The Quest to Automate Real Estate Development

How close are we to machines doing a real estate developer's job?

The past few years has seen the proliferation of tools that seek to automate aspects of real estate development. From deal sourcing to underwriting to cost estimation and procurement, there’s now an AI-enabled app out there for almost every step of the development journey.

To date there has been no machine-led real estate development firm. But it’s at least theoretically possible to stitch these apps together to automate the process end-to-end. So how far away are we from this theory becoming reality?

Today’s letter will attempt to answer that with a thought experiment: if I were to build a real estate development firm with no humans, how would I go about that? What apps would I use and how would I design the process?

Today we’ll design and launch Asimov Partners, a hypothetical real estate development firm that builds ground-up multifamily but has zero human employees doing any actual work. As we tackle this, we’ll touch on some of the technology companies pushing the boundaries in automation as well as what this might all mean for real estate development as a profession in 3, 5, and 10 years.