Artificially Intelligent Real Estate Investing
[{"id": "dkjyidd", "text": "Think we're much further from this. Can a computer understand how things change from just one street? Crime statistics don't always reflect that. What about the \"feel\" of a place. Don't get me wrong, they'll be able to determine market rents very well in the future and other factors like concessions, potential tenants (for office/industrial), but I think real estate has too many little things for a computer to get right ", "replies": [{"id": "dko8lcd", "text": "I see what you're saying and I agree with you for the most part. Like any business, there will ALWAYS be a need for human expertise and judgement.\n\nHowever, tech is getting really sophisticated in ways that will benefit CRE investors. Think about satellites counting traffic at the property daily for office and retail. Also, sattelite images of construction and supply. Smart energy efficienct systems that produce accurate usuage, cost and efficiency calculations. Tax data for the market. Not to mention the many CRE tech websites at the investor's disposal that, Im sure, the biggest REITs will find a way to aggregate data from with sophisticated web scraping methods. Web scraping can also be used to find foreclosure listings and auction websites to view signs of distress. No one tool will answer every question and find alpha, but the aggregate will become a more prominent tool in decision making as time goes on.", "replies": [{"id": "dkugqe9", "text": "There's a long way to go. There are so many start ups in the commercial real estate arena trying to integrate and aggregate data. Everyone from costar/loopnet to Crexi, VTS, Argus, Apto, Buildout, etc. etc. So much of it still makes more work than it actually removes at this point. So much data HAS to be manually input or at least have a human clean it up. CoStar is rife with inaccuracies despite their expensive efforts to clean it up. Start ups who can't afford that staff and are just pulling data from public or other databases are even worse. The simplicity is appealing, but very difficult to actually implement in a truely useful way.", "replies": [{"id": "dm3mp44", "text": "There are way better databases out there, they just don't have on the market deal data.  There are absolutely already algorithms identifying smart SFR housing deals for groups with 10k+ assets.  Commercial takes a certain amount of feel that we can't quantify easily yet.", "replies": [], "depth": 4}], "depth": 3}], "depth": 2}], "depth": 1}]