While most AI startups talk a big game about their tech’s capacity, Cadastral has been quietly delivering results.
Abe Somani co-founded Cadastral with the simple yet challenging goal of creating an AI agent that can run over 300 complex workflows from end to end. Somani drew from 15 years of experience building tech for CRE companies to identify the inefficiencies and solve them using cutting edge AI. The result is an increasingly-ubiquitous platform that allows companies including JLL, Continental Realty Corporation, AvalonBay, EquityResidential, Empire State Realty Trust, Green Courte Partners and others to close more deals and improve their level of service without hiring additional staff. TRD sat down with Somani and Cadastral Co-Founder and CTO Aman Dhesi to learn how clients are deploying the company’s AI agents across their business areas.
Using AI for the right tasks
Despite what marketers will have you believe, AI is not a universal solvent.
Somani’s journey to building a useful AI platform for the CRE industry began with identifying where the tech could actually help operators in their daily work.
“The future of AI is always going to be human-enabled and human-enhanced,” says Somani. “I knew how complex and challenging and manual and tedious a lot of those day-to-day workflows were.”
Somani zeroed in on the repetitive tasks that AI handles well, building AI agents that take those tasks off of a user’s plate.
“The goal is to allow organizations to do a lot more with the same amount of people,” says Dhesi. “We want our customers to be able to run larger portfolios, to be able to service larger tenants, to increase the quality of support for tenants, to increase leasing velocity, to increase acquisition, due diligence velocity, basically do a lot more with the same amount of resources.”
Use case: lease abstraction
One area where Cadastral’s AI has proved immensely useful is lease abstraction.
Cadastral helps customers speed up and streamline their lease abstraction workflows by replacing a manual process, often prone to error, with automation. For example, after integrating Cadastral into its brokerage workflows, JLL was able to generate accurate lease and LOI abstracts within seconds, saving hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
“A customer like JLL has a ton of insights into what’s going on in their respective markets,” says Somani. “They’re able to now use the power of our Cadastral agents to harness that information and make it available to their brokers at their fingertips.
Continental Realty Corporation uses Cadastral to administer leases at its shopping centers. AI agents identify risks and help negotiate and draft renewals. Agents can also run scenarios, such as modeling the impact of an anchor tenant pulling out of a property.
“With Continental Realty Corporation,” explains Somani, “we have found that they have been able to not only speed up their processes by over 50%, they’ve also simultaneously been able to reduce their reliance and their cost on third-party law firms by more than 50% as well.”
Use case: asset acquisition and management
Dhesi outlined how one of Cadastral’s clients, Green Courte Partners, uses the tech in its acquisition workflows.
AI agents can compile a database of offering memorandums and rank them by the organization’s investment criteria. For a particular asset, agents are able to fill out a due diligence questionnaire and then trigger a variety of risk assessment and cash flow analysis tasks.
“We’re helping them do some of this diligence work much faster, much more cheaply, be able to do it in-house and do a lot of cost cutting that way,” says Dhesi. “By extension, we also allow them to look at the acquisition faster and look at more deals as well and not miss deals that are relevant to them.”
Once an acquisition is complete, customers can use Cadastral for asset management.
“Here is really where Cadastral shines. Being able to look at your monthly financials, compare them to your operating budget, compare them to your original underwriting, looking at the GL level to tell you, ‘Hey, there’s too much CapEx being spent here, this is way out of line. Here’s a risk here; here’s a tenant that looks like they might fold,’” says Somani. “Those kinds of things Cadastral agents are doing proactively, monitoring and assessing so you don’t have to be reactive, but you can actually preempt things happening to your portfolio.”
Use case: enhanced compliance
Empire State Realty Trust is using Cadastral agents to comply with monthly reporting requirements.
While it once took weeks to produce line-level explanations of discrepancies, “Cadastral agents have been able to take all that information and within a few minutes, turn that into a first draft of a variance report, which then can go to management in order to be refined,” says Somani.
In the legal department, customers like AvalonBay Communities deploy Cadastral to assess documentation risks and COI compliance.
“You just upload all of your insurance policies, you upload your leases or your loans, and Cadastral will very quickly build a matrix for you and tell you where you’re in compliance and where you’re not,” says Somani. “It even automatically drafts emails to each of your tenants or counterparties, letting them know that this is the information you need in order for them to continue to maintain their compliance obligations.”
AI-powered, human-guided
Of course, AI isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. That’s why Cadastral provides an advisory service that helps customers deploy AI strategically and at scale.
“Every single one of our customers not only gets access to an AI solution,” Somani says, “they also get access to a real human being who has real estate and AI expertise.”
That allows customers to move faster and seize opportunities.
“Real estate has typically been seen as this glacial space that takes a long time to get deals done. And that can all change now with AI agents,” Somani says. “This is the last tool you’ll ever need.”
Reach out to Cadastral today and begin scaling up your CRE business with AI agents.