Real estate is slowly adopting artificial intelligence

In Cannes at the International Market for Real Estate Professionals (Mipim), the world's leading trade fair, several companies present in the space dedicated to technological innovations are highlighting their work in AI.

“It’s very important to have AI if we want to be competitive. It’s crucial. Because we can save so much time,” says Morten Paarup, technical director of the Danish company Propbinder.

For several months, this company has been offering its clients, mainly property managers, the ability to use AI to automatically direct a request to the right person, search for information in a rental contract, and enter the characteristics of a property. ..

“This is an area in which we are improving the time spent communicating with customers,” he emphasizes.

For large residential land companies, more common in North America than in Europe, the possible uses are broader, explains Salim Faroukh, director of the American company Domain 6 which works with Microsoft, to AFP.

AI can, for example, analyze a mass of public data, for example via social networks, to estimate demand in a given neighborhood and allow owners to adjust their rents and stick to market prices.

“More finesse”

But, immediately recognizes Philippe Boyer, director of innovation at the French real estate company Covivio, “the real estate train does not necessarily go as fast as we can see in other sectors”.

Office real estate companies, more professionalized, have been doing this for several years to automate the management of the energy parameters of their buildings, he explains.

"For example, knowing (...) the average occupancy rate of a space in an office building is used to anticipate the fact that these meeting rooms will have to be heated, lit, require a certain number of services , in connection with the data collected in the past", he explains.

For the past year, the Schneider Electric group has been offering technical building management systems integrating AI.

“It brings more finesse and automation,” notes Nathalie Champeaux, smart buildings marketing director at Schneider Electric France.

For example, heating control could be connected to weather forecasts and adapt the temperature accordingly, rather than being limited to a set temperature and predefined times.

AI also makes it possible to detect a decline in the performance of equipment (solar panel, ventilation, etc.) earlier and to adapt maintenance.

In residential real estate, however, AI is starting to make a place for itself, particularly to process a volume of data that can quickly become gigantic.

For real estate agencies, it allows them to refine the price estimates of a property based on many more parameters than by hand, explains Loeiz Bourdic, a director of the Swiss start-up PriceHubble who works with many heavyweights in the sector.

“Machine learning makes it possible to estimate much more precisely and understand the impact of each parameter in greater detail,” he continues. For example, how much will the value of a property increase if it includes a balcony, southern exposure, etc.? ?

The next step is to have the machine read images or documents.

Generative AI can thus make it possible, underlines Loeiz Bourdic, to extract usable data from photos, or a scanned document.

"We still need quite abundant literature when it comes to buying or selling buildings, signing leases, analyzing PLUs (local town planning plans, Editor's note)", lists Philippe Boyer. “And all that, the machine takes care of it, without any margin of error, 1.000 times, 10.000 times faster than humans.”

“No doubt in the future, architects will ask the machine to generate images from prompts,” he assures, imagining how orders could be placed: “Here, produce me an office building in such an area, I would like 50% vegetation..."