Wow, the last time I had posted was October 20th. That’s 75 days that I’ve not written a newsletter.

It’s crazy to think that the audience had actually increased from not posting. I guess that means you guys like the content!

So let’s chat about what is new:

• DealIntel is coming along

• AI in the real estate market

• 2025 goals?

DealIntel Is Coming ALong

So if you guys don’t know, DealIntel.ai is an AI app I’m working on with a friend of mine. It’s aiming to be an AI agent for CRE where you can automate workflows.

Currently, you’re able to upload docs, extract the key information, plug it into your model so you can quickly assess deals instead of spending a ton of time manually doing monkey work. You’re also able to chat with your docs too.

Key benefits:

1. Speed to decision is key. Less time wasted

2. Underwrite more deals in less time

3. Spend more time working on broker relations

4. Chat with your docs to get more insights

   

   Adding ability to chat with your docs

   

   Easily export your data into your model

The goal is to eventually create AI agents.

What do I mean by AI agents?

I mean creating models, spreadsheets, powerpoint decks, LOIs all within the single click of a button.

Say you have this situation…

You have 20 new deals in your inbox every day. On average, it takes about 2 hours to manually underwrite a deal, input everything into your model, verify comps, etc. It’s a looooong time. In theory, it would mean you would have to dedicate 200 hours of labor to underwrite deals. Say you have 3 staffers on it, so that’s 67 hours/person to underwrite deals…

That’s a lot of work & you can’t accurately assess the quality of a deal.

That’s the current state of what being in an investment shop looks like. If it’s really lean, the younger staffers have a lot of hands on exposure to all facets of the business and really get into the weeds of underwriting.

But this is slowly changing with the advancement of AI.

Which brings me to my second topic…

AI In The Real Estate Market

AI is changing the way that people work. “AGI” or artificial general intelligence is a term where people spectate AI can do human jobs better than a human can.

AI is definitely changing the way people work and do business. I think it’s going to be really easy to do away with a lot of lower level jobs and have AI take the gap.

I really worry about knowledge workers in the West.

Right now, there are shops that outsource their underwriting & asset management to India to manually input it into their models. The main guys are worried about dealmaking and not about punching numbers into a spreadsheet. Not undermining the analysis component of commercial real estate, but the real money is in relationships in commercial real estate.

I think AI is going to affect

• Property valuations & making decisions

• Analyzing huge batches of data

• Lease abstractions & analysis

• Distilling down legal opinions

• Finding out undervalued pieces of real estate

• Identifying risks in property inspections

• Creating assets like financial models, spreadsheets, pitch decks, LOIs

The list goes on and on as computers get smarter. I think it’s only a matter of time until we’re automating away a lot of society and new jobs will take its place.

With AI, you can create your own apps if you know what you’re doing. I’m talking about coding them from scratch to production into a working prototype. In a long enough time horizon, I think the value of creating basic software will diminish long term.

I could be wrong (and as a software entrepreneur, I hope I am), but it seems like coding is slowly going to be like writing. ChatGPT, Claude, etc can produce amazing blog posts, articles, and listicles that can reproduce the tonality. It’s about the prompt engineer, not the AI itself imo.

This may be doom and gloom, but realistically, I think vertical SaaS is going to be a thing. AI Agents are the new hot girl on the block from the eyes of VC’s.

This reigns in a new version of software. If the cost to run an agent is going to be pennies compared to hiring people, why not just have a bot doing most of your bitch work and leaving the high level thinking to humans?

But the future is a way off…

The only thing we can focus on is ourselves and being 1% better everyday.

What Does 2025 Look Like

From a real estate perspective, I have no clue.

The motto from 2023 was “survive til 2025”. Well the year has finally gone by and wallah, we are stuck in 2025.

I think rates might come down because Trump’s in office. Real estate is going to go through a boom, but costs with construction & labor are going to increase. Given high interest rates, things are also harder to finance and you need more capital down.

I don’t think multifamily is going to be a buy. I think industrial and retail are going to be the sweethearts of the institutional game. Single family homes also might be a hot commodity there too.

What does MY 2025 look like?

Big goals are:

• Get licensed

• Buy primary residence

• Get more customers for DealIntel

• Buy an investment property

• Create other income streams

The goals never change, just be better every year by 1%. Everything compounds.