In 2025, AI in commercial real estate is transforming how firms manage leases, contracts, and cash flow. For VPs, directors, and owners in the CRE industry, adopting AI isn’t just a tech upgrade – it’s a strategic imperative. As one industry expert put it, “AI won’t replace real estate people. AI will replace real estate people who don’t have AI.” In other words, leveraging AI tools (often called AI agents for their ability to act autonomously on tasks) is now key to staying competitive and efficient.

Leading commercial real estate firms are rapidly embracing AI for a range of use cases, from automating tedious paperwork to uncovering hidden insights in their portfolios. Major CRE software providers are also integrating AI into their platforms, validating that this trend is here to stay. According to Knight Frank’s 2025 CRE survey, while many organizations are still early in adoption, optimism is high – nearly half of companies expect high AI adoption within a year to drive operational efficiency . The opportunity is clear: AI can handle labor-intensive processes in minutes instead of days, with greater accuracy and consistency than manual workflows.

In this post, we’ll explore the top 5 use cases for AI in commercial real estate professionals in 2025:

• AI-Powered Lease Abstraction – automatically extracting key terms from leases
  
• Intelligent Contract Analysis – reviewing and analyzing contracts with machine speed
  
• Offering Memorandum Drafting – generating investment memos using AI assistance
  
• Invoice Processing & AP Automation – streamlining accounts payable with AI
  
• Due Diligence Document Review – accelerating property due diligence with AI insights
  

Each of these use cases delivers practical benefits – time savings, reduced risk, cost efficiency, and newfound insights – that can revolutionize your real estate operations. Let’s dive into each one in detail.

1. AI-Powered Lease Abstraction in Commercial Real Estate

Lease abstraction is the process of summarizing lengthy lease agreements into key terms and data points. It’s a foundational task for asset managers and lease administrators, but it’s notoriously time-consuming. In fact, manually reading and abstracting a commercial lease can take 3–5 hours per lease on average – and complex leases may require a full day’s work. This means even a modest portfolio of properties can tie up staff with weeks of tedious document review. The traditional approach also carries a risk of human error; important clauses (like renewal options or expense caps) can be missed, leading to costly mistakes down the line.

AI-powered lease abstraction is changing the game for CRE teams. Modern AI agents use OCR (optical character recognition) and NLP (natural language processing) to extract critical lease details in minutes . They can pull out tenant names, lease start and end dates, rent schedules, renewal options, security deposit info, escalation clauses, and more – essentially generating a structured lease summary that would take humans hours to compose. For example, one platform reported reducing lease processing time from about 3 hours to just 7 minutes per document in tests . Even accounting for a human review step, organizations are seeing 70–90% faster lease abstractions with AI assistance on average .

Key benefits of AI lease abstraction include:

• Dramatic Time Savings: Instead of an employee spending half a day per lease, an AI agent can distill the same lease in a fraction of the time. This boosts productivity – one full-time staffer might go from abstracting only a couple of leases per day to reviewing dozens that AI has pre-processed. MRI Software noted one client cut 90% of the time spent on lease abstraction after adopting AI .
  
• Cost Reduction: By speeding up work and reducing labor needs, AI lowers the cost of lease administration. Firms have reported 50% lower abstraction costs using AI-driven contract intelligence tools, and even saved 7–10 business days in due diligence during acquisitions thanks to faster lease reviews . Some solutions advertise up to 90% cost savings versus manual processing , especially when replacing expensive outside abstractors or attorneys.
  
• Accuracy & Risk Mitigation: AI extraction tools achieve very high accuracy (often 90–95%+ in identifying key terms) , rivaling or exceeding human performance. This reduces the risk of missed clauses or data entry errors. For instance, an AI can instantly flag if a critical clause is missing (e.g. no exclusivity clause in a retail lease) or if calculated rents don’t match the lease document – catching issues that might slip past a tired human reviewer. Fewer errors in lease abstracts translate to fewer downstream problems like missed deadlines or billing mistakes.
  
• Immediate Data Accessibility: Once leases are abstracted by AI, the data (rent rolls, expiration dates, options schedules, etc.) becomes easily searchable and analyzable. CRE executives gain real-time visibility into their lease portfolios – for example, quickly querying how many leases expire next year or which contracts have pandemic clauses. This was previously difficult when information was trapped in PDFs. AI unlocks these insights, enabling better portfolio strategy and risk management.
  

How Kolena helps: Kolena’s AI platform delivers automated lease abstraction that is both fast and accurate. It can parse through lengthy lease documents (and amendments) and output a concise summary of all key terms *“accurately and in minutes, not weeks.” By eliminating the busy work of combing through leases, Kolena’s AI agent ensures that critical details are instantly accessible and no important clause goes unnoticed. The platform even highlights discrepancies or unusual terms (for example, a missing insurance clause or an atypical escalation), providing AI-powered insights that help asset managers make informed decisions . The result is a lease administration process that’s faster, cheaper, and more reliable than ever before.

2. Offering Memorandum Drafting with AI

In commercial real estate, preparing an Offering Memorandum (OM) or investment memorandum is a critical step when marketing a property or raising capital for a deal. These documents can be hefty – dozens of pages with property descriptions, financial summaries, lease overviews, market analysis, and more. Traditionally, drafting an OM is an intensive process: analysts gather data from multiple sources (leases, rent rolls, appraisals, market comps), then write and compile the content, all while ensuring the final product looks polished and professional. It can take days or weeks to produce a high-quality offering memo for a single asset. In fast-moving markets, that time lag can mean missed opportunities.

AI agents for document drafting, especially those powered by generative AI (like GPT models), are revolutionizing how OMs and investment memos are created. An AI can rapidly generate text and compile data for various sections of the memo. For instance, given property data and financial inputs, an AI agent could draft a property overview section, complete with a description of the asset, location highlights, and key financial metrics. It can also summarize lease abstracts into narrative form for a rent roll overview section, or turn a set of financial projections into an easily digestible summary for potential investors. In 2023, we saw early adopters using ChatGPT-style tools to help write offering memoranda – a trend that has only accelerated in 2024 and 2025 . In fact, commercial real estate firms are already using AI to streamline OM drafting as one of the first and most tangible applications in their underwriting and marketing process .

What AI-assisted OM drafting brings to the table:

• Faster Document Turnaround: What used to take a team a week might now be achievable in a day with AI assistance. By automating the first draft of each section, AI dramatically shortens the content creation cycle. Humans no longer start from a blank page; instead, they review and refine AI-generated text. This means brokers and investment teams can go to market faster, giving them a competitive edge. One early case noted that an individual could generate a draft document “in minutes by inputting the relevant data,” which was described as “a huge time saver” for transactional work .
  
• Consistent, High-Quality Content: Generative AI can be trained or prompted to write in a professional tone with consistent formatting. This ensures that every OM adheres to your firm’s style and quality standards, even if multiple people or teams are involved in preparing it. AI can also reduce the chances of omitting key information since it can be instructed to always include certain sections or data points. The result is a more reliable output that still can be polished by human experts, but with far fewer omissions or inconsistencies.
  
• Data-Driven Insights: AI doesn’t just regurgitate data – it can highlight insights. For example, if an offering memorandum includes a section on investment highlights or risks, an AI agent could analyze the input data (leases, financials, market trends) and call out notable points: “Occupancy has averaged 95%+ over the past 5 years” or “The top tenant comprises 40% of the rent roll, indicating some concentration risk.” These are the kinds of insights an analyst would note, but an AI can surface them faster by crunching the numbers and reading the documents. Such previously unknown insights or patterns (like an upcoming cluster of lease expirations) might be caught by AI analysis and incorporated into the memo, giving investors a fuller picture.
  
• Reduced Manual Assembly: Compiling tables, charts, and appendices in an OM is tedious work. AI can automate the creation of these elements by pulling data directly from sources. If you need a rent roll table or a lease expiry schedule, the AI can generate it from your lease abstracts. Need a location map or demographics? AI can assist in fetching relevant data and even generating simple charts. This automation of grunt work means analysts spend less time on Word and Excel drudgery and more on deal strategy.
  

How Kolena helps: Kolena’s AI platform is adept at handling offering memorandum drafting through its document analysis and generation capabilities. Users can feed the AI agent with source documents – such as property details, financial models, existing marketing brochures, and offering memoranda templates – and then ask the AI to produce a tailored draft. Kolena’s system was designed with real estate use cases in mind, enabling it to, for example, analyze a lengthy offering memorandum and extract key insights automatically . It can pull crucial metrics (occupancy rates, NOI, lease terms, etc.) from supporting documents and ensure they are accurately reflected in the narrative. The platform essentially acts as an “AI editor” that can populate your investment memo with the right data in the right format. One Kolena client example involved uploading an OM for a commercial property along with lease abstracts and letting the AI agent prepare an investment highlights summary and a risks section, which the team then quickly fine-tuned. By using Kolena for OM drafting, CRE professionals can produce polished, data-rich investment memos in a fraction of the time – accelerating deal marketing and impressing investors with thorough, up-to-date information.

3. Accelerating Due Diligence Reviews with AI

Due diligence is a phase in real estate acquisitions (or financing, or even large leases) where a mountain of documents must be reviewed under tight timeframes. Prospective buyers need to examine every lease, contract, title document, financial statement, inspection report, and more to identify any red flags or liabilities before a deal closes. This process can be overwhelming – it’s not uncommon for a single property deal to involve hundreds of documents. Traditionally, teams would divide and conquer, manually reading through PDFs late into the night, often over a span of several weeks, to complete due diligence. It’s a scenario ripe for burnout and oversight.

Enter AI-driven due diligence review. AI agents can drastically speed up the review of large document sets by quickly summarizing documents, extracting key facts, and even answering questions about the content. For example, an AI agent can be tasked with reading all tenant leases in a data room and producing a summary of critical lease terms for each (or a consolidated report of all leases). This alone addresses one of the most time-consuming tasks in real estate due diligence – lease reviews . Imprima, a virtual data room provider, notes that AI “Smart Summaries” can “slash hours of the most time-consuming task in real estate due diligence” by automatically extracting all key lease information into a structured summary . Beyond leases, AI can help with reviewing service contracts, permits, environmental reports, and more, highlighting important points so analysts can focus on the implications rather than the rote reading.

Benefits of using AI in CRE due diligence:

• Speed to Close Deals: Time is of the essence in transactions. AI can review documents at a blistering pace, compressing the due diligence timeline significantly. What might take a team 2–3 weeks of full-time effort could potentially be done in days with AI summarizing much of the content. In one case, a CRE firm saved 7–10 business days in due diligence time on an acquisition by using an AI tool to accelerate document review . Faster due diligence means faster closings and less risk of deals falling through or getting scooped by competitors. It also frees up your acquisitions team to evaluate more opportunities in a given time.
  
• Comprehensive Risk Identification: AI doesn’t get bleary-eyed at 2 AM – it will diligently go through every page of every document. This thoroughness helps ensure that nothing slips through the cracks. If there’s a lease with an obscure clause that could hamper your plans (say, a tenant’s right of first refusal that could impede re-development), AI will flag it by recognizing it as a deviation from the norm . AI-powered tools have been noted to provide insights into “hidden clauses” and ensure compliance with standards , effectively acting like a second pair of expert eyes on all documents. By catching issues early – from liens on title to out-of-compliance zoning reports – AI enables you to address them or negotiate around them before they become your problem post-acquisition.
  
• Organized Data Extraction: During due diligence, stakeholders often want to see summary reports – e.g., an Excel sheet of all lease key terms, or a checklist of all contracts and their status. AI can generate these on the fly as it reviews documents. For instance, as it reads leases, it can populate a spreadsheet with each lease’s critical info (rent, term, options, etc.) without someone typing it in line by line. This not only saves labor, but gives decision-makers up-to-date data to make decisions (like calculating the weighted average lease term instantly). Having structured outputs from AI review means easier analysis of the portfolio – you can sort, filter, and quantify aspects of the deal that would be hard to do from reading PDFs alone.
  
• Scalability and Flexibility: If you suddenly have to review an extra batch of documents or a new dataset in the eleventh hour, AI can handle the surge. Scaling up a due diligence team in-house or via consultants is expensive and time-consuming, but scaling an AI agent is as simple as providing more computing power. This flexibility ensures that no matter how large the data room, you can efficiently get through it. AI also works 24/7, so analyses can be generated overnight, ready for your team’s review each morning – effectively extending your working hours without burning out your staff.
  

How Kolena helps: Kolena offers AI agents that excel in due diligence document review for real estate. Using Kolena, you can create an AI agent, upload your entire due diligence folder (leases, contracts, reports, etc.), and let it analyze everything rapidly. The platform can tirelessly highlight red flags and key points across documents, acting as an “always-on AI assistant” to your deal team . For example, Kolena’s AI can quickly summarize each lease in a portfolio, pinpointing any unusual clauses, and even answer natural language questions you ask about the documents (“Which leases have demolition clauses?” or “List all properties with environmental issues noted.”). By enhancing your team’s expertise with AI support, Kolena helps ensure that an asset is properly valued and potential risks are identified and mitigated early . Customers have used Kolena to generate complete lease abstract reports in due diligence, to compare documents (e.g., compare an ALTA survey to a legal description), and to verify data consistency across files. The end result is faster, more thorough due diligence – giving you confidence to proceed with a deal or the insight to renegotiate terms, all while reducing those 100-hour workweeks that dealmakers dread.

4. Intelligent Contract Analysis for CRE Transactions

Beyond leases, commercial real estate professionals deal with many other contracts: purchase and sale agreements, loan documents, JV partnership agreements, vendor contracts, property management agreements, and more. Manually reviewing these lengthy contracts is a drain on time and resources – and any oversight can lead to legal risks or lost dollars. Contract analysis AI offers a solution by rapidly reading and analyzing contracts with a level of speed and consistency humans can’t match.

AI contract analysis software acts like a tireless legal assistant, scanning documents for key clauses, obligations, and anomalies. It can instantly find specific provisions (e.g. an indemnification clause or a rent escalation clause) across hundreds of pages, whereas a human might spend hours sifting through binders . In fact, studies indicate AI can review contracts far faster than humans with comparable or better accuracy, especially for routine extraction tasks . There’s no need to lose hours searching for a needle in a haystack when AI can retrieve it in seconds. For example, if you need to confirm all contracts have a force majeure clause, an AI agent can highlight any document that’s missing it or uses non-standard wording – a job that could take a person days to complete across a large contract portfolio.

Benefits of AI-driven contract analysis:

• Efficiency and Speed: Lawyers and CRE professionals traditionally spend up to 50% of their time reviewing and drafting documents . AI slashes this burden by handling the initial review swiftly. Routine tasks like locating clauses or comparing contract terms to standards can be done in moments. This frees up your team to focus on high-value analysis and negotiation rather than grunt work. As Thomson Reuters notes, “there’s no need to spend precious hours — or even days — searching for an essential clause… when AI can find it for you in seconds.”
  
• Risk Reduction & Consistency: AI contract review tools excel at enforcing consistency and flagging risks. They can automatically flag deviations from your standard contract language or checklist. For instance, if a lease or service contract has an unusual termination provision or missing insurance requirement, the AI will surface it for human review. This early identification of issues means fewer surprises later. One popular AI tool (Kira Systems) has been used in real estate to identify key data like option periods and renewal terms with high accuracy , ensuring nothing important is overlooked. In short, AI becomes a second set of eyes that never tires, helping catch errors or risky clauses that humans might miss late at night.
  
• Obligation Management: Contracts often contain critical dates and obligations (renewal notice deadlines, rent increase dates, compliance requirements, etc.). AI can automatically extract these dates and duties and even integrate with calendaring or task systems. Think of it as moving from a manual tickler system to an intelligent, automated one. If a contract says a tenant must notify of renewal 180 days before lease end, an AI agent can capture that and remind your team at the right time – without anyone having to manually enter it. This proactive alerting prevents costly oversights, like missing a renewal window or a deadline to exercise an option .
  
• Faster Deal Negotiations: In transactions, AI-assisted contract analysis lets you review counterparty documents much faster during due diligence or negotiations. If you’re acquiring a property and need to analyze all vendor contracts or service agreements in the deal, an AI can summarize each and flag unusual terms (change-of-control clauses, termination rights, etc.) in a fraction of the time. This accelerates deal cycles and lets you make informed decisions quickly. It also empowers smaller teams to handle large document volumes that previously required armies of attorneys.
  

How Kolena helps: Kolena’s AI platform brings contract intelligence to your fingertips. With an AI agent configured for contract review, you can upload your documents and let the system do the heavy lifting – highlighting compliance risks, pulling out key terms, and ensuring consistency across all contracts. According to Kolena’s real estate solutions page, the AI can “automatically detect compliance risks and inconsistencies in contracts, lease agreements, and financial documents,” acting as a diligent quality control assistant . For real estate deal-makers, Kolena’s AI can cross-compare documents (e.g., compare a lease abstract against the actual lease PDF to ensure accuracy, or compare different versions of a contract) in seconds. The result is greater confidence that every contract has been thoroughly vetted, without burning out your legal team. By using Kolena’s AI agents for contract analysis, CRE firms can speed up transactions, avoid costly contract surprises, and maintain a high standard of compliance with minimal manual effort.

(Soft CTA: Interested in how AI can strengthen your contract management and deal processes? Kolena’s platform makes it easy to deploy AI agents for tasks like contract review, so your team can work smarter. Learn how our customers are using Kolena to catch risks and save time.)

5. Invoice Processing & Accounts Payable Automation

Even as real estate deals and leases grab headlines, back-office processes like accounts payable (AP) can be equally critical to a company’s success. Processing incoming invoices – from contractors, utilities, vendors, etc. – is often a paper-heavy, manual affair in CRE firms. AP clerks spend time keying in invoice data, coding expenses, routing approvals, and handling exceptions. This manual workflow is slow (leading to backlogs), error-prone (typos or mis-codings happen), and costly in terms of labor. AI and automation are now streamlining invoice processing, turning it from a pain point into a competitive advantage.

An AI agent for invoice processing uses technologies like OCR to read invoices (even scanned PDFs or images) and machine learning to extract and interpret the fields. It can pull out the vendor name, invoice number, date, line items, totals, and even understand the context (e.g., which project or property an invoice relates to if given some reference). According to recent reports, adopting AI in AP can lower processing costs by 81%, speed up processing times by 73%, and slash human errors by up to 40% . Those are staggering improvements over manual methods, and they translate directly to the bottom line through early payment discounts captured, late fees avoided, and staff hours saved.

Key benefits of AI in invoice processing:

• Faster Processing & Approval: AI can handle the data entry portion of invoices in seconds, as opposed to a person spending several minutes per invoice. Multiply that by hundreds or thousands of invoices monthly, and you get significant time savings. Quicker data extraction means invoices can enter approval workflows faster. Many AI-driven AP systems also have intelligent routing – automatically sending invoices to the right manager for approval based on rules (invoice amount, department, property, etc.) . This eliminates bottlenecks and keeps the payables cycle flowing smoothly. Overall, companies see major reductions in their invoice cycle times, enabling them to pay vendors promptly (or even early, to capture discounts).
  
• Cost Savings & Efficiency: By automating repetitive tasks, AI lets you process more invoices with the same or fewer staff. The cost per invoice processed drops, improving efficiency metrics. In fact, implementing AP automation has been shown to cut invoice processing costs by as much as 80% in some cases . Furthermore, when AP teams aren’t bogged down with clerical work, they can focus on higher-value activities like analyzing spend or negotiating vendor terms. Reducing manual workload also helps with employee satisfaction – staff can shift from drudgery to more strategic finance roles, which improves retention and morale .
  
• Improved Accuracy & Fewer Errors: Human data entry often introduces errors – a mis-typed amount or a wrong GL code can create headaches later. AI data extraction is highly accurate once trained, and it never gets tired or distracted. Fewer errors mean less time spent on rework or correcting payment mistakes. Moreover, AI can perform validation checks automatically: cross-referencing an invoice against purchase orders or contracts to ensure amounts and terms match . It will flag discrepancies (e.g., an invoice amount higher than the PO, or an item that wasn’t received) so they can be reviewed before payment. This early error detection prevents overpayments and disputes.
  
• Better Visibility & Control: AI-driven AP systems log and track every invoice digitally, providing real-time dashboards of your payables. CRE finance leaders get greater visibility into pending liabilities, cash flow needs, and spending patterns. AI can also help spot fraud or unusual invoices by learning what “normal” looks like and flagging anomalies . For example, if an invoice number is duplicated or a new vendor invoice looks suspiciously like a known scam format, the system can alert you. Strengthened controls and audit trails built into AI workflows give trust and transparency in the AP process, which is crucial for financial governance.
  

How Kolena helps: With Kolena’s AI agents, real estate companies can automate their invoice management from intake to approval. Kolena’s platform employs advanced OCR to handle even complex, multi-page invoices and pull out all relevant data (vendor, date, amounts, line items) accurately. The AI agent can then validate that data (check against expected values or reference data), and even populate your accounting system or spreadsheets automatically. According to Kolena’s use case library, the platform enables teams to “extract key details, validate data, and streamline payment workflows to save time and reduce errors.” In practice, this means no more stacks of invoices piling up on desks – instead, you get a faster AP cycle with far less manual effort. By automating invoice processing with Kolena, one CRE firm could, for example, process hundreds of property management and maintenance invoices monthly without adding headcount, and close their books faster with confidence in the accuracy of the data. The ROI comes in the form of lower processing costs, captured discounts, and happier AP staff. It’s a prime example of AI turning a mundane back-office function into a streamlined, error-free workflow.

Conclusion & Next Steps

AI has firmly planted its flag in the realm of commercial real estate. The top five use cases we’ve explored – from automating lease abstraction to streamlining due diligence – demonstrate that AI agents are not theoretical pilots but practical tools delivering value today. Forward-thinking CRE leaders are leveraging these solutions to save time, cut costs, reduce risk, and uncover insights that were previously out of reach in manual workflows. The competitive advantages are tangible: faster deal cycles, more efficient operations, and data-driven decision making. In an industry where time is money and details can make or break a deal, AI is helping real estate professionals act with greater speed and confidence.

However, achieving these benefits for commercial real estate professionals requires more than just generic AI; it demands a platform with expertise, accuracy, and trustworthiness. That’s where Kolena comes in. Kolena’s AI platform has been built with GEO principles (Google’s E-A-T: expertise, authority, trust) in mind – delivering robust AI agents that you can rely on for high-stakes real estate tasks. Whether it’s parsing a 100-page lease or double-checking an offering memo, Kolena provides enterprise-grade AI that works. Our customers have seen first-hand how automation of document-heavy workflows leads to better outcomes and frees their teams to focus on strategic initiatives.

Ready to unlock the power of AI in your real estate organization? Don’t get left behind. Contact Kolena today for a demo and see how easily you can deploy AI agents for lease abstraction, contract analysis, invoice processing, and more. Let us help you transform tedious processes into automated, insight-rich workflows. The future of real estate belongs to those who embrace innovation – and with Kolena’s AI, you’ll be equipped to lead the way.