The AI for CRE Course is BACK + Design Brochures, OMs & Floor Plans with AI
Learn to Use AI from the CRE AI Pros: The ChatCRE Feb 2025 Edition
Welcome to the (early) February 2025 edition of ChatCRE, your trusted source for all practical strategies for leveraging AI in commercial real estate. As you likely know, this is typically a 1x monthly newsletter, but I’m sending you the February 2025 edition early to bring you an important announcement:
The AI for CRE Program is BACK!
I’m beyond excited to announce the return of our AI for CRE Course with Rod Santamassimo, Connor Kadel, and myself, kicking off on February 19th.
Rod invited me to join him in teaching this program in 2024, and we taught over 100 commercial real estate brokers real world tactics & strategies on leveraging AI, and how to customize it to work for THEIR business. The course has been updated for 2025, and is custom-tailored to enable commercial real estate brokers to do more deals by doing less minutia.
The Course Structure:
5 one-hour live trainings across 5 weeks, starting on Feb 19th
What You’ll Learn:
In 5 weeks, one hour per week, you'll learn to:
Use AI Tools for Prospecting
Create Stunning AI-Generated Imagery for Marketing
Build YOUR OWN Customized AI Bots for CRE
Leverage Google’s Latest AI Tools to Analyze Docs & Find Tenants/Buyers
Put it All Together to Work for You!
The Dream Team:
This program is led by:
Rod Santamassimo (@MassimoGroup): World Renown CRE Brokerage Coach, Owner of The Massimo Group
Myself, Topher Stephenson (@TopherNOW): Head of Operations for Aspire Commercial and author of the ChatCRE newsletter.
Connor Kadel (@ConnorKHere): Director of Innovation at The Massimo Group and the architect behind CRE Launch AI.
We’re capping this program at 100 brokers to ensure a personalized experience..
Everyone who joins not only gets the opportunity to ask questions of all 3 of us during the class, but they can ask questions throughout the 5-week course about the tactics and tools covered in the lessons as well as how to apply them.
If you’ve been waiting to make AI your competitive edge, this is your moment.
🔗 Reserve your spot here: AI Program for CRE Brokers
Back to ChatCRE: The rest of this newsletter will have a key theme..
Leveraging AI to DESIGN Your Property Marketing Materials: Brochures, OMs, Space Plans & Renderings
We’ll go through 3 key AI platforms that you can use to save time and accelerate deal flow by designing marketing materials using AI.
TL;DR:
AI for CRE Brokers Course: Learn to leverage AI in your brokerage business in just one hour per week over five weeks, starting February 19th.
Gamma: Upload property details and have AI generate a marketing deliverable in your brand colors and fonts in MINUTES. Best for those who don’t need consistent templates.
Henry AI: Upload photos, financials & details, and generate professional offering memorandums, BOVs and other CRE materials with your exact branded templates for consistent results every time.
qbiq: Quickly reimagine office spaces with AI-powered floor plans and 3D renderings.
Gamma: Your Shortcut to Stunning AI-Generated Marketing Materials
When people DM me with questions about using AI in CRE, there’s some common ones that come up regularly. One of the most common questions? “How do I use AI to generate brochures?” Not that long ago, the answer was more or less “you can’t”, the technology wasn’t really there yet. Gamma changed that, now it’s easy.
Spoiler Alert: Gamma is a great tool, but the drawback is it can’t create your marketing docs with the same exact template every time. They’ll look good, but they don’t offer pre-built templates. If that’s important to you or your firm, read on to Henry.AI.
Here’s How It Works:
Copy and Paste Your Text: Start by dropping in the copy for your brochure, or even just the property details. Gamma will work with whatever you have to draft a brochure (or any other marketing doc), from top to bottom. Pro-tip, you can draft the copy for your brochure using my custom GPT Real Estate Writer Pro - We’ll teach you how to create custom GPT’s like this in the AI for CRE Program.
Use the Prompt Editor: Tell Gamma how you want your content structured, who your target audience is, and any specific directions for AI-generated imagery. There’s lots you can adjust, but you don’t need to change much for it to give you a stellar design.
Choose a Theme: Upload your brand colors, fonts, and logo—or pick a pre-made theme and adjust to taste.
Generate and Edit: Gamma instantly designs your document, presentation, or mini-website. You can swap out AI-generated images for your own property photos, or keep them depending on what kind of document you’re creating.
Maybe you’re thinking to yourself: “Topher, we have a team of people who make our brochures, we don’t really need this.” That’s great, I don’t expect everyone to stop using designers and to start using Gamma to create brochures. But if you don’t have a designer, Gamma is a layup for a lot of marketing use-cases. And even if you do, think of all the marketing you or your team are sending out that looks mediocre, or just bad. It could be anything.. A broker resume, a proposal, acquisition criteria memo, etc. If you’re sending your marketing out in the form of a word doc saved as a PDF - Do yourself a favor: Upload it to Gamma and just see what it can do.
The Nuances:
Gamma is a fantastic tool for creating marketing materials that look beautiful. The downside is that they don’t necessarily come out with the same components and visuals every single time - Said otherwise, you can create the materials with your custom branding, but not your custom templates. If you’re a small shop, and you don’t need your deliverables to look the same way every time, Gamma can provide you with much improved efficiency with your marketing, especially for creating 1-off deliverables. But if you or your organization you need more consistency in your marketing materials, there’s still tools out there that can help you. Enter Henry.
3. Henry: Your Branded CRE Templates + AI Generated Design
For CRE pros and orgs that need more consistency in their marketing materials, it’s definitely worth checking out Henry AI. Henry AI provides a reliable, consistent solution for uploading your financials, photos, and property details to AI, and having it create an OM that is in complete alignment with your custom-tailored templates.
Want to see how it works? Here’s a demo that the CEO, Sammy Greenwall put together just for you all!
Here’s what Henry it stand out:
For starters, Henry is an AI platform BUILT for the CRE industry
Henry is NOT a completely DIY AI tool. It’s a subscription service with an onboarding protocol. The goal behind Henry is not to give you another AI tool to learn to use, it’s to have AI do the work for you.
Henry does do more than OMs, it can create credit memos, flyers, BOVs, etc.
When you sign up for Henry, their team customizes the platform to recreate your existing templates, ensuring that every time you use it, the output will align with your templates and brand standards.
Once you’re onboarded, it works similar to other AI design tools: Upload your property details, photos, comps, and financial data, it provides you a fully designed piece of marketing collateral.
Henry will not only design your offering memorandum, but it will design it in complete alignment with your existing OM templates and design standards.
The output will require minimal editing, because it’s based off your existing templates, whereas outputs from Gamma will come out a little different every time, and likely need refining.
The Nuances:
A few things worth noting on Henry:
Pricing: Lots of AI tools are very inexpensive. Henry is definitely on the higher end of the pricing spectrum at $500/month per seat. But if you’re looking to make your marketing production process for more efficient, and you want to do it without sacrificing your company’s brand standards, and if you do a lot of volume, it could absolutely be worth the cost.
Full transparency - I haven’t personally actually used Henry in my day to day work, but I have seen it in action in a deep dive demo with the CEO, and it looks pretty amazing.
If you’re interested in checking out Henry, you can learn more about it here.
3. qbiq: Reimagine Office Spaces with AI-Powered Floor Plans & Renderings
It’s worth noting that I’ve mentioned qbiq in ChatCRE before - But it wouldn’t be a complete newsletter on using AI for marketing buildings and spaces if I didn’t bring it up. qbiq is a floor plan & rendering generation platform that works with AI and actual architects to reimagine your spaces in a 24-hour turnaround time. Below is a quick summary on what it can do, but if you want more details, you can check out this previous edition of ChatCRE.
How qbiq works:
Provide qbiq “as-is” floor plan.
Specify your requirements: Number of workstations, offices, conference rooms, and finishes like style of desks, flooring, and partitions.
qbiq uses AI to generate hundreds of options, and works with actual architects to narrow them down to a handful of top space plans, and delivers them to you with a full blown 3D rendering & virtual tour of your top choice within 24 hours.
What you get:
CAD files.
Virtual tours of your selected layout
Buildout material estimates (note: qbiq provides material estimates, but doesn’t include pricing).
Pricing:
Similarly to Henry - qbiq is not a completely DIY AI tool, it’s an AI powered platform that also requires the input of real architects, and the cost reflects that. They have 2 pricing plans:
Property Marketing Plan: $0.15 per square foot/year for unlimited floor plans
Under this plan you can work with qbiq on a space or building for $0.15 psf, and you get unlimited floor plan revisions for a year - Meaning you can generate a new one each time you take a new tenant through a space so you can customize the floor plan to them.
Agency Plan: Plans for groups with larger portfolios or deal volume start at $0.10 psf per quarter, starting at a minimum 50,000 square feet. Under this plan you don’t need to limit yourself to specific spaces, you start with 50,000 square feet worth of floor plans, and can create them for whatever spaces you like until you go through the 50,000 square feet. This could be more cost effective for groups who don’t need to revise floor plans for the same space over and over again, but need floor plans across many spaces.
In addition to it being a potentially powerful tool to help CRE firms work more efficiently, I believe that tools like qbiq represent one of the largest leaps forward in AI for commercial real estate. Maybe I’m biased due to the years I spent working on the landlord side, but I think these tools are going to help remove the CRE bottleneck that is lack of imagination. Landlords that have a vacant spaces can worry less about whether to leave it, update it with paint and carpet, or build it out for the use they want and hope they find the tenant. Imagine the day when we’re able to create these floor plans and renderings using AI, and immediately walk through them using VR headsets! It’s my opinion that technology like this will drastically shorten the time that it takes to lease vacant space in the near future. Learn more about qbiq here.
That’s It, That’s All.
That’s it for the February 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.
And don’t forget to check out the AI for CRE Program if you’d like to join a 5-week deep dive into how to use these amazing tools to be more productive, generate more business and close more deals.
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.