AI in Research & Strategy
What this department does
Research & Strategy decides where a firm should invest before anyone underwrites a deal. The team tracks the economy, demographics, job growth, migration, supply pipelines, and the demand drivers behind each property type, then turns that into a point of view: which markets to enter, which to exit, and which neighborhoods are about to change. It’s the department most focused on the question where is society heading?
Tasks AI will replace
- Compiling market reports from data vendors and broker researchStandard documents
- Cleaning and merging datasets like census, rent, supply, and employment dataData entry & cleanup
- Summarizing economic outlooks, broker reports, and newsText work
- Watching the supply pipeline, permits, and major employer announcementsMonitoring
- Spotting trends and outliers across hundreds of submarketsPattern recognition
Bigger use cases
Site selection tool
Blends traditional metrics (rent growth, vacancy, absorption) with alternative data like social media activity, foot traffic, and job postings down to the census tract, then ranks sites against your strategy. I built an early version of this with social media data. See the project →
Demand signal monitor
Continuously watches for early signs that demand is shifting in a market, such as corporate relocations, hiring surges, new transit, or a change in how people are spending time in a neighborhood, and alerts the team before it shows up in rents.
Market narrative generator
Turns a stack of data into a clear story for the investment committee: what is happening in this submarket, why, and what it means for the deal.