AI is rapidly transforming the real estate industry, from automating tedious paperwork to uncovering market insights. In fact, over 72% of real estate owners and investors globally are already committing or plan to commit to AI solutions. Forward-thinking commercial real estate firms and residential brokers are adopting real estate AI tools to gain a competitive edge, improve operational efficiency, and fuel business growth. This blog post explores high-impact automation use cases – including lease abstraction, PayApp (payment application) processing, and offering memorandum drafting – and reviews the top AI tools (from industry giants and Kolena) that are revolutionizing real estate today.

• Faster Processes and Fewer Errors: AI-driven software can complete document-heavy tasks in minutes, not weeks, dramatically reducing turnaround times and human errors.
  
• Cost Savings: By automating what used to require hours of manual labor or costly outsourcing, AI helps cut operating costs without compromising accuracy .
  
• Better Insights & Compliance: Advanced AI can instantly flag missing information, key terms, and compliance issues in leases or contracts , giving firms greater visibility into risks and opportunities.
  

Why Real Estate Firms are Embracing AI

Modern real estate transactions generate massive paperwork and data, from lengthy lease contracts to financial reports. Manually handling these is slow and error-prone. AI in real estate offers powerful benefits that directly impact a firm’s bottom line and service quality:

• Competitive Advantage: Early AI adopters can get ahead of the competition by closing deals faster and responding to clients sooner. Many CRE companies report AI improves efficiency in everything from lease management to lead handling. High adoption rates show that those who delay risk falling behind.
• Improved Efficiency: Routine tasks like data entry, document review, and report generation can be automated, freeing up staff to focus on high-value activities like client relationships and strategic decision-making. For example, AI lease abstraction can shorten a 4–8 hour manual process down to ~2 hours, saving significant time at scale.
• Cost Reduction: By replacing or augmenting labor-intensive work, AI tools allow firms to handle more volume without proportional headcount increases. They are faster, cheaper, and more accurate than offshoring tasks to manual data processors.
• Better Client Service: From AI chatbots that respond instantly to inquiries, to personalized property recommendations, AI helps deliver a smoother customer experience. In 2023, chatbots made up about 29% of real estate AI, engaging leads 24/7 without extra staff. Faster document turnaround and more accurate information also mean clients get answers and results sooner.

High-Impact AI Use Cases in Real Estate

Real estate operations are filled with repetitive, document-intensive workflows ripe for automation. Here are some key use cases where AI is making a tangible difference:

AI-Powered Lease Abstraction

Lease abstraction – extracting key terms and financials from lengthy lease agreements – is notoriously tedious. A single commercial lease can span dozens of pages, and abstracting them manually can take 4–8 hours each. AI tools can now read and interpret leases in a fraction of that time. For instance, enterprise AI solutions (like MRI’s Leverton) have cut abstraction down to as little as 2 hours per lease, while improving accuracy. The AI swiftly pulls out rent schedules, expiration dates, options, and clauses, building a structured summary for easy reference. This not only saves time but also ensures no clause is overlooked, supporting compliance with lease accounting standards. By automating lease abstraction, property managers can streamline portfolio management and make data-driven decisions with ease.

Automating PayApp Reports (Construction Payment Applications)

PayApp reports – the payment applications and invoices submitted by contractors or vendors – are another labor-intensive process. In commercial real estate development and property management, teams must review and approve these requests for payment, often verifying that work milestones or materials match the billed amounts. AI tools for document parsing can dramatically speed up PayApp processing. For example, machine learning-based OCR (Optical Character Recognition) services from major providers (like AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft) can automatically extract key information from invoices and payment forms. Instead of manually keying in amounts, dates, or vendor details, an AI system reads the PayApp, captures the data, and even cross-checks it against budgets or contracts.

Offering Memorandum & Investment Memo Drafting

Preparing an offering memorandum (or investment memo) for a property sale or fundraise is a time-consuming endeavor, often involving brokers, analysts, and marketing teams. These documents must compile financial projections, market comps, property photos, and narrative text into a polished package for investors or buyers. Generative AI is changing the game by helping draft such documents in a fraction of the time. For instance, an AI content generator can take in property details and financial data and produce a first draft of the narrative sections – covering property descriptions, location highlights, tenant information, and risk factors. Internal data suggests AI can generate these investment memos in minutes rather than weeks, giving teams a fast starting point.

Other Real Estate Automation Use Cases

AI’s impact extends across many other real estate workflows. A few notable examples include:

• Contract Analysis & Due Diligence: Beyond leases, AI contract analytics tools (like DocuSign Insight) can review purchase agreements, loan contracts, and insurance policies to uncover hidden risks and obligations. They use natural language processing to highlight unusual clauses or missing documentation, helping legal teams ensure nothing slips through the cracks. This accelerates due diligence in acquisitions and financings, and surfaces opportunities (e.g. identifying under-utilized lease escalation clauses) that humans might miss.
• Property Maintenance & Inspections: Computer vision AI analyzes photos or videos of properties to detect issues (for example, identifying roof damage or parking lot cracks from drone images). Firms like CAPE Analytics use AI to cut down manual property condition inspections by 50% through automated image analysis. Maintenance requests can also be auto-categorized and prioritized by AI based on urgency and historical patterns, ensuring faster response to critical issues.
• Market Analysis & Valuations: AI-driven models can ingest vast datasets (comparable sales, demographic trends, economic indicators) to forecast property values and rents with increasing accuracy. A well-known example is Zillow’s Zestimate, which leverages machine learning on millions of data points to estimate home values. Commercial investors similarly use AI for predictive analytics on market conditions, helping them make more informed buy/sell decisions.

Each of these use cases highlights how real estate professionals can do more with less by leveraging AI – handling larger portfolios, processing more transactions, and responding to clients faster, all with a leaner team.

Top 5 AI Tools for Real Estate in 2025

With the range of applications above, a natural question is: what solutions can real estate firms adopt today to unlock these benefits? Below we review five leading AI tools (from major technology providers and industry leaders) that are empowering commercial real estate (CRE) companies and brokers. These are established, reputable platforms – not experimental startups – and each brings unique strengths for real estate use cases.

1. OpenAI’s ChatGPT (Generative AI Assistant)

OpenAI’s ChatGPT has become the go-to generative AI tool across industries, and real estate is no exception. ChatGPT is a powerful language model (accessible via a chat interface or API) that can generate human-like text. Agents and brokers are using ChatGPT to automate a variety of tasks that once ate up hours of their day. For example, many Realtors now employ ChatGPT to write property listing descriptions and marketing content. An Iowa broker, JJ Johannes, reported that using AI to draft listings “saved me so much time… It’s not perfect but it was a great starting point.”In fact, realtors across the country are embracing ChatGPT to pen everything from engaging listing copy to routine client emails.

ChatGPT shines at generating creative, polished text instantly based on simple prompts – helping defeat writer’s block when crafting home descriptions or social media posts. Brokers also use it to summarize long documents (e.g. summarizing a dense inspection report for a client in plain language) or to draft initial responses to client inquiries. The AI can even simulate conversation scripts for negotiations or customer service scenarios. Importantly, ChatGPT has a very low barrier to entry – it’s user-friendly and doesn’t require any technical integration, which means individual agents can adopt it on their own. The main caution is ensuring the outputs are fact-checked, as the model can occasionally produce incorrect details. Overall, ChatGPT is a versatile content and productivity booster that hundreds of brokers have added to their toolkit, backed by OpenAI’s cutting-edge research and Microsoft’s Azure infrastructure.

2. Kolena (AI Agents for Real Estate Automation)

Kolena is a cutting-edge AI platform that deserves a spot among the top real estate AI tools, especially for its focus on document-intensive workflows in real estate. Kolena enables firms to create custom AI agents in minutes – without any complex setup or coding – to automate tasks like lease abstraction, loan analysis, property reporting, and more. Think of a Kolena “AI agent” as a tireless virtual analyst: you can upload your property documents (leases, rent rolls, purchase agreements, etc.), and the agent will parse and analyze them according to your needs. For example, Kolena’s real estate solution can automatically generate lease abstracts, cash flow reports, and investment memos with high accuracy in a fraction of the time it takes humans. One major appeal of Kolena is its emphasis on accuracy and quality control – the AI is state-of-the-art and delivers high-quality results, but users can still review and approve outputs via an intuitive dashboard, with any anomalies flagged for attention.

Kolena stands out for real estate professionals because it comes with pre-built domain expertise. Out of the box, it knows what to look for in a lease (e.g. rent escalation clauses, CAM charges, options), how to read an offering memorandum, or what matters in a loan document – thanks to a library of real estate use case templates. This dramatically shortens the learning curve. Busy lease administrators or acquisitions analysts can eliminate busy work (“no more manually combing through lengthy lease agreements, maintenance requests, or contractor reimbursements” as Kolena puts it) and trust the AI to catch critical details. By automating these tasks, companies cut costs without compromise, replacing expensive manual labor or outsourcing with faster and more accurate AI outputs. Kolena also addresses common concerns about data security: it allows firms to keep data onshore and secure (no need to send sensitive documents overseas for abstraction), which is crucial for privacy and compliance.

3. IBM Watson (AI Document & Data Insights)

IBM has been a pioneer in artificial intelligence, and IBM Watson offers a suite of AI services that real estate firms leverage for advanced document analysis and data insights. One of Watson’s strengths is in natural language processing and understanding unstructured text, making it well-suited for parsing contracts, leases, legal documents, and financial records. For instance, IBM’s AI has been used in lease abstraction and administration: Watson’s capabilities (sometimes integrated via solutions like IBM TRIRIGA for real estate) can ingest lengthy lease contracts and extract critical details into a structured database. This helps landlords and corporate occupiers manage lease obligations more effectively. An AI lease abstraction project using IBM’s tech showed that what used to take many hours by hand can be done far faster by AI, similar to the time reductions reported with other platformsmrisoftware.com.

4. Google Cloud AI (Document AI & Vision)

Google Cloud’s AI tools are widely used to build real estate automation solutions, thanks to Google’s strength in machine learning, vision, and language processing. One standout offering is Google Cloud Document AI, which can intelligently extract data from forms and documents. Real estate firms use it to automate tasks like invoice and document parsing – Google’s models can recognize fields in PDFs of invoices, leases, or loan applications and feed that data directly into databases. According to industry resources, major providers such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft offer invoice parsing APIs that can handle the variety of formats seen in real estate accounting. This is invaluable for processing the hundreds of vendor invoices, payoff statements, or closing documents that a real estate office might handle monthly.

Google’s expertise in translation and natural language is also beneficial in real estate’s global context. Deals often involve multilingual communication – Google’s AI translation can instantly convert property documents or listings between languages, breaking down barriers for international investors or clients. On the marketing side, Google’s Vision AI is employed to analyze property images (for example, automatically tagging photos with features like “granite countertop” or “pool” for easy image library searches).

5. DocuSign Insight (AI Contract Analytics)

DocuSign Insight is an AI-powered contract analytics tool from DocuSign (a company well-known to real estate professionals for its e-signature platform). Insight brings the power of AI to the analysis of executed contracts and agreements. Real estate teams use DocuSign Insight to search and analyze lease agreements, purchase contracts, NDAs, and more – essentially any document that’s been signed and stored. The tool uses natural language processing and machine learning to read through contract text and identify key clauses, obligations, and anomalies. According to DocuSign, Insight’s AI can uncover risks and hidden opportunities in agreements with powerful analytics. For example, a portfolio owner can quickly find all leases that lack a certain insurance clause or list all contracts that expire next year and have a renewal option, without manually sifting through filing cabinets or PDFs.

Conclusion: Embrace the AI Advantage in Real Estate

The rise of real estate AI tools signals a new era where commercial real estate firms and residential brokerages can operate smarter, faster, and more competitively. By automating repetitive tasks like paperwork and data entry, AI frees professionals to focus on strategy, relationships, and deals. The business benefits are clear – greater efficiency, cost savings, enhanced decision-making, and improved client service – all of which contribute to accelerated growth. It’s no surprise that industry leaders are investing heavily in AI; as mentioned, a vast majority plan to incorporate AI solutions into their operations.

For any real estate organization, the key is to start leveraging AI in areas that deliver quick wins. That might mean deploying an AI lease abstraction tool during your next acquisition, or using ChatGPT to power your marketing content this quarter. Start small, measure impact, and scale up – many firms pilot AI on a few projects and soon find the results so compelling that they expand usage across departments. Remember to train your team and integrate AI tools with your existing systems for a smooth adoption. In doing so, you will cultivate a tech-enabled workforce that can do more with less and adapt rapidly to market demands.

The message is clear: AI in real estate is no longer a moonshot idea for the future; it’s a present-day reality delivering tangible value. Those who embrace it early will reap the rewards of agility and insight, while those who hesitate may find themselves at a disadvantage. Whether you choose a versatile platform like Kolena’s AI agents or tap into tools from giants like IBM, Google, and OpenAI, there’s never been a better time to bring AI into your real estate business. By harnessing real estate AI tools, brokers and CRE firms can secure a competitive edge – streamlining operations, delighting clients, and unlocking new growth opportunities in an increasingly data-driven industry.