“Winning with AI in Real Estate”

August 31, 2026 by Donald Davidoff

I recently had the pleasure of watching the Willie Walker webcast with Aditya Sanghvi, partner at McKinsey with QuantumBlack, their AI unit who also leads their global real estate practice. 

Titled “Winning with AI in Real Estate,” it’s a must-watch for any executive in property management as it mixes theory and real-world examples in good measure. It’s an excellent example of how we’ve left the earliest “innings” of the AI revolution when pundits candidly spouted more platitudes than practical applications. With time has come enough examples of successful (and unsuccessful) applications that there’s a growing corpus of truly useful blogs and webcasts. 

The 41-minute blog (21 minutes if you watch at double speed) carries far too many messages to cover is an 800ish word blog. I’ll leave you all to watch the full session to get the full benefit. Meanwhile, I’ll cover just a couple of things that resonated strongly with the way I’ve come to understand how real estate operators and asset managers should be approaching the AI challenge. 

The Importance of Data 

In discussing why so many AI projects don’t end up delivering real value, he discussed the importance of clean, governed data. I was specifically drawn to his observation that “Agents are not at the place yet they can take data that’s not clean and make it clean…and I don’t think they’ll be there for a while.”  

Further, he quotes a Gartner report that found 60% of AI efforts were abandoned because of data quality; and then he reminds us that “data that is 90% accurate is 0% useful.” Truer words have never been spoken about AI, and that’s why we at REBA put so much energy into our data cleansing algorithms and our data validation processes with our clients. 

This is more than just a trite, “best practice.” Aditya hammers home that, “Data in real estate is terrible” as he discusses how the industry simply hasn’t invested time in data cleansing and data governance like many other industries. Without trying to offend, he points out the reality that technology talent and maturity in real estate is behind other industries. As I’ve pointed out before, numerous Gartner, HBR, McKinsey and other studies have shown that successful AI goes through unglamorous, but necessary and often grungy, process of cleansing and governing the data. 

This is a great segway to perhaps his most profound conclusion of the entire webcast, “Every single conversation I have, people ask me about [whether they should] buy, build or partner.” He quickly and matter-of-factly answers that with, “The answer is all. You should be doing all three of them,” reminding us that “The real value is making sure you have connectivity across the stack.” 

That’s exactly the sentiment behind our “Buy the Foundation. Build Your Advantage^SM” tagline. With limited IT and data science resources, why solve problems that have already been solved? Buy the foundational data model and AI insights; build your own additional AI agents and custom dashboard adding bespoke data to this foundation; and partner with a tech vendor who has the domain expertise and customer-centered approach to help you make the most of your platform. 

Aditya closes out his session talking about data governance which he describes as “the most boring but also the most important slide that I have in my entire presentation.” All the value depends on data, “and almost no one has solved it in our industry.” He says you need to focus on 

• A business-led approach to data not IT 

• Data accountability, data definitions, data quality measures 

• Data as the most important thing because it is the most important thing 

That’s exactly what we, at REBA, agree should be done. If this resonates with you, reach out…and join us on this exciting journey!