A version of this article first appeared in the CNBC Property Play newsletter with Diana Olick. Property Play covers new and evolving opportunities for the real estate investor, from individuals to venture capitalists, private equity funds, family offices, institutional investors and large public companies. Sign up to receive future editions, straight to your inbox.
Fundrise, a Washington, D.C.-based online investment platform that prides itself on opening up investment in private real estate companies, real estate assets and private technology companies to the average individual, is now setting its sights on artificial intelligence.
Fundrise is launching RealAI, a new AI platform that changes how single- and multifamily real estate professionals and individual investors find and use data. It gives users instant access to high-level market intelligence, ranging from neighborhood income and migration trends to multifamily comps and average rents — right down to each individual property.
Fundrise's co-founder and CEO, Ben Miller, says it goes far beyond what more generalized AI, like ChatGPT, can offer. The tool is launching with residential data, but Miller said he expects to expand to other commercial real estate sectors within six months.
"It does the work of a real estate analyst, and it's for anyone," Miller told Property Play. "We went out and built a database of, now, 3.5 trillion data points of all the real estate knowledge you want. That's every property in America."
RealAI is free to users for the first dozen uses and then charges a monthly rate of $69 for a standard plan.
Fundrise culls its data from both public records and private databases. It also includes information on the people living and working in the properties, like their education level, credit scores and income. It gets some of that from social media.
By using these extremely comprehensive, proprietary real estate datasets, it can compare markets, evaluate any property and model returns. Miller ran a simulation for Property Play to demonstrate how it works.
"You'll be able to actually know what is the best property to buy based on all the factors you give it," Miller said. "This is the type of stuff that I've talked to some of the big asset managers [about] — Blackstone, [TPG Angelo Gordon], some of them have dedicated machine learning teams. Most people do not."
The real estate industry has always been notoriously slow to modernize, but major players are starting to tout the game-changing impact of AI. JLL has several AI platforms for property analysis and portfolio management in multiple real estate sectors, but those tools are only available to its employees and clients.
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