The rise of AI in commercial real estate is already here, quietly absorbing the administrative weight that has long defined our days: lease abstractions, comp searches, financial modeling, market reports, and the endless email threads that accompany every transaction. What AI is particularly good at is reducing the friction between the origin of an idea and its execution. For brokers and appraisers who built their value around access to information, this is a legitimate reckoning, but also an opportunity to return to the work that only we can do. What AI cannot replicate is the texture of local market knowledge accumulated through years of working a submarket: who owns what, who is quietly distressed, which relationships need careful management before a letter of intent is ever drafted. That knowledge is shaped by repetition, failure, and hard-won trust, and no algorithm can replicate the seven a.m. phone call to a contact who speaks off the record.
Consider the deals that never appear the way they actually happened. I have witnessed brokers quietly absorb an entire lease transaction to keep a sale from falling apart, walking away without a commission because the alternative was watching years of work collapse at the finish line. That concession shows up nowhere in the sales data. The recorded price looks clean, but the true story lives only in the memory of the people in the room. Appraisers face a parallel challenge. Market data is only as good as the facts behind it, and primary research is necessary to confirm those facts. The best appraisers contact buyers, sellers, brokers, and attorneys not simply to confirm a sale price, but to listen carefully to how people respond. A hesitation, an overly rehearsed answer, a broker who redirects too quickly: these are signals that something beyond typical market motivation may be at play, whether a 1031 exchange deadline, a foreclosure avoidance, an abutter purchase, or a family transfer dressed as an arm’s length sale.
The abundance of AI-generated information will not make our jobs easier so much as it will raise the stakes of getting things wrong. When every market participant has access to similar comp sets and AI-drafted offering memoranda, the differentiator will not be who has the most data, but who best understands its limitations. Verification becomes the central professional act. The broker or appraiser who recognizes that something does not add up, and then does the work to find out why, will be more valuable in an AI-saturated market than in one defined by information scarcity. If 60-80% percent of what we do can be automated, then what remains is not the lesser portion of our work. It is the best of it.
This reckoning is playing out in every field where deep expertise meets the capacity of machines to process information at scale. The engineer who understands how materials actually behave in the field is not replaceable by a structural analysis algorithm. The attorney who reads a counterparty’s posture across the table and knows when a clause is a dealbreaker is doing something no contract-drafting AI can replicate. In every skilled profession, the pattern is the same: AI absorbs the retrievable, the repeatable, and the procedural. What it cannot absorb is the judgment that required a human being to be present, to make mistakes, and to exercise instincts forged through exposure to real consequences.
I’ll close with a confession: AI assisted with the syntax and structure of this very article. I was a philosophy and economics major who took pride in turning out essays on short notice, so the irony is not lost on me. But the ideas, convictions, and observations gathered from years in the field, along with the editorial judgment and conclusions that give this piece its meaning – those belong to me. In every profession worth practicing, AI is a powerful tool in skilled hands. It is the hands that matter.
Bryan J. Plourde, MAI is a Broker with The Dunham Group, and a Certified General Commercial Real Estate Appraiser with Maine Valuation Company.