Fundrise’s new AI tool brings high-level CRE analytics to the public

A version of this article first appeared in the CNBC Property Play newsletter with Diana Olek. Property Play covers new and evolving opportunities for the real estate investor, from individuals to venture capitalists, private equity funds, family offices, institutional investors and large public companies. subscription To receive future issues, directly to your inbox.

Fundrise, a Washington, D.C.-based online investing 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 launches RealAI, a new AI platform that is changing how real estate professionals and individual investors find and use data. It gives users instant access to high-level market information, from neighborhood income and migration trends to multifamily businesses and average rents — all the way down to each individual property.

Fundrise co-founder and CEO Ben Miller says it goes far beyond what more general 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.

“He does the job of a real estate analyst, and he’s available to anyone,” Miller told Property Play. “We went out and built a database that now has 3.5 trillion data points for all the real estate knowledge you could want. And that’s every real estate in America.”

RealAI is free to users for the first ten uses and then charges a monthly price of $69 for the Standard plan.

Fundrise pulls its data from public records and private databases. It also includes information about the people who live and work in the properties, such as their education level, credit scores, and income. He gets some of that from social media.

Using its highly comprehensive and proprietary real estate datasets, it can compare markets, evaluate any property and model returns. Miller ran a simulation of Property Play to demonstrate how it works.

“You’ll be able to know what’s the best property to buy based on all the factors you give it,” Miller said. “This is the kind of thing I’ve talked to some big asset managers about [about] —Blackstone, [TPG Angelo Gordon]Some of them have dedicated machine learning teams. Most people don’t do that.”

The real estate industry has always been slow to modernize, but major players are starting to tout the game-changing impact of AI. JLL has several AI platforms for real estate analysis and portfolio management across multiple real estate sectors, but these 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 that artificial intelligence will change the world faster than the industrial revolution.

“This is terrifying to me,” Sternlicht said, speaking about his hotel business. “I’m not very satisfied, looking at my companies and how we spend money, and what I can do with AI agents that I do with humans today.” “I guess we have to let people go, right?… Jobs for 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 launching Fundrise in 2012. It started as a real estate crowdfunding platform but quickly evolved into a fund structure, the first non-traded public equity fund.

Fundrise now has $3 billion in assets under management in funds for both commercial real estate and technology, and, according to Miller, more than 2 million investors. The minimum investment is only $10.

By using technology to pool capital and offering low minimum investments, Fundrise has opened up access to asset classes traditionally limited to wealthy individuals and institutions. Its technology venture fund includes investments in private companies such as OpenAI, Databricks, and Anthropic.

Miller, whose father was a major real estate developer in the D.C. area, says he always wanted to be “a traitor to my class.”

“My dream is to get rich by tearing down existing companies, so technology is the best way to disrupt the status quo,” he said. “We have been leveraging technology year after year, doing new things that will hopefully change the way things are done.”

Miller acknowledges that AI will cause job losses across all commercial real estate sectors. He said he didn’t let people go to Fundrise, but he stopped hiring.

“This is what technology has done so far in America over the last 20 years. It makes the rich richer, and it has a negative impact on the average worker,” Miller said. “It’s going to happen. I just want it to be available to everyone, not just the big institutions. I think that would be a bad outcome for society.”