Welcome to the January 2025 edition of ChatCRE, your source for intel on leveraging AI for commercial real estate. As we launch into 2025, the past year has brought transformative advancements in AI that are changing the landscape of CRE. In fact, there’s been a TON of advancements in AI over just the past month or so. In this edition of ChatCRE, we’ll dive into what I think is the most impactful recent AI advancement that you can actually use in commercial real estate today, how AI is changing the way that our industry accesses information, what you can do to stay ahead of the curve, and some fantastic marketing tools that will help you do that.
TLDR:
Google Gemini’s Deep Research Feature: Use AI to uncover tenant/buyer leads that have indicated they’re expanding in recent news publications.
AI’s Impact on Search Engines: The way people access market intel is changing, learn what’s happening and how you can stay ahead of the curve.
My Top AI Content Tools from 2024: Learn what tools you can use to stay in front of your audience despite shrinking search traffic.
P.S. I’m booking public & private AI presentations and training sessions for 2025. If you’re interested in having me present to your team, company, or association, send me an email and let’s connect.
Google Gemini’s Deep Research: Find Tenants & Buyers That are Likely to Expand
Over the month of December leading up to the new year, we saw a flood of updates from major AI players like OpenAI and Google Gemini. Some updates are massive, others are minor, but only a select few offer immediate tactical applications for CRE. The standout for me is Google Gemini’s Deep Research function. This tool leverages AI to scour hundreds of (sometimes over 1,000) websites, reports and publications to provide actionable, comprehensive reports on whatever you’re researching.
The reason it’ll be helpful for CRE? You can use it to search hundreds of local or nationwide news publications for recently published articles that mention companies that have somehow indicated they’re likely to expand.
Here’s How It Works:
Select Deep Research Mode: Head to Google Gemini and choose Model 1.5 with Deep Research. (Subscription to Gemini Advanced is unfortunately required, for now.)
Craft a Targeted Prompt: Give it specific requirements for the types of publications you want to search, the date range for when the articles were published, the types of companies you want to find, and even the types of expansion indications you’re looking for. For example, I recently asked it: “Can you search articles published in the last 6 months from Maine news publications that mention indications of boatbuilders, building product companies, or manufacturing companies that may be expanding their operations?” Next, Gemini will put together a step-by-step research plan for you to review.
Review the Research Plan: The beauty of this new feature is that Gemini will craft a multi-step plan to find the relevant news publications, filter for the ones published in the date range you set, filter for articles that mention expansion-related keywords, and then filter for the ones mentioning the TYPES of companies you’re looking for. You can prompt Gemini to update this research plan as you see fit. It will likely take some trial and error with this to find exactly what you’re searching for, but here is the research outline it gave me.
Execute the Search: Watch Gemini analyze up to 1,000 of websites and news publications, delivering a comprehensive, actionable report with leads you may want to contact.
Here’s a video of it executing this research plan so you can see it in action.
Iterate for Better Results: Begin with a broader search scope to capture a variety of tenants and refine based on the insights you gather for pinpoint accuracy.
Pro Tip: You CAN try to execute a similar prompt with other LLM’s like ChatGPT, but unfortunately it’s not going to do even close to this deep of a dive. ChatGPT will search until it thinks it’s found the information you’re looking for, provide you a few results and then stop, you can prompt it to continue by saying “Please keep going”, but as of now it doesn’t come close to what Gemini can do. Gemini’s Deep Research feature’s ability to analyze hundreds of sources at once ensures comes pretty close to leaving no stone unturned.
BONUS Pro Tip: Try using Gemini to find companies that have recently announced changes in leadership, send the new business leader a congratulations card, and add them to your CRM to follow up and see if they have a need for your services.
If you have a subscription to Gemini Advanced, I highly recommend giving these tactics a shot, seeing what it can uncover, and making the calls.
The Evolving SEO Landscape: How AI is Changing the Way People Access Information
Continuing with the Google theme, there’s another massive shift in AI’s access to the internet that’s shaking up the world of online marketing.
Here’s what’s happening:
In 2022, an AI-powered search engine called Perplexity launched, giving users the ability to ask questions and scrape the internet for data without visiting the websites the information originated from. For CRE professionals, this means being able to ask questions about tenants, properties, property owners, or market intel and receiving comprehensive answers instantly.
Below is an example showing how I was able to research the ownership group of a hotel, and learn more about their active projects.
Perplexity worked so well that by 2023, Google began rolling out AI-generated search results into its own search engine interface, further reshaping how people access information. Now, ChatGPT has joined the race, and has launched its own AI-powered search interface to compete.
While all these tools are impressive, none of them, in my opinion, work as well as Perplexity for market research. It’s a FANTASTIC tool for collecting data and insights. But these powerful AI search functions cut both ways—your clients are going to use it, too. The fact that industry giants like Google are integrating AI-generated search results into everyday search tools means that you don’t have to be an AI expert to use them. This shift will have a particularly significant impact on CRE brokerages, which often rely on web traffic to generate leads.
Consider this: that market update report you worked so hard on? It used to live on your website, where people searching for its insights might click over, see your face, your brand, your brokerage, and perhaps reach out for more information—or at the very least, provide you increased brand recognition. Now, Perplexity, Google, ChatGPT, and other tools will scrape that report for its intel, combine it with data from other sources, and serve the combined results directly to the searcher. Maybe they’ll click through to your website, but often, they won’t need to. As a result, they’ll never see your name, face, or brand.
The Bottom Line: The way people access information is changing, and if you want to stay ahead, you’ll need to be proactive to continue generating business from your online marketing. The good news is that AI is making it substantially easier to create content (see the last edition of ChatCRE for some tools you can use to create AI-generated videos), but there are additional steps you can take to secure your businesses ability to generate business from online marketing.
I recently came across a Twitter thread (yes, I still call it Twitter) from CoFounders Nik that effectively summarized this issue while outlining actionable steps his companies are taking to adapt to this new era of online marketing. These steps are ones you and your business should consider implementing as well. If your CRE business relies on search traffic to generate leads, I highly recommend checking out his post: Read it here.
One of the ways that you can stay ahead of the curve with online marketing is by leaning into content creation, luckily, AI is making it way easier to do that than ever before.
My Top AI Platforms from 2024 for Marketing Content Creation & Repurposing:
As I mentioned, while AI is poised to have some downward effects on search traffic, it’s also drastically improving the ability of people and businesses to efficiently create other forms of marketing content. This next section of the newsletter is less specific to CRE, but I couldn’t include all the doom and gloom about AI’s impact on search traffic without offering a solution. So here’s a list of fantastic tools for creating marketing content that I’ve collected over the past year, some that I use every day, and some that were recommended by colleagues. If you plan to create more content to proactively get out in front of your clients and build your own audience in 2025, give it a read!
Opus Pro:
Opus Pro takes long form video content and chops it up into short-form videos that you can post to your favorite social media platforms. It uses AI to find the most engaging clips, creates the captions, and makes it extremely easy to edit the clips, add your branding, and even schedule the posts. This is honestly one of the highest leverage AI tools I’ve found based on the time it saves.
Canva Magic Studio:
Many people know Canva, it’s like Adobe design and video editing software except it’s actually easy to use! What some people don’t know is that they’ve rolled out some amazing AI editing tools that enable you to automatically expand your photos, erase blemishes, objects or people, remove backgrounds, grab and edit text, and even reimagine parts of the photo (think “replace the wall of this industrial building with 3 dock doors). If you’re not a design pro and you want to leverage AI to edit images in a hurry, I highly recommend trying it. This one IS applicable to CRE because you can use it to reimagine properties.
Image Generation:
Listen, there are endless AI tools for creating images at this point. If you want to get started, you just need to pick one and learn to use it. That said here’s a few of the ones I use, what I like and don’t like about them:
Grok (Available thru X, and they now have a stand-alone product): Great for photo-realistic images, but it doesn’t always understand complex prompts.
ChatGPT with Dalle3: Great for illustrated/cartoon style images, much less effective for photo-realistic images. The images I use for this newsletter are typically made in ChatGPT. You can also edit the images it creates. What I like about ChatGPT is that you can tell it to ask you questions about your brand and color scheme, and it will adapt the images it creates to follow those guidelines.
MidJourney: Fantastic for photo-realistic images, and honestly images of all kinds. It has the best platform I’ve seen for editing the images it creates, but it’s a more complex tool with more features and more difficult to use if you’re just getting started.
Ideogram: I don’t use this currently because I had to cut off my AI subscription budget somewhere, but I’ve tested it quite thoroughly, and I’d say it’s the best I’ve seen if you consistently want to create images with text. Many AI image tools jumble up text and it comes out riddled with misspellings. Ideogram is great if you want to avoid that.
Bonus tip: If you create a great AI image with one of these tools but the text comes out jumbled or misspelled, you can grab and edit the text with Canva AI studio.
Gamma:
Gamma is by far the best AI tool I’ve used for creating ad-hoc marketing documents. Give it some text to go off of, tell it your target audience, whether you want a doc, a presentation, or even a small website, and it will design it from top to bottom using smart layouts that you can adjust, and beautiful AI generated images. This one is absolutely worth checking out, especially if you’re a broker designing your own marketing collateral. I use this both personally and in CRE.
Runway ML:
The way I use this tool is simple - Take images and turn them into 10 second videos. Honestly there’s lots you can do with this tool, generate short videos from text prompts, extend/edit videos with a text prompt, and create images or transform existing images, but turning images into video is their claim to fame and it’s what I use it for most often. Read more about how to use it for CRE in the last edition of ChatCRE.
Invideo.AI:
Runway is great for short video clips, but Invideo is the tool to see for creating LONG-FORM video content. Give it a bunch of text (think a market report, a blog, or even brochure copy for a property), Invideo will write a script, record an AI voiceover, and stitch together stock inages and video to create a custom tailored video using your content. Then you can replace the stock images with images and videos of your own. Read more about how to use it for CRE in last months edition of ChatCRE.
Bonus tip: Create short form videos with Runway ML and turn them into a long form video using Invideo.
Swell AI: A Platform for Streamlined Content Creation
Swell AI was recommended to me by a colleague of mine and it looks to be a game-changer for businesses that want to create more written content, automating the transformation of audio and video into polished written formats. With its intuitive interface, users can seamlessly import media, generate high-quality content, and export it across multiple platforms with ease. It’s particularly powerful for repurposing podcast content.
It offers automatic transcription with speaker identification, AI-powered highlights, and team-friendly editing. Content creation spans show notes, social media posts, blog articles, newsletters, and title brainstorming. Multi-format export ensures compatibility with platforms like Google Drive and Dropbox. For audience engagement, Swell AI even allows you to create AI chatbots around your content! I look forward to trying this out in 2025.
There are more AI content creation tools coming out DAILY,
but these are the ones I either use most often or am most excited about. But don’t get overwhelmed thinking you need to use them all at once. If you’re leaning into content creation for yourself or your business in 2025, pick one and give it a whirl!
This was a long newsletter..
Be honest, did you enjoy reading about 3 interrelated AI topics in 1 dose, or should I have broken this up into 3 separate newsletters for an easier read? Feedback is much appreciated!
That’s It, That’s All.
That’s it for the January 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 us to cover in future newsletters. Feel free to comment below, reach out on X, or simply reply to this email.
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 for the 2025 calendar year on how to leverage AI tools for commercial real estate. 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.
Great content Topher. Thanks for taking the time to create this newsletter, it is very educational.