More Than a Third of Asia Real Estate Executives Have Deployed AI Systems

More than a third of Asia real estate executives are leveraging artificial intelligence, up sharply from year-ago levels, according to a report released this past week by Yardi, based on a Mingtiandi survey.

In the fifth in a series of surveys of tech adoption in Asia’s real estate sector by Mingtiandi and Yardi, 37 percent of respondents said they were using AI, compared with just 17 percent in 2023 and a mere 9 percent in 2021.

Despite the upswing in AI usage, 78 percent of those polled said the real estate sector still lags other industries in tech adoption, up from 71 percent in 2023, with heightened criticism from mainland China (82 percent) and India (100 percent). AI adds another layer of complexity to the challenge, as the technology’s influence on developing tools is “pretty new”, said Bernie Devine, Yardi’s senior regional director for Asia Pacific.

The report was released to the public by Devine and Mingtiandi’s Michael Cole at an event this past week in Singapore, where the findings were reviewed by a panel of experts from online investment platform Investax, industrial developer and fund manager Emergent Capital Partners and law firm Goodwin.

Staff Spearheading Adoption

In the 18-question survey completed by 104 industry professionals, 26 percent said they have commenced research into AI and another 26 percent are actively implementing systems, signalling a growing acknowledgment of AI’s ability to improve operational efficiencies and decision-making. Some 16 percent of respondents said they have a stable AI solution in place.

Rank-and-file employees are driving adoption in many cases with their embrace of tools like Open AI’s Chat GPT, Zoom’s Assistant and Microsoft’s Copilot, said Zak Ungerman, a managing director at Emergent Capital Partners.

“The staff have gotten ahead of the companies, and the companies need to pay attention to that to make sure it’s being done in a safe way and also to make sure that the proper training is provided for the staff,” said Zak Ungerman, a managing director at Emergent Capital Partners. “I think we’re going to see more of this. People want to use these tools.”

A similar experience was reported by Alice Chen, co-founder and general counsel at Investax, who revealed that “every single person” in her company is using AI.

“I completely agree that we’re still at a very early stage of this technology, but we’ve already found the real-time and dynamic way that you can use the AI to deliver results that a human cannot,” Chen said. “So we’re implementing it across every department.”

Stress Test for Side Letters

To illustrate the labour-saving potential of artificial intelligence, Goodwin partner Matthew Nortcliff gave the real-world example of how AI tools can help to organise side letters, which are the various supplementary agreements made with parties to a deal.

“If you raise a $1 billion fund, you might have 50 or 100 side letters,” Nortcliff said. “It is a very onerous process to arrange them, analyze them, collect them … there are a number of AI service providers that ought to solve this problem.”

His firm “stress-tested about 10 or 15” providers before settling on one called Altra, “and now it’s a key part of our process where it makes our lives easier, it makes our clients’ lives much easier, and that’s a good selling point for us.”

You may download a copy of Technology Transformation in Asian Real Estate by clicking here.