12 Months Free from Top AI Platforms + AI for CRE Images Update

Welcome to the September 2025 Edition of the ChatCRE Newsletter

Welcome to the September 2025 edition of ChatCRE - Your dose of AI intel, and practical ways to use it for commercial real estate.

Last month I started the newsletter with a poll asking if people prefer longer monthly newsletters, or shorter weekly ones.

The consensus is in: Most people would prefer shorter newsletters.

I’ve kept this newsletter as tight as I could: Let me know what you think!

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ICYMI - The AI for CRE Learning Platform is LIVE:

This month I launched a new way to learn to use AI for CRE with AI pro’s Jonathan Buckelew & Nadine Ezzie. You can learn more about CRE AI Studio here.

The platform offers:

• Weekly video lessons on how to execute specific CRE workflows with common AI tools, and creating AI powered automations built for CRE.

• Live sessions with real time Q&A

• On-demand consulting: Ask us anything on AI in CRE, get our guidance within 24 hours

We only have 39 seats left under the current program, claim your spot in the CRE AI Studio here!

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Perplexity.AI Pro: 12 Month’s Free:

I’m a hound for a deal. But it’s not often that I come across an amazing deal on one of my favorite AI platforms.

Perplexity AI is now offering a FREE 12 months of Perplexity Pro for people who sign up and connect their PayPal account as their payment method (yes you have to connect a payment method, but you don’t actually have to pay, at least for the first 12 months).

You can use this link to signup.

Perplexity is an outstanding platform for CRE market research - It’s literally AI purpose-built for searching the internet. Yes, ChatGPT can search the internet but it’s also built to be able to write you a story and make stuff up. Perplexity isn’t built for that, it’s built to scour the internet and public data sources to give you the intel you need. Exhibit A:

But if you have Perplexity Pro, you can also leverage Deep Research, as well as create dashboards with Perplexity Labs, like the one below. Jonathan Buckelew used Perplexity Labs to research and create this dashboard outlining distressed multifamily opportunities in NYC. We posted an in-depth guide to using Perplexity’s key features in CRE AI Studio next week, and will be doing a live step by step lesson in the weeks ahead.

Perplexity is an EXTREMELY powerful way to use AI to gather intel from public CRE records - I highly recommend taking advantage of the offer.

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Google Gemini Pro: 12 Month’s Free for STUDENTS

And Why CRE Pros Might Like Gemini

Google Gemini is ALSO offering 12 months free of it’s pro platform, but only for students. Many of you might not qualify as students, but in the event that you do or if you have a kid who does, I’d check this out.

If you’re not sure what Google Gemini is, think ChatGPT, but it’s Google.

But what separates Google Gemini from ChatGPT?

1. It integrates easily with Google Drive, Gmail, your Google calendar, etc.

2. It’s better at reading scanned documents than ChatGPT or most other LLMs (which are unfortunately extremely common in CRE).

3. A larger context window - For CRE folks this basically means it can read MUCH longer documents, or batches of text. If you’ve ever uploaded a document to ChatGPT and thought “wow it didn’t read that very well”, it probably just didn’t read a lot of it at all. You’ll have that problem less with Gemini.

4. VEO 3 for Videos: VEO 3 is currently regarded as one of the top AI platforms for generating videos.

5. Notebook LM Pro: Notebook LM is an AI assistant trained ONLY on the documents and sources you upload to it. This means it won’t (or at least will very rarely) make stuff up - You can read more about it in this recent edition of ChatCRE. Notebook LM has a free version, but it only lets you upload 50 sources per Notebook. With Notebook LM Pro you can upload up to 300 sources.

6. Google Gemini was the first major LLM to offer Deep Research, and it might be the best. It can cover over 1,000 sources in a single search.

But there’s one more thing Google Gemini brings to the table.

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A New AI Image Generator for CRE: Nano Banana

OK the name is ridiculous but the quality is amazing.

Google Gemini’s latest image generator is INCREDIBLE for editing CRE images, or re-imagining them. And you can can make these images using plane english prompts.

You can use Nano Banana with Google Gemini for FREE, but there are limits to how much you can use it. With pro you get unlimited usage. Here’s a few ways you could use it I’ve collected across social media:

Highlight Buildings:

Reimagine a City Block:

Make a Rendering from a Site Plan:

But wait.. Can’t ChatGPT do that too?

The short answer - Yes, but Nano Banana is better. ChatGPT took a giant leap forward with their latest image generator a few months ago. But Gemini’s Nano Banana is better at understanding the spacial layout of images. Said otherwise, it’s better at recognizing where walls, windows, roofs, lot lines, etc. were in your original image, and making sure they stay in the same place in its updated image. It can also access Google Maps and street view imagery, which better grounds the images it makes in real-world geography. If you tried to reimagine a property with ChatGPT’s image generator and it didn’t come out well, try Nano Banana on Gemini, it might surprise you.

It’s still not perfect but it’s pretty incredible. You can try nano banana free here. And here’s a quick video showing you what to click (please don’t mind the incredibly ridiculous example shown in the video.)

That’s It, That’s All.

That’s it for this edition of ChatCRE. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this edition - What you found valuable, what you could do without, or any topics you’d like me to cover in future newsletters. Feel free to comment below, send me an email, or reach out on X and LinkedIn.

If you’re interested in step-by-step tutorials on how to use the tools covered in this newsletter, check out what we’re doing at CRE AI Studio.

P.S. I’m currently booking in-person & online AI presentations & training sessions for next quarter. If you’re interested in having me present to your team, company, or association on how to use AI in CRE, you can find more information here, or just send me an email and we’ll connect.