Extracting value from real estate documents using AI

Artificial intelligence can provide distinct benefits for the real estate sector, which has undergone dramatic changes in recent years. Contraction of brick-and-mortar retailers, plus the widespread shift to remote work in 2020, have raised the stakes for retaining tenants and also led investors and property owners to increase concessions. In this context, full understanding of the terms and conditions contained in lease contracts is critical, and AI can make a material difference here.

AI already has versatile applications in real estate, with major use cases including building management, transaction marketing, property valuation and tenant communications. Now, commercial real estate professionals are seeking to level-up their decision making with deeper, faster data capture and analysis, particularly in the domain of document intelligence.

AI-driven document intelligence has the potential to provide all stakeholders in a real estate transaction with more streamlined processes, better structured data for robust reporting and analytics, and faster full-text searches, completable in seconds rather than days or weeks.

AI directly addresses some of the longstanding challenges in document management. For instance, seasoned real estate experts know the difficulties inherent in managing the large volume of supporting documents involved in a transaction. Transactions involve a complex mix of agreements governing multiple rights and obligations, including purchase and sales contracts, commercial leases, addendums, amendments, estoppels, work letters and insurance binders, among others. Data is often stored in separate environments, leading to disparities.

Basic AI platforms focus on document organization, but real value comes from AI that goes beyond organization and extracts meaning from the documents to develop a full picture of the data.

What does AI-Powered Document Understanding for CRE documents look like in action? Let’s look at a few examples:

• Track critical dates for expansions, leases and other events. An AI platform with advanced, domain-specific data-extraction capabilities that tightly integrates with other platforms would create calendar alerts based on critical dates.
• Expedite M&A and transaction due diligence. With the swelling appetite for M&A and capital market investment sales, firms face increasing pressure to speed up insights from key documents. A Document Understanding solution can search an entire portfolio, eliminating the need for an analyst to manually review documents and possibly miss key details. A consolidated platform also makes it easier for brokers, owners and occupiers to exchange documents with added security, visibility and collaboration.
• Simplify legal compliance and audit. The AI platform would pull in source document data — since that’s where the details and value reside — and produce a comprehensive list of leases and obligations, letting users reliably account for all of them.

AI-powered Document Understanding & Contract Analytics platforms like ThoughtTrace open up new, more strategic possibilities for managing real estate data and mitigating risk through more accurate analyses and predictions, all conducted in a compliant and cost-effective way. Commercial real estate professionals can spend less time on data entry and monotonous reading and more time on actual analysis to drive operational improvements. ThoughtTrace allows decision-makers to focus on the most important decisions and opportunities, with a clear understanding of what lives within their real estate agreements.

5 hours or 5 minutes?

ThoughtTrace is a Document Understanding and Contract Analytics platform that provides value on day one with minimal training and setup. Leveraging AI/machine learning as a complement to human expertise, the ThoughtTrace platform identifies critical obligations in documents exponentially faster and with greater accuracy than traditional methods. ThoughtTrace surfaces the information you need in seconds, condensing weeks of work down to minutes.

Learn more about ThoughtTrace for Real Estate or request a free portfolio assessment.