AI-Powered Prospecting for Commercial Real Estate + Top AI Questions & Answers
The March 2025 Edition of ChatCRE
Welcome to the March 2025 edition of ChatCRE—Your monthly dose of updates on AI tools, and practical ways to put them to work in commercial real estate.
This month’s edition includes: The most impressive AI tool I’ve found for helping you call property owners (not an AI cold caller), updates on how you can use Deep Research to find expanding tenants, and the number one AI development I’m watching closely. As a bonus, I’ll answer the top questions I get on leveraging AI in CRE.
Let’s dive in.
TL;DR
Deep Research is Now Available on Most Major Paid AI Platforms. You can now use Deep Research ChatGPT Plus, Perplexity Pro, Grok 3, and Google Gemini.
Terrakotta is changing CRE cold calling with AI. This AI-powered auto-dialer speeds through your call list, leaves AI-generated voicemails, AND uses AI to find property owner contact info.
AI Developments I’m Watching: Check out how Superhuman’s AI updates could fundamentally change email with AI.
AI for CRE Q&A: Over 2 years of educating people on how to use AI for CRE, I’ve gotten a lot of recurring questions. Skip to the bottom to read them.
P.S. I’m booking public & private AI presentations and training sessions for Q3 and 4 of 2025. If you’re interested in having me present to your team, company, or association, send me an email and let’s connect.
Quick Update: Deep Research is Now Available on Grok 3, ChatGPT Plus, and Perplexity:
Use Deep Research to Find Expanding Tenants or CRE Opportunities on Whichever Paid AI Platform You Subscribe to!
In the January edition of ChatCRE, we covered how one of Google Gemini’s latest features, Deep Research, could be used to scan over 1,000 news articles at once to help CRE professionals find expanding tenants with AI. The trend is catching on; people love Deep Research. So much so that almost most major LLMs have incorporated it into their paid platforms, including ChatGPT, Grok 3, and Perplexity.
See below for an example showing Perplexity’s Deep Research pulling a list of expanding retailers in Southern California. I prepared this video for a recent AI presentation I gave to X Team Retail Advisors to show them just how easy it is to use!
I’ll spare you the deep dive on Deep Research, because we covered it previously, but the potential uses are endless. Looking for expanding tenants is just one great use-case, it’s really just scratching the surface.
I’d sum it up like this:
You know how you read a news article every so often, and your radar goes off? You’ve spotted an opportunity for a deal. Deep Research can scan over hundreds of news sources, websites and reports at once to make you a list of those opportunities.
But that’s not the only way you can use AI to find CRE opportunities..
AI-Powered Contact Info Scraping & Auto-Dialing:
This update is one I’m pretty excited about, because it answers one of the most common questions I get in AI for CRE:
“How can I use AI to find contact info for property owners?”
Up until recently I didn’t have a great answer for this question, and it comes up a lot. That changed when I met with Vincent Wilson, Co-Founder of Terrakotta, a few weeks ago.
Terrakotta’s platform actually provides a 3-in-1 AI punch for CRE pros looking to get in touch with property owners: Property data, contact data, and auto-dialing with AI-generated voicemails.
How It Works
Power Dialing at Scale: If you have your own contact database of property owners, upload it, and Terrakotta’s power-dialer will automatically call them one by one while you focus on other work.
AI Voicemail Options: If a call goes to voicemail, depending on how you set it up, you can:
Leave a live voicemail.
OR let AI drop a voicemail in your voice that dynamically references the specific property address you’re calling about.
Real-Time Data When You Connect: The second someone picks up, Terrakotta instantly pulls up their contact record, along with the property details from your database, AND with relevant property data from LoopNet and Crexi. So you can work on whatever you want while it’s dialing, but have all the information at your fingertips once you connect.
But what if you don’t have contact info for the people you want to call?
Terrakotta has solved for that.
Everyone’s gone through the tedious process of finding contact info for property owners. Pull info from the assessor database, figure out who’s attached to the LLC, try to find their phone number on one of the bajillion contact info services, and even with that tedious process it’s never that easy. Terrakotta has automated this process with AI.
All you do is enter a prompt about the type of property you’re trying to call on, along with the location and whatever other specifics you want. Terrakotta does the contact scraping for you, and gives the numbers to your auto-dialer to power through.
Luckily I recorded my call with Vincent, and he explained it in the video below much better than I could. (The video is edited to remove the barrage of questions I was hurling at him, or it would have been a LONG video.) If you want to learn more, you can check out Terrakotta here.
A few things worth noting:
Terrakotta isn’t a discount platform it starts at $250/mo. But for the combination of pulling contact numbers, combined with the auto-dialer and AI voicemails, it seems reasonably priced.
They don’t do free trials. BUT, if you don’t like the service they’ll refund your first month’s fee (assuming you’ve made 100 calls within the first 30 days, and you request the refund within the first 30 days). So it seems pretty low-risk, but only get started if you’re going to use it.
If you use Terrakotta to pull you property owner phone numbers, the numbers won’t all be correct. In fact, most of them probably won’t be. Think about all the bad numbers you find when you’re searching for contact info, Terrakotta finds the same ones - It uses AI but it’s not psychic. The difference is Terrakotta finds them FOR you, and then powers through them on the auto-dialer to get to the one correct phone number.
I personally haven’t used Terrakotta, but I’ve seen it in action and I’m considering it for a project. You can find more info here.
An AI Development I’m Watching Closely..
Superhuman’s AI-Powered Email Management
Superhuman, a popular email client for busy professionals, is planning to roll out new AI features that sound jaw-dropping.
I already use Superhuman, and previously I’ve barely considered it an AI tool, but it is absolutely FANTASTIC for managing email. The best feature isn’t AI, it’s the keyboard shortcuts that enable you to careen through hundreds of emails at blazing speed without having your hands leave your computer - It doesn’t sound like this would save that much time but it does. And the reminder feature is a real game changer for things you need to follow up on but don’t warrant putting on a to-do list.
All that said, the AI features they’re rolling out look amazing. Feel free to watch the promo vide below.
Notable New Features:
Auto Labels: Automatically categorizes emails (marketing, leads, follow-ups, etc.).
Auto Archive: Clears clutter while keeping emails organized.
Instant Reply: Drafts fully personalized email responses in your own writing style and leaves them in your drafts folder for you to review and send.
Auto Reminders & Follow-Ups: Helps keep conversations and things you need to take action on moving without you needing to manually track them.
I’ve introduced some CRE pros to Superhuman who’ve confirmed it saves them a ton of time. In fact, about a year ago, I did a consulting session with a CRE acquisitions team leader. His response at the end of the presentation:
“Topher, this is all great, but I have a team for this stuff. Could you do a presentation for them? I really just need AI to manage my email, have anything for that?”
It sounds like soon, you will.
Bonus: Top Questions (and Answers) I Get on AI for Commercial Real Estate
I recently gave a public presentation to a room of 200+ brokers, followed shortly after by an consulting call with a small team of 3 people - Both had a Q&A session. Something hit me later in the day: Both groups asked me almost the exact same questions. So I decided to compile the most common questions I get, along with my current answers. For better or worse, the answers are always changing, but here they are right now:
Q1: How can I design OMs and brochures with AI?
A1: Gamma if you don’t have rigid branding guidelines and templates, Henry AI if you do.
Q2: How can I get AI to do repetitive CRE tasks?
A2: Custom GPTs. Build simple ones with ChatGPT, build complex ones with multi-step workflows with Claude. They have limitations but if you can successfully build a custom GPT you’ll get better at prompting, and if you ever want to build an automation/agent you’ll need to do that.
Q3: How can I automate AI to do those repetitive tasks?
A3: Use Relay, Zapier or Make to automate AI workflows based on a trigger, such as, you receive a signed lease, OM, or P&S. OR build an agent with Replit (the likelihood of non-technical people doing that is kind of low).
Q4: How can I find CRE opportunities with AI?
A4: Use Deep Research for CRE. Use it on ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, or Grok. Tell it to search for articles published in local news publications in a certain time frame that mention companies that have somehow indicated they’re expanding (or whatever you’re looking for).
Q5: How can I create a searchable database of all my leases/OMs/whatever documents?
A5: Best answer I’ve got is Google NotebookLM, but there may be a better answer soon. Stay tuned for the next newsletter.
Q6: How can I scrape websites for CRE info?
A6: Build a web scraper with Bardeen.
Q7: How do I actually use AI at Aspire Commercial?
A7: Mostly combinations of 1, 2 and 3 above. We don’t actually use Gamma for brochures, but for other more unique design deliverables, or ones we need extremely quickly.
Q8: Why don’t we use it for everything possible?
A8: Setting and accomplishing goals with AI is like accomplishing any other kind of goal. You need to focus on what’s most important for your business. If you try to do everything at once you’ll fail. The current focus is getting it to do boring work no one else wants to do and that makes people’s lives easier.
That’s It, That’s All.
That’s it for the March 2025 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.
If you found this newsletter helpful, please consider sharing it with a colleague or friend who could benefit from enhancing their CRE operations, marketing, or pipeline with AI.
P.S.
I'm currently booking private and public presentations on how to leverage AI tools for commercial real estate for Q3 and Q4 of 2025. If you’re interested in helping your team, company, or association learn about powerful AI tools for CRE, please send me an email, and we can set up a time to connect.