A version of this article first appeared in the CNBC Property Play newsletter with Diana Orrick. Property Play covers new and evolving opportunities for real estate investors, from individuals to venture capitalists, private equity funds, family offices, institutional investors and large publicly traded companies. Sign up to receive future editions directly to your inbox.
Fundrise, a Washington, DC-based online investment platform that prides itself on opening up investing in private real estate companies, real estate assets, and private technology companies to ordinary individuals, is now turning its attention to artificial intelligence.
Fundrise launches RealAI, a new AI platform that transforms the way single-family and multifamily real estate professionals and individual investors find and use data. This gives users instant access to a high level of market intelligence, from neighborhood income and migration trends to multifamily rents and average rents, all the way down to individual properties.
Fundrise co-founder and CEO Ben Miller says this goes far beyond what more generalized AI like ChatGPT can offer. The tool will launch with residential data, but Miller said it plans to expand to other commercial real estate sectors within six months.
“This is what real estate analysts do, and it’s something anyone can use,” Miller told Property Play. “We’ve built a database of 3.5 trillion data points that contains all the real estate knowledge you could want. This is all real estate in America.”
RealAI is free for the first 12 uses, then the standard plan costs $69 per month.
Fundrise curates data from both public records and private databases. It also includes information about the people living and working at the property, such as their education level, credit score, and income. Some of that comes from social media.
Compare markets, value any property, and model returns using these highly comprehensive and unique real estate datasets. Miller ran a simulation of Property Play to demonstrate how it works.
“You’re going to be able to take all the factors into account and really figure out the best property to buy,” Miller said. “This is the type of story I’ve had with some of the big asset managers (TPG Angelo Gordon), like Blackstone and others, where some of them have dedicated machine learning teams. Most don’t.”
The real estate industry has always been known to be slow to modernize, but major companies are beginning to tout the transformative impact of AI. JLL has several AI platforms for real estate analysis and portfolio management across multiple real estate sectors, but those tools are only available to employees and customers.
In a recent Property Play podcast, Barry Sternlicht, chairman and CEO of Starwood Capital Group, said AI will change the world faster than the industrial revolution.
“That’s scary to me. I’m not very happy. I’m thinking about my company and how we spend money and what we can do with AI agents similar to what we’re doing with humans today,” Sternlicht said of the hotel business. “I think we have to free people up, right?…A chatbot that costs $36 a month can do the work of 15 people.”
Miller said that since he launched Fundrise in 2012, he has been on a mission to democratize investing. Fundrise started as a crowdfunding platform for real estate, but quickly evolved into a fund structure, becoming the first non-traded public venture fund.
Fundrise currently manages $3 billion in assets across both commercial real estate and technology funds, and Miller said it has more than 2 million investors. The minimum investment is just $10.
Fundrise uses technology to pool capital and offer low minimum investment amounts, opening up access to asset classes traditionally reserved for wealthy individuals and institutions. The company’s technology venture fund includes investments in private companies such as OpenAI, Databricks, and Anthropic.
Mr. Miller, whose father was a major real estate developer in the Washington, D.C., area, said he always wanted to be a “traitor to his class.”
“My dream is to beat the incumbents and become wealthy. So technology is the best way to disrupt the status quo. Every year we have leveraged technology to do new things that hopefully change the way things are done,” he said.
Miller acknowledged that AI will cause job losses in all areas of commercial real estate. He said Fundrise hasn’t let people leave, but it has stopped hiring.
“This is what technology has done in the United States for the past 20 years: It has made the rich richer and it has had a negative impact on ordinary workers,” Miller said. “This is definitely going to happen. I just want it to be available to everyone, not just the biggest institutions. I think that’s a bad outcome for society.”
