Commercial real estate has historically lagged behind other industries in adopting technology, surviving major waves from digitization to data aggregation largely unchanged. According to Dan Mosher, Co-Founder and CEO of DealGround, this resistance stems from the industry's core as a relationship-based field where data was traditionally a strategic weapon, leading to a culture of data hoarding and fragmented technology adoption.
Mosher explains that brokers typically juggle five or six disconnected systems—such as CRMs, comp databases, and property management tools—just to make a single informed phone call. This "five-system problem" has persisted because each tool performed one function well, leaving brokers to manually connect the dots between them. The industry's advanced workflows involve pulling data from one system, processing it through tools like ChatGPT, mapping it in platforms like Google My Maps, and checking CRMs, all before initiating contact.
The current shift, Mosher argues, is driven by artificial intelligence's ability to handle the unstructured data that defines commercial real estate, including offering memorandums, spreadsheets, lease documents, and due diligence materials. For decades, this data has been messy and siloed, but large language models excel at synthesizing such information. The fragmentation that hindered earlier technology waves is now the exact problem AI tools are built to solve.
DealGround was designed to address this by creating a single platform where brokers, investors, and analysts can centralize private data, access public property and title records, and query everything through an AI-powered interface. As Mosher states, the goal is to be the "database of records," tracking all property-related events—such as new tenants, lease expirations, and loan maturities—in one place. This approach aims to collapse the entire technology stack, moving beyond adding AI features to existing workflows to creating a unified system that surfaces insights and frees professionals to focus on relationship-building and deal-closing.
The platform's value lies in reducing administrative legwork, allowing brokers to spend more time on relationships. By automating research and flagging key events—like a lease expiring in six months or a loan maturing in 2027—it enables brokers to make well-informed propositions. Mosher emphasizes that this transformation is not about replacing brokers but giving them an "unfair advantage" in a competitive market. After decades of lagging, the convergence of existing data, ready AI tools, and growing broker interest suggests conditions are finally ripe for change in commercial real estate. For more information, visit https://www.dealground.com.
