The 2026 DNA of CRE reports just launched get your copy and they confirm what many of us have felt building over the last two years: artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer emerging in commercial real estate. It’s here. It’s happening. Get on board.
According to the 2026 DNA of CRE Broker Report, 83% of brokers are now using AI in some capacity. That number alone marks a dramatic shift from just a few years ago. AI adoption has officially crossed the threshold from experimentation to normalization.
But when you look deeper into how AI is being used, a more nuanced story emerges.
Across the industry, AI is primarily being used to accelerate communication and marketing outputs.
Among brokers, the top AI use cases include writing copy for marketing materials (59%), drafting prospect outreach emails (56%), and creating social media content (52%). On the marketing side, the pattern is similar. The 2026 DNA of CRE Marketer Report shows 57% of marketing teams use AI to create social content, 47% use it to draft email correspondence to clients, and 43% use it to design marketing collateral.
In other words, AI is helping CRE professionals create faster.
Listing descriptions are written more quickly. Emails are drafted in seconds instead of minutes. Social posts are generated with less effort. These are meaningful productivity gains, especially in a business built on speed and responsiveness.
But creation is only one piece of the workflow.
What AI is not yet doing — at scale — is transforming how brokerages operate.
Despite the surge in AI adoption, the structural realities of CRE workflows remain largely unchanged.
More than half of brokers (53%) still do not use a dedicated deal management system. Nearly one-third cite “too many tools” as a core deal management challenge. On the marketing side, 45% of listing distribution is still handled through manual administrative entry, and 35% still rely on manual broker entry.
Listing data is stored across spreadsheets, custom-built systems, cloud storage platforms, and various CRM or marketing tools. Email marketing platforms are similarly fragmented, split across Buildout, Constant Contact, Mailchimp, CoStar, and others.
So while AI may draft an email in seconds, that email often still needs to be exported, reformatted, uploaded into another system, and tracked separately from the deal pipeline.
AI is accelerating output — but it isn’t yet orchestrating the workflow behind it.
The data makes something clear: CRE does not have an AI adoption problem. It has an integration problem.
AI layered onto siloed systems doesn’t eliminate friction. In many cases, it simply produces content faster while the underlying manual processes remain intact.
True operational leverage requires more than generative tools. It requires connected systems — where property data flows seamlessly from listing creation to syndication, from email marketing into CRM, and from deal tracking into commission reporting.
Without that connective layer, AI remains tactical rather than transformational.
This pattern mirrors what broader enterprise research is showing. Across industries, organizations have rapidly adopted generative AI for productivity use cases — writing, summarizing, drafting — but struggle to embed AI into core operational systems due to fragmented data environments. Commercial real estate is experiencing the same growing pains.
Both reports also show that the industry is entering 2026 with strong optimism. Seventy-five percent of brokers express a positive outlook for the year ahead , and 87% of marketers report positive sentiment. Marketing technology investment is increasing as well, with 68% of marketers expecting higher tech budgets in 2026.
In a rising market, competition intensifies. Listings move faster. Clients expect faster responses. Firms are measured more closely on performance and visibility.
In that environment, surface-level AI adoption won’t be enough.
The firms that win won’t simply be the ones using AI to draft content. They’ll be the ones who connect AI to their entire deal lifecycle — eliminating duplicate data entry, automating listing distribution, tying email engagement to pipeline activity, and creating real-time reporting across marketing and transactions.
The question is no longer, “Are you using AI?” Most of the industry can answer yes.
The real question is: Is AI embedded into your operating system — or is it just helping you write faster?
Because in 2026, speed alone won’t create advantage. Integration will. And that’s where the next phase of CRE technology evolution begins.
Don’t miss out on the annual DNA of CRE report. It’s a joint effort across the industry powered between TheBrokerLit and Buildout year after year. The reports contain exclusive inputs from the broker side as well as the marketer side. Get your copy!
