Commercial Real Estate Technology Trends 2025 | The Concrete Voice
That's gold, you know. A knowledge worker who's got a packed day of back-to-back meetings all day long knows that they need to document what was said. They know that they need to go and act on things that were said as well. Unfortunately, that stuff, at least for me in my busy days,
has to wait until the end of the day in order for it to get taken care of. Most of these professionals are at best buzzword compliant. What I'm doing now actually crafted that particular query for me. This is natural language searching capability that's no longer
hope - this is real. These technologies that I know can bring value to them - CRM, AI, and others, portals, etc. Leveraging these tools helps you to keep that unique value proposition of a great customer experience, efficiency, and all of these things that are dialed in. The portal is going to be a big, big part of that. I just don't think it's optional anymore.
Arthur: Welcome to the Concrete Voice. My name is Arthur Ambartsumyan, your trusted guide to everything commercial real estate technology, and today our guest is Wes Snow. Wes, can you please introduce yourself to us? Wes: Yes, hello everybody. Wes Snow here with Ascendix, a company that's been around for 29 years, 200 plus employees and offices across the globe, specialists in commercial real estate technology. Arthur: Thanks Wes. I suggest we just jump right into the topic. Today we're
discussing top trends in commercial real estate and technology 2025. Let's start with artificial intelligence. How do you see AI reshaping the commercial real estate landscape in 2025, and what practical steps can our tech team take to contribute to this transformation? Wes: As we engage with the commercial real estate community at large, they're believing that it's real this time. As we all know, there have been false attempts for AI to come in,
but they didn't have the infrastructure and the depth of tools. Everybody that we're talking to is taking more of a proactive effort to get educated on it. They know they need to position themselves for this reality, and if they don't, they know that they're going to be left behind. There's a little bit of FOMO or fear of missing out that's starting to be palpable, and that's beneficial and kind of an obligation for technology companies to react to.
Having said that, most of these professionals are at best buzzword compliant. I think for technology companies, there is this need to step into the gap, and we have been doing that - not just studying up on these technologies but making investments in platforms and proofs of concept that are applied specifically to commercial real estate and residential real estate business problems, where AI can step in and help candidly be more efficient at the jobs that they're doing. Themes that I'm seeing are assistance being able to have tasks that are needing to be done but oftentimes are not done because of just the administrative overhead, having those be offloaded to an AI assistant. Another area where we've taken a deeper dive
in as an investment is around the arena of document abstraction. As we all know, real estate generates a lot of documents, lots of information possessed in these documents. We've become very aggressive in our investments on dealing with this inefficiency of abstracting data from these documents and having those be democratized in systems that are supporting decision-making on a daily basis. Those are some themes and some trends, especially as it relates to real estate. There are others as well, but that's that's what I'm seeing, Arthur. Arthur: Thanks for this insight, Wes. Speaking of AI assistants or AI agents as they call it right now, what use cases do you see for those in the market? Wes: I think we're all familiar and it's almost commonplace for AI note-takers to be joining various meetings. There's the ability very easily to transcribe those meetings. That's gold,
you know. A knowledge worker who's got a packed day of back-to-back meetings all day long knows that they need to document what was said, and they know that they need to go and act on things that were said as well. Unfortunately, that stuff, at least for me in my busy days, has to wait until the end of the day in order for it to get taken care of. AI steps in, this note-taking tool that now is my assistant, goes in and takes that burden off of me so I can listen like I am right now with you, listening to the conversation and being present, and being able to fully appreciate what's being said and also to say and respond to what's being said. The note-taker is doing its job.
Let's take for instance an investment sales broker who is conversing with someone, and during that call they reference companies and contacts and properties and deals that they're working on, all of which are extremely valuable and certainly could be captured as a note. But imagine all of those things that are being referenced would be interesting to have as data in a database actually coming to pass, and if I'm talking about 123 Main Street, that the system after it transcribes the notes is intelligent enough to observe that hey, there was a property that was referenced. Why don't we suggest to the end-user that that be a record that gets added to the system, and even have the intelligence to know that hey, that property record already exists but there were things that we talked about related to that property that don't exist, so maybe it's an update instead of an insert of a new record.
Countless meetings have all this information being grabbed in it, and what we're simply saying is let's allow for this AI tool to not only transcribe but to transform that transcript into chunked down data that in a large way also realizes another pain point in real estate and other communities for that matter, and that is data entry. People don't want to enter in data even though they know it's in their best interest to do so. They choose not to do it because they're too busy. Arthur: Yeah, these are great cases and I've seen a number of companies trying to solve this problem of entering the data, maybe using voice comments. Let's talk about customer relationship management, CRM systems. From your perspective, what are the key features that the next generation CRM
systems need for commercial real estate and how can tech companies bring those features to life? Wes: When we talk CRM, most people immediately associate CRM - the ticker symbol I might even add - to a company called Salesforce. Now we've talked about things like assistance, and I just mentioned the product named Agent Force. There's an agent-centric type of mindset where instead of the chatbots of the past where they were rather dumb and somewhat limited in what they could do, agents are moving in the direction of autonomy and being able to learn from themselves. This is going to get scary for some, but that's the reality - that's where we are. Being able to engage with these agents not just to do busy work, but them to actually come back to you with some intelligent questions and dialogue. I
think agentic CRM is probably the way that I would craft this, and as we fast forward 12-18 months, you're going to see it commonplace. Just baked into the core fabric of CRM, you're going to see agent-oriented work where those things that were the bane of our existence in training on CRM 20 years ago - like data entry and opening up an application and having to do all this manual work of note-taking and so forth - these things are going to be thoughts of the past. We're really going to see this elevation of more cerebral work. Now it all relies on the data. Without data, AI is really limited in what it can do, and so that's what we're going to
see - these methods to making sure that data is democratized and it's easily accessible so that AI can learn from it and continue to evolve and do much more on our behalf than is known today. Arthur: Yeah, and so we're somehow getting back to this topic of agent again. It seems like that's not a new buzzword - it's been a while. HubSpot recently released this marketplace of agents. Agent Force by Salesforce in February - Agent Force 2.0 will be released. And Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, recently said that agentic AI will be replacing SaaS in general software service. These topics are like on the top of the trends, and that's great that
we can discuss it here, and I hope that our listeners will learn something new. Wes: Another thing if I might add on that front as it relates to AI and CRM is instead of the keyboard and the mouse being the data entry, the mouth, the voice. Once data is harvested and curated into a knowledge support system like a CRM tool, being able to have a broker who's not been trained - this is part of it, right? Is going to train people on this? You don't have to train people to speak. For instance, if I wanted to go out there and in my knowledge support system look for all properties that have sold for anywhere between 10 and $25 million in the last two years in the North Dallas area, what I'm doing now actually crafted that particular query for me. This is this natural language searching capability that's no longer hope - this is real.
It can also help us with data entry, whether it be from a note taken from a meeting or just simply making commands. These are all things that in the past could have been done, but they were done with less accuracy than they can be now. So in the CRM realm, I think that's an important advancement as well. Arthur: I agree, I agree. And I'm curious also about another trend that I see, and maybe you can
kind of bring more light to this topic - this is public portals. What role do the portals currently play in the commercial real estate industry and how do you see their adoption evolving in 2025? Wes: Once we've seen a maturing data set internally, there is this opportunity that's presented itself to shed the old ways of communicating with external parties and allowing for almost a virtual existence through visualization of data. Those are realized in a number of ways. Just a couple of examples - in a real estate setting, there's this notion of
having all your listings, your sale and/or lease listings inside of your CRM system or otherwise data store that's behind the firewall and then making those available to the public, anonymous visitors of your website for instance, in what we call a property listing portal. That's a great use of data and leveraging not only for internal benefit but also allowing for external people to benefit from that. Now we've got this portal which is allowing for two-way commerce, not only educating people of the inventory that we have but also capturing the indications of interest directly and dynamically into the system with workflow triggers that allow me instantaneously, without any effort on my behalf, to be aware of the fact that Bob Thompson just indicated an interest in 123 Main Street. So that's an example of a property listing portal. Advance through the commercial or residential lifecycle and you get these evolution of relationships where it's not just a passing interest but now there's an engaging relationship, one that hopefully will end in some sort of commercial event, whether that be the signing of a lease or the sale of a property. Imagine having this virtual collaboration room in the context of, say, a tenant rep assignment where we have procured a collection of very tailored properties with availabilities that fit your precise requirements. And
instead of sending that to you in a tour book that's an attachment in a PDF email, simply inviting you to this virtual collaboration room where you can see the dynamic curation of these properties and can even give me instantaneous feedback without having to mark up with a red pen and then fax over or scan over to me your interest, but rather clicking and saying "Look, this one works, this one doesn't, this one's a maybe," and being able to have that dynamic feedback again with triggers and such that give us that instant feedback. Of course, document repositories along the way - most of these transactions require a sharing of documents, and instead of that being relegated to email back and forth, all that going up into these portals. Same thing with deal rooms, this more on the investment sales side where we've got confidentiality agreements that we need to have signed. Why not having people
get invited to these deal rooms to have that be where they interface with the confidentiality agreement? Once signed, automatically unveils to them the financial details that are needed for that particular real estate transaction and then engaging wholly in that particular form as opposed to all these other inefficient means that in the past were just the way of it. Now we're elevating, and that's just portal 101. You start putting AI on top of that and then it just amplifies the whole game. A community of buyers and your customers out
there that have access to more knowledge and more data than ever, and ultimately what they're going to judge everybody on in the real estate sector is the experience in doing business with them. If that experience is really chunky and it's really protracted through old school methods of communication, then you're not working to your advantage there. Leveraging these tools helps you to keep that unique value proposition of a great customer experience, efficiency, and all of these things that are dialed in, and the portal is going to be a big, big part of that. I just don't think it's optional anymore. The platforms like Salesforce, for instance, have created a special product called the Digital Experience Cloud. So there's
a lot that has been done and there's a lot that will be done in the way of portals for the real estate sector. That's just a small sliver of what we're seeing from a portal perspective. Arthur: Thanks for this perspective, Wes. I know about obviously Salesforce and Digital Experience Cloud and the CRM, so portals for CRMs is like an extension of your general relationship management. As you said, we have the team that internally works on
the tasks, events like calls and scheduling some tours etc. in CRM, but then we have this another dimension with the portals for the clients and for the partners as well. Maybe like for instance there are other portal tools - you can connect WordPress to the system if you have the data there and there are some connection points with an open API you can use. For investors, you have this Juniper Square software and they have like they call it security investor portal, also some specific extension of the relationship with certain groups of people in the market. So yeah, the portals, I believe and I agree with you, for this year would be another wave of demand on that.
Wes: One thing that might be interesting, and this may be not overly obvious, but with 29 years of experience you make observations. User adoption has always been a challenge for CRM, and portals in some way contribute indirectly to helping that process. If a user were to enter in data and they were the only one to benefit from it, they may actually use the system, but if they entered in the data and not only would they benefit from it but others that they depend on would benefit from it, then that heightens their incentive to actually use the system. Imagine a portal where if I enter in data about a listing and other deal flow information, and while I benefit from having organized all that and I have that accessible to me, but also another constituent, i.e., my customer benefits from it without me having to put any more effort into it - that's an incentive for me to go and start using CRM in a much more motivated way than in the past. So portals actually can unleash this data in
a much more meaningful way and indirectly actually help to support adoption of these internal CRM systems. So it just multiplies the value of the data that's residing in there. Arthur: Perfect. You just in several minutes discussed at least three types of portals that can be implemented - one for like a listing portal for the customers, one for partners, and one for managing relationship with investors. As we wrap up, I'd like to get
your thoughts about how to understand this business need. As we integrate all this AI, CRM, and portals innovation, how can our teams ensure that these technologies not only meet the technical goals but also address real business needs in the commercial real estate space? Wes: I think the advantage that Ascendix has is that we're not trying to boil the ocean, meaning we're not trying to solve everybody's problems. We are very discreetly and intentionally going after the real estate sector, and that's important. To your question, you have to have more than buzzword compliant domain knowledge in the industry if you're going to truly solve some meaningful problems.
We've already got, you know, could write the book on CRM, and we're starting to get smarter and smarter on it a daily basis on AI. We're essentially going to be standing in the gap there as that translator and that facilitator of value for this real estate sector on these technologies that I know can bring value to them - CRM, AI, and others, portals, etc. That's what our task is here - to position ourselves to be that great translator for the real estate community. We're not trying to be everything to everybody, let's just be that and be great at that. That's the journey that we're on, but it does require we have
deep knowledge of not only the technologies but also the market that we're going after, and once you have that, that's a great confluence of knowledge that then allows you to be that facilitator of realization of these technology platforms. Arthur: Excellent, very interesting takeaways from today's episode. Thank you, Wes, for sharing your thoughts and your expertise.
Wes: Thank you for having me, appreciate it. Arthur: Pleasure to have you. Thank you for listening to the episode of the Concrete Voice. Join us next time for more commercial real estate technology insights.
2025-02-14 00:51
