AI Hotels Can't Actually Use
AI for Real Estate
Most hotel technology investment is stuck in a waiting room called Hilton approval. Jake Wurzak, founder of DoveHill Capital - 20 hotel properties, 11 managed directly - has spent the past year mapping exactly where AI can and cannot reach inside his own portfolio. Brand lock-in is the actual bottleneck. Hilton, Marriott, and Hyatt control the core technology stack at every affiliated hotel. Revenue management, check-in systems, guest data - all locked. Third-party AI platforms cannot be substituted without brand cooperation, which moves slowly. The workaround is agentic AI...
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Why 50% of U.S. CRE Listings Pass through Buildout
AI for Real Estate
Most commercial real estate brokerages are still running their operations on Excel, PowerPoint, and three separate tools that don't talk to each other. Every time data moves between them, something degrades. The broker pays for it in time. Helen Calvin, CEO of Buildout - the platform that processes roughly 50% of U.S. commercial listings - sat down with me to walk through what end-to-end brokerage operations software actually looks like in practice, and where AI fits into it. Three things from the conversation that are worth sitting with: ...
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The Data Layer Reshaping Real Estate Decisions
AI for Real Estate
Most CRE firms do not know how their data is performing. They know the assets. They do not know whether the numbers coming out of their ERP, their property management system, and their third-party data feeds are consistent, auditable, or actually connected. When AI gets layered on top of that mess, it produces confident-sounding outputs nobody can verify. LD Salmanson, co-founder and CEO of Cherre, has spent seven years building the infrastructure layer that sits underneath the AI. The alternative is manual - and it breaks. Teams of consultants collect, distill, and...
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Turning Lease Documents Into Intelligence with AI
AI for Real Estate
My podcast/YouTube show guest today, Cameron Steele has spent the last several years tackling a problem most commercial real estate firms don’t realize they have. As the co-founder and CEO of Prophia, his focus is simple: turn the most important documents in CRE - leases - into usable intelligence. The issue is that much of the economic blueprint of commercial real estate still lives inside legal documents. And most firms are still extracting that information manually. In our latest conversation, Cameron walks through how AI is beginning to change that. ...
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Real-Time Asset Management, Finally
AI for Real Estate
Most multifamily asset managers are still assembling reports. Colin Green built software to eliminate that step entirely. Colin is the founder of BubbleGum BI, a business intelligence platform designed specifically for multifamily asset managers. Before launching it, he built the tool for himself - nights and weekends - to solve the frustration of pulling rent rolls, cleaning spreadsheets, and waiting on Monday Morning Reports. The result is a real-time operating layer. In our conversation, Colin answers five important questions for serious CRE operators: ...
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Data Is the Real AI Advantage
AI for Real Estate
The firms that win with AI in this cycle won't be the ones with the best models. They'll be the ones with the best data. My Demo Day podcast/YouTube guest today is Michael Mandel, co-founder and CEO of CompStak. Key takeaway: clean data is the moat - AI is the multiplier. CompStak spent 14 years crowdsourcing lease and sales comps from nearly 50,000 brokers and research professionals. That foundation is what makes their AI tools actually useful rather than just impressive. The practical applications worth knowing about: natural language search across 1.3...
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Amazing Pitch Decks with AI
AI for Real Estate
Most pitch decks are failing because PDFs no longer match how investors actually consume information, especially on mobile. That is the problem Avi Solomon and his team at Pulse are solving with AI. In brief: • Interactive decks increase conversions • AI now makes advanced pitch decks economically viable • Investors increasingly expect interactive, mobile-native formats Pulse feels like a category shift because the decks behave like interactive web pages not documents where on-screen motion captures attention, information is layered so investors can skim or...
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AI Automation for Hotels
AI for Real Estate
Hotels are not underperforming because demand is weak, they are underperforming because the economics of the guest relationship are still being managed manually. That is the central takeaway from my recent Demo Day conversation with Luca Zambello, Founder, and Jason Lopez, VP of Revenue at Jurny. [Full disclosure: I am an early investor in Jurny] In brief: Hotels are leaving meaningful NOI on the table by treating guest experience as a cost center rather than an operating system. What stands out Personalization at scale is an operational advantage that...
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Underwriting CRE at Speed with AI
AI for Real Estate
Want to screen (waay) more deal flow for your acquisition pipeline than you do currently? Here is exactly how to do that with AI (and I'm NOT talking about some clever new way to use ChatGPT). 𝘐𝘯 𝘣𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘧: 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘢𝘣𝘪𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘺 𝘵𝘰 𝘶𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘸𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘦 𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘦 𝘥𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘴 𝘢𝘤𝘤𝘶𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘭𝘺 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘣𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘦𝘹𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘤𝘦𝘴𝘴 𝘪𝘴 𝘢...
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Deal Screening on Steroids
AI for Real Estate
AI in commercial real estate is usually framed around predictions and pricing. In brief: Underwriting delays come from manual data extraction, not Excel. Institutional CRE teams automate the data layer, not the model. Parsing rent rolls and T12s is now a scale problem, not a staffing one. AI underwriting is being adopted first by lenders and servicers. Speed and consistency are emerging as underwriting risk controls. This Demo Day conversation with Parag Goswami, CEO of Clik.ai, focuses on something more fundamental: how underwriting actually gets done. ...
info_outline- Personalization at scale is an operational advantage that directly impacts NOI.
- Ancillary revenues sold post-booking carry near-zero marginal cost and disproportionately expand NOI.
- AI changes the labor equation by shifting staff from admin and triage to actual hospitality.
- Centralized communications using AI work when guest intent, sentiment, and history live in one place.
- Jurny helps hotels systematically monetize guests beyond the room night.
Why this matters beyond hospitality
Call: 213-761-1000