing a really good job of addressing certain needs. So to be specific, we’re seeing a lot of investments and interest. As a company, we have been building up functionality in the initial screening data, intake of new listings, and then the initial screening of listings and deals.”

Finding ways in which to improve in-house technology to better use rapidly evolving AI is now a focus of many CRE companies.

“I think AI expertise is becoming more of a thing,” Sage said. “A lot of people are investing time in learning and development when it comes to AI. So I think the barrier there will be lowered. A lot more people who understand AI will be working with AI.

“On the budget constraint front, a lot of the tools are in place. There’s been a lot of investments by the behemoths of AI that are helping a lot of the costs being driven down. We’ve seen that even in just the last year at Dealpath. And then with regulatory compliance, there’s a lot of companies that are putting in place the frameworks. I think their important thing will be partnering with the right service providers.”

The survey’s results did offer some surprises.

“I think, going in, I was surprised by how far ahead larger firms are relative to smaller firms,” Sage added. “Working in tech and in Silicon Valley, what you tend to see is smaller firms being more nimble and quick. And, so, I assumed we would see something similar in the space — our investment firms adopting AI tools. So that’s something that surprised me from the survey: how far ahead of the curve the larger institutional investors are.

“The other thing I would say surprised me is learning from the adoption curve in the last 20 years of cloud computing. I don’t think it’s controversial to say that real estate has been a laggard there and late to adopt, so I assumed we would see similar trends with AI.  But that’s not been the case. They’re going all in. They understand what’s at stake and the importance of adopting AI. There’s definitely a collective vision of what it can help do. So I’m super excited to be in the space and helping realize some of that vision.”

Philip Russo can be reached at prusso@commercialobserver.com.