New AI tool from Fundrise brings high-level CRE analysis to the public
A version of this article first appeared in the CNBC Property Play newsletter with Diana Olick. Property Play covers new and emerging opportunities for real estate investors, from individuals to venture capitalists, private equity funds, family offices, institutional investors and large public companies. become a member to receive future editions straight to your inbox.
Fundrise, a Washington, D.C.-based online investment platform that prides itself on opening up investing in private real estate companies, real estate assets, and private technology companies to the average individual, is now setting its sights on artificial intelligence.
Fundrise is launching RealAI, a new artificial intelligence platform that transforms the way single- and multifamily real estate professionals and individual investors find and use data. It gives users instant access to high-level market information ranging from neighborhood income and immigration trends to multifamily comps and average rents for each property.
Ben Miller, co-founder and CEO of Fundrise, says this goes far beyond what more generalized AI like ChatGPT can offer. The tool is launching with residential data, but Miller said he expects to expand to other commercial real estate sectors within six months.
“It does the job of a property analyst and is for everyone,” Miller told Property Play. “We went and created a database of 3.5 trillion data points on all the real estate information you could want. That’s every property in America.”
RealAI is free to users for the first dozen uses and then charges $69 per month for the standard plan.
Fundrise collects its data from both public records and private databases. It also includes information such as education levels, credit scores and incomes of people who live and work in the properties. He gets some of this from social media.
Using these highly comprehensive, proprietary real estate datasets, it can compare markets, evaluate all types of properties, and create return models. Miller ran a simulation to demonstrate how Property Play works.
“You’ll really be able to know which is the best property to purchase based on all the factors you give,” Miller said. “This is the kind of stuff I’ve been talking about with some of the big asset managers [about] — Karataş, [TPG Angelo Gordon]some have dedicated machine learning teams. Most people don’t do that.”
The real estate industry has always been notoriously slow to modernize, but big players are starting to tout the game-changing impact of artificial intelligence. JLL has several AI platforms for property analysis and portfolio management across multiple real estate sectors, but these tools are only available to its employees and clients.
Barry Sternlicht, chairman and CEO of Starwood Capital Group, said in a recent Property Play podcast that artificial intelligence will change the world faster than the industrial revolution.
Speaking about the hotel business, Sternlicht said, “It’s very scary for me. I’m not that complacent, and I look at my companies, how we spend money, and what I can do with AI agents like I do with people today.” “I guess we should just let people go, right? … The job of 15 people can be done by a chatbot that costs me $36 a month.”
Miller said he’s been on a mission to democratize investing since he started Fundrise in 2012. It started as a crowdfunding platform for real estate but quickly evolved into a fund structure – the first non-commercial public venture fund.
Fundrise currently has $3 billion in assets under management in both commercial real estate and technology-oriented funds and more than 2 million investors, according to Miller. The minimum investment amount is only $10.
By using technology to pool capital and offer low minimum investments, Fundrise has opened up access to asset classes traditionally limited to wealthy individuals and institutions. The technology venture fund includes investments in private companies such as OpenAI, Databricks and Anthropic.
Miller, whose father was a major real estate developer in the D.C. area, says he always wanted to be “the traitor of my class.”
“My dream is to get rich by overthrowing incumbents, and that’s why technology is the best way to disrupt the status quo. Every year we leverage technology, we do new things that we hope will change the way things are done,” he said.
Miller agrees that AI will cause job losses in all sectors of commercial real estate. He said he wasn’t letting people go to Fundrise, but he was halting hiring.
“This is what technology has been doing in America for the last 20 years. It’s making the rich richer and it’s having a negative impact on regular workers,” Miller said. “This is going to happen. I want this to be available to everyone, not just the largest institutions. I think that would be a bad outcome for society.”
