Bringing Order to CRE's Data Chaos

Commercial real estate has long depended on data, yet stitching it together into something truly useful remains one of its thorniest challenges. As firms increasingly turn to AI to extract meaningful insights, the focus is shifting from cleaning and structuring internal information to integrating unstructured, market-driven intelligence. It's a transformation that's reshaping how the industry manages and acts on data.

"In real estate, lots of different teams are handing off workflows," Frank Spadafora, industry principal for real estate at Intapp, tells GlobeSt.com. "Your cap table could have five different providers." Those providers—both internal and external—often apply different standards or objectives to the same data, complicating how organizations can draw business value from it.

Spadafora says one of Intapp's largest real estate clients is confronting those complexities head-on through collaborative AI innovation. "When we launched our Agentic AI platform, we co-developed it with one of our largest real estate clients," he says. "They wanted 'conversational querying.' The end user for this development was the CEO of the firm."

That CEO envisioned simply asking questions aloud—about performance metrics or market trends—and receiving precise, structured answers pulled from across the company's databases. The goal was to unify disparate information sources and make actionable insights instantly accessible.

"They wanted to pull sentiment data from the market," Spadafora says. "They wanted to understand if there are issues of tenancy, rent, etc. They were able to home in on a specific building in a specific market and get the sentiment signals." To do that, the system drew on nontraditional sources like Yelp and social media. "They see this as an opportunity to move from reaction to proaction," he adds. "They're moving beyond the internal data journey."

Supporting this new data ecosystem required rethinking how every piece of information is stored and shared. The company uses Microsoft SharePoint to house investment committee memos—from purchase assumptions and rent projections to growth expectations and final sign-offs. Once the asset is acquired, various property management systems feed back into an AI-powered data warehouse on Snowflake, enabling continuous performance tracking.

It's a complex, unfinished process—and a major leap for the traditionally cautious CRE sector. But as Spadafora notes, mastering these integrations is becoming the price of admission for firms that want to stay competitive in a data-driven future.