Short answer: Jackson Reiter says many firms still Google for a tax assessor's portal, download a PDF and type values into Excel. He recalls an investor modeling a New Jersey deal on a printed spreadsheet with a calculator.
Watch this answer from Episode 47 (starts at 9:28) · Episode 47 notes and transcript
From Episode 47: AI Agents Doing Commercial Real Estate Due Diligence in Minutes. We Demo It Live., starting at 9:28.
Jordan Metzner [9:28]: Okay. Cool. Alright, Jackson. So let me jump in here a little bit as a non commercial real estate expert and maybe help our audience out a little bit as well. So first, let's just walk through kind of most of this work's being done today. I would say, like, you'd call it, like, manually, like, people are kind of they're getting the data, they're collecting it from multiple sources, they're using Google Maps or Google Earth, they have maybe some proprietary. Is it walk me through kind of like, what is like today or like maybe the previous workflow, and then walk me through kind of like, once you get Realm, kind of how the workflow changes.
Jackson Reiter [9:58]: Absolutely. This is why I get so excited about what we're building because I'd say in, like, the 2021, 2022 era coming out of COVID when the big real estate boom happened in residential, the entire industry got kind of slapped in the face and realized that the jokes everyone had been making about real estate being so pen and paper and antiquated were true, and now it was actually becoming a real problem. Over the last, I'd say, three or four years, the industry has made huge efforts to modernize, I guess you could say. But most of that's taken shape in the way of simple digitalization. I'm not joking. I when I was working in real estate during the COVID era, I worked with a real estate investor who's looking to buy a commercial property in New Jersey, and he was a sophisticated guy. He was not some noob or some guy who didn't know what he was talking about. He owned a wide portfolio. And when it came down to the financial modeling, he was using a, and I'm not joking, a printed out spreadsheet, like pen and paper, doing math with, like, a button calculator on the side. That's what the industry was like not even five years ago.
Jackson Reiter [11:02]: Now some firms were ahead of the curve on that. And, again, a lot have done a lot of new things in the last few years, but it has not really gotten us to the age of, Claude being able to run all of this directly in it, which is why we exist, is all that data is now available online. We're the ones that can actually go and find it. To be more direct about it, though, still to this day, there is a lot of people in the industry, big firms, small firms, who are trying to leverage AI to do this. They all seem to love Claude, as many of us do, and they're trying to use Claude to just do basic automation things for them, but still everything's happening in Microsoft Excel. The data part of it is simple Google search. They'd know that, hey. We're looking in Jersey City. I know where the portal for the tax assessor's office is. I'm gonna go log in, download a PDF of the page, and then type in the values manually into an Excel sheet.
Jackson Reiter [11:57]: That's really what we're dealing with today. And there's a lot of people, like I said, making great efforts to change that. And hopefully, Realm is the tool that lets them do that much quicker.
