CHICAGO, IL – Interra Realty’s Jack Pearson was recently featured in the latest Multifamily Housing News Executive Council where the use of AI was discussed. Jack’s comments were included alongside other real estate professionals.

AI tools offer efficiency gains in many back-office operations but do not replace the importance of building relationships and gathering boots-on-the-ground insights of a market.

In the back office, AI is a great tool for assisting with data-heavy workflows and analysis tasks. Things that used to be done by hand, like extracting a rent roll from PDF, can be done much more efficiently with the help of AI. Tools like Claude can accelerate analysis work by drafting Excel documents and writing formulas. This is particularly helpful with repetitive tasks where the end results can be verified. These tools are also very helpful for understanding and summarizing long and complex documents like a new city ordinance or extensive mortgage documents

There are many areas where AI is not the right answer. It cannot build the critical relationships with other real estate professionals or provide day-to-day market insights that can only be gathered through talking with owners, lenders, brokers and people who are out in the field every day. Additionally, AI is not yet able to assess the physical quality of an asset and weigh that against similar properties in a market. This still requires showing up and understanding a market in a way that can only be done in person.

Read the complete article at Multifamily Housing News.