This essay builds on the last one. Catch up on Part 1: Defining Your Real Estate AI Strategy here.
The Problem: A Bottleneck in Sourcing
Sante Realty Investments manages $2B in assets, but one challenge was slowing them down: finding enough quality deals to deploy capital efficiently.
Their sourcing team—just two people—spent the entire week gathering data, running numbers, and filtering out unqualified properties. After 40+ hours of work, they would present eight viable opportunities. That’s one deal for every 10 labor-hours.
Jim, Sante’s CEO, knew this wasn’t scalable. His team had too much data to process and not enough time. He asked us: Can AI help?
Finding the right investment properties is a time-consuming process. It requires gathering listings from Costar, reviewing investment memorandums, analyzing financials, assessing occupancy rates, and evaluating location factors like highway access and retail proximity.
This manual process is why sourcing takes so long.
Most of the work isn’t decision-making—it’s just sorting through information.
The AI-Powered Solution
Instead of layering AI on top of an inefficient process, we broke the workflow down step by step.
We mapped out each task the team performed.
We identified repetitive, data-heavy steps that slowed them down.
We built an AI-driven system to handle those steps automatically.
Now, instead of manually gathering and analyzing data, the system pulls in listings, extracts key financial details, cross-references market data, and scores each deal based on Sante’s investment criteria.
Briefly, the solution works as follows:
- Market and sale data is exported from various data vendors
- Data is uploaded into AI
- AI compares data to predetermined investment criteria
- Does the data meet all the criteria? (choose 1)
- Yes. All data matches. Green Light
- Some data matches. Yellow Light
- Very little data matches. Red Light.
- Documents are created for investment committee and sorted based on green light / yellow light / red light status.
- Documents are sent to investment committee for review.
The result?
Instead of spending a full workweek to find eight deals, they can now analyze 150 in under a minute.
Sourcing used to be the bottleneck. Now, the challenge is selecting the best opportunities from a surplus of qualified deals.
For Sante, AI wasn’t the strategy. It was the tool that made their strategy possible.