AI is now core infrastructure for commercial real estate agencies.

CRE Success Principle: Use AI yourself on one real business task before asking your team to change how they work.

There is a certain type of commercial real estate principal I see regularly.

They are sharp, capable and running a solid business. But they are still doing many things the hard way.

They are drafting every email blast from scratch, building prospecting lists manually, and spending hours analysing information that AI can process in minutes…or even seconds.

The issue is not resistance to change. It is just recognising that AI is no longer something to investigate one day. It is becoming a core part of the infrastructure of well-run commercial real estate agencies.

Five Ways CRE Agencies Are Using AI

Right now I am seeing my clients use AI across five key areas.

First, correspondence. AI can produce a strong first draft of an enquiry or client email, which a person can then review and approve.

Second, content. AI can help create content plans, social media copy and email campaigns much faster.

Third, prospecting. AI can help build targeted call lists and score leads so teams can focus their attention on the opportunities most likely to convert.

Fourth, analysis. Large amounts of raw data can be turned into clear insights that are easier to understand and communicate.

Fifth, AI is increasingly built into the software agencies already use, including property management platforms.

Start With Yourself

I believe every commercial real estate principal should become adept at using AI.

You do not need to roll it out across the entire business immediately. Start with one practical use case yourself.

Once you experience a genuine win, the time saved and usefulness of the result can create the momentum to explore what else is possible.

Want to hear the five use cases in detail? Listen to episode 289 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership.

And if you need somewhere to start, visit cresuccess.co/chatgpt for the AI guide containing 100 prompts for commercial real estate agencies.

Episode transcript:

There's a certain kind of commercial real estate principal that I come across quite a lot.

They're sharp, they're capable, they run a great business. Maybe it's you.

But they're doing certain things the long way. They manually draft every bit of copy from scratch. They build prospecting lists themselves manually.

They spend valuable time pulling together analysis that could be done automatically in minutes.

Now, they're not doing this because they've got time to burn or they don't know what they're doing. They're doing it because they haven't yet made the shift from thinking of AI as a novelty that they might look into one day, to actually understanding that it is something that is already core infrastructure within a well-run commercial real estate agency.

And that shift is what today's episode is all about.

This is episode 289 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership. My name's Darren Krakowiak. I'm here to host this podcast, and I also help commercial real estate principals to build an agency that can run without them, so they have the choice to work on or off the tools.

Now, last episode, we talked about who and how, documented processes, team structure, roles, and accountability.

Today is the third piece of the third pillar. The third pillar is process. Of course, the other two pillars were pipeline and also people.

And today, we're talking about how efficiently things can get done, and we're doing that through the prism of talking about AI.

So let me give you five places that I'm seeing AI doing some significant work inside commercial real estate agencies across Australia right now.

And just to be clear, this is not hypothetical stuff. This is what is actually being done by my clients today.

And the first one is with correspondence - drafting responses to inquiries and client emails.

Not replacing judgment, by the way, but producing a strong first draft in seconds that a real person can then review, and if they approve it or if they want to make some changes, they can then send it instead of starting from a blank page every time.

And as a general principle, I think AI is fantastic at getting rid of the blank page problem. So that's the first one.

The second one is content - content plans, social media copy, email blast copy.

In fact, I just saw a post the other day by one of my clients with an image that I could tell was AI-generated, but I was actually pleased that I could tell, because I could also then decipher that it wasn't him or one of his team members who were fiddling around in Canva to produce it. They were leveraging AI.

Now, when doing this, the thinking and the input should still be yours or your team's.

But the drafting time that used to take hours can shrink into a prompt that takes mere minutes to construct.

The third way that I know, that clients are using AI is with prospecting.

So things like mining databases, scraping data from a variety of sources to build targeted call lists. I do this myself.

Rather than, you know, a generic list of anyone who might own a commercial property or be a commercial real estate principal or manually doing it yourself.

Another way that AI can help with prospecting is with lead scoring, right? This is ranking the potential of a lead based on data that's available so you and your team know where the lowest hanging fruit is, where the best opportunities are, so you can focus on them first.

The fourth way is analysis.

So this is taking lots of raw data and distilling it into something that you can put in front of a client or that you can use to better understand what's going on in your business.

Clear, useful, communicated properly with clear takeaways rather than a spreadsheet nobody outside the business would understand and some of your team and maybe also you would take a long time to analyze yourself.

The fifth and final way I want to share with you today, and this is just five. I've got 100 that I can share with you, and I'll do that at the end of the episode, by the way.

The fifth is inside the software that you're probably already using.

So, the example I want to share is property management platforms that increasingly have AI-driven features built in.

So, one that a few of my clients use is automatically collecting information from invoices for receipting.

Now, you might not even think of this as using AI because it's just part of the software now, and that's kind of the point.

Correspondence, content, prospecting, analysis, and what is already inside your existing software.

And I think sometimes software is the process.

And I'm not talking about a far-off future. We're talking about what is happening in commercial real estate agencies in Australia right now.

And I'm sharing this with you because there's a point. There's an argument I want to make, and I think this matters more than any individual use case.

Every commercial real estate principal should make it their business to become adept at using AI themselves.

So I don't want you to delegate the learning of AI to someone junior in your team.

You might have someone who could be the AI champion in your business, but what I don't want you to do is just be waiting for someone in the team to figure AI out.

I want you to use it yourself properly, so you're capable of identifying where it can fit into your own business to improve the productivity of yourself, your team, reduce the cost of doing business, and deliver better outcomes for clients.

And I want to share something that I've noticed a lot with my own client base, and I think this is pretty instructive.

I've got clients that are aged 50 and over, including one or two who are over 55, who were hesitant when I was banging on about AI, you know, a year ago.

They were very, very hesitant, seriously hesitant.

They're not dismissive because they can see that I'm using it, but they're skeptical that this was something for them, maybe because of their age or because they just don't understand it.

But every single one of them who I've encouraged to try it in one specific way has eventually gone ahead and applied it and then come back to me, unprompted by the way, to tell me about all the other things that they've found that they can use AI for, including in many ways that I never even suggested to them.

So, there are two lessons in that, and I think both are worth taking note of.

The first one is that you are never too old to learn new tricks. It's not just a saying about old dogs. I really mean that.

Age is not the barrier that people assume it is with technology. It's easy to use, it's accessible, and there are clients who are older than me, and I'm no spring chicken, and, you know, they aren't the exceptions.

It's been consistent across the board with all of my clients who have gone ahead and started using AI. They start using it more and more.

And the second takeaway is that once you actually get started, you build momentum, and that momentum drives curiosity.

The first use case can be the hardest, right?

It's hard to get started, but once someone has a real win, once they see that doing this thing is saving them real time, a lot of time, and has produced something that's really useful, then they start looking for the next thing themselves.

Nobody has to keep pushing them because the tool's own usefulness becomes the reason why they keep exploring.

So, if you're a commercial real estate principal who hasn't properly sat down and used AI yourself yet, that is the starting point.

Not a company-wide rollout, just you trying one thing and having a proper go at it.

Some of your team may resist AI, and that's normal, and it's not necessarily a bad sign. It's often just some uncertainty about what this means for them.

When you think about all, what is in the media about what AI means, you can understand why they might be hesitant.

And if they are, you can just tell them, "Look, you're not planning on replacing the whole team with AI, but what you don't want is to lose your clients to competitors who are able to use AI better than we can."

I think that's the message, right?

We're not going to be replaced by AI, but we could be overtaken by competitors who know better how to deploy it.

And I think, here's why using it yourself first matters so much for that conversation.

If you're trying to mandate AI adoption from a position of not really understanding it yourself, of not really having given it a go, then you're effectively asking your team to trust a directive then that you're not really sure about yourself, right?

If you've actually used it, you can speak from direct experience about exactly how it's helped you, what it did, what it didn't do, where it's actually saved you time, all of that.

And when you do that, you're having a very different conversation. You're not mandating, you're not coming from a place of unknown. You're showing them something that has already worked for you.

And I think that's a much easier position to advocate from, and it's a much easier position for a hesitant team member to really hear where it is that you are coming from.

So that's our topic on process - documented and followed procedures so your team can deliver the standard your clients expect.

Team structure that separates functions and adds management capacity at the right point.

Clear roles and accountability - we covered all of that in episode 288.

And today in episode 289, we've talked about AI across correspondence, content, prospecting, analysis, and inside the software that you're probably already using.

And it all starts with you becoming adept at it first.

And that closes out this seven-episode series that we've been running, where we've been talking about the categories or the buckets of where all of the problems that I come across that people talk to me about, that commercial real estate principals talk to me about, the three buckets where they typically belong: pipeline, people, process.

So, pipeline's all about generating opportunities across four channels we talked about, qualifying them properly and converting them through defined stages.

When it comes to people, we want to hire like we prospect. We want to develop people through a weekly one-on-one meeting with your direct reports, and we want to retain them by having a great culture and also by having a vision that's been communicated clearly.

And we've talked about process, getting things done, who does them, and how efficiently with AI now firmly part of the picture.

So yeah, that's seven episodes, ton of ground covered.

And by the way, if you really don't know where to get started with AI, you can go to cresuccess.co/chatgpt and grab our AI guide.

It contains 100 prompts for commercial real estate agencies to get started with AI.

I actually put this together at least a year ago, but if you haven't gotten started yet, if you don't really know where to go, it's a great starting point. It's going to get the ball rolling for you, and then you can speak from a place of knowing with your team.

So cresuccess.co/chatgpt, or if you don't have a pen, just find me on LinkedIn, send me a DM, ask me for the AI guide, and I will send it to you.

That is our episode for today. Thank you so much for listening, and I will speak to you soon.