AI Agents Finally Automate Commercial Real Estate Ownership Research

For decades, commercial real estate ownership research has remained a stubbornly manual process, even as other brokerage tasks became digital. According to Dan Mosher, CEO and Co-Founder of DealGround, the core obstacle is structural: property records are scattered across 50 states and thousands of counties, each with its own update timeline, format, and accessibility. Since most commercial properties are held in LLCs or trusts, tracing the actual owner requires navigating multiple distinct systems in sequence—identifying the entity, piercing it to find the individual, and then locating current contact information. This fragmentation made automation nearly impossible until recently.

Mosher explains that while technology could handle each individual step, chaining them together into a single automated workflow was the missing link. The breakthrough came with AI-driven agentic processes, which can execute multi-step workflows autonomously. This capability, viable for about a year, allows platforms like DealGround to replicate the manual research process but at unprecedented speed. Brokers who once spent 15-20 hours per week on ownership research can now accomplish the same output in 15-30 minutes. The time savings are significant, but accuracy is equally critical: manual research often yields outdated contact information, costing deals. DealGround runs ownership lookups on demand, achieving about 95% accuracy in data extraction from documents.

DealGround's platform allows brokers to submit up to 100 LLCs at once, and AI agents work through state filings to identify associated individuals and retrieve current contact info. One broker found a land parcel in Texas through DealGround that manual research had failed to uncover, illustrating the potential to turn a 'no deal' into a deal. By automating the fragmented steps, DealGround is addressing a bottleneck that has constrained commercial real estate prospecting for decades, freeing brokers to focus on more productive activities like pitching and deal development.