Source: CNBC
By Diana Olick
Fundrise, a Washington, D.C.-based online investment platform that prides itself on opening up investment in private real estate companies, real estate assets and private technology companies to the average individual, is now setting its sights on artificial intelligence.
Fundrise is launching RealAI, a new AI platform that changes how single- and multifamily real estate professionals and individual investors find and use data. It gives users instant access to high-level market intelligence, ranging from neighborhood income and migration trends to multifamily comps and average rents — right down to each individual property.
Fundrise’s co-founder and CEO, Ben Miller, says it goes far beyond what more generalized AI, like ChatGPT, can offer. The tool is launching with residential data, but Miller said he expects to expand to other commercial real estate sectors within six months.
“It does the work of a real estate analyst, and it’s for anyone,” Miller told Property Play. “We went out and built a database of, now, 3.5 trillion data points of all the real estate knowledge you want. That’s every property in America.”
RealAI is free to users for the first dozen uses and then charges a monthly rate of $69 for a standard plan.
Fundrise culls its data from both public records and private databases. It also includes information on the people living and working in the properties, like their education level, credit scores and income. It gets some of that from social media.
By using these extremely comprehensive, proprietary real estate datasets, it can compare markets, evaluate any property and model returns. Miller ran a simulation for Property Play to demonstrate how it works.
“You’ll be able to actually know what is the best property to buy based on all the factors you give it,” Miller said. “This is the type of stuff that I’ve talked to some of the big asset managers [about] — Blackstone, [TPG Angelo Gordon], some of them have dedicated machine learning teams. Most people do not.”
The real estate industry has always been notoriously slow to modernize, but major players are starting to tout the game-changing impact of AI. JLL has several AI platforms for property analysis and portfolio management in multiple real estate sectors, but those tools are only available to its employees and clients.
In a recent Property Play podcast, Barry Sternlicht, chairman and CEO of Starwood Capital Group, said AI would change the world faster than the industrial revolution.
“That is terrifying to me. I’m not so complacent, and I look at my companies and how we spend money, and what I can do with AI agents that I do with humans today,” said Sternlicht, speaking about his hotel businesses. “I think we have to let people go, right? … Jobs of 15 people can be done with a chatbot that costs me $36 a month.”
Miller said he has been on a mission to democratize investing since starting Fundrise in 2012. It started as a crowdfunding platform for real estate but quickly evolved into a fund structure, the first non-traded public venture fund.
Fundrise now has $3 billion in assets under management in funds for both commercial real estate and technology, and, according to Miller, over 2 million investors. The investment minimum is just $10.
By using technology to pool capital and offer low minimum investments, Fundrise has opened up access to asset classes that were traditionally limited to wealthy individuals and institutions. Its tech venture fund includes investments in private companies like OpenAI, Databricks and Anthropic.
Miller, whose father was a major real estate developer in the D.C. area, says he has always wanted to be a “traitor to my class.”
“My dream is to get wealthy by tearing down the incumbents, and so technology is the best way to disrupt the status quo. We’ve been leveraging technology year after year, doing new things that hopefully change the way things are done,” he said.
Miller admits that AI will cause job losses in all sectors of commercial real estate. He said he has not let people go at Fundrise, but he has stopped hiring.
“This is what technology has been doing so far in America the last 20 years. It makes the rich richer, and it has a negative impact on the normal worker,” Miller said. “This is going to happen. I just want it to be available to everybody, not just the biggest institutions. I think that would be a bad outcome for society.”