Commercial real estate has survived every major technology wave of the past three decades largely unchanged. Listings moved from the newspaper to the internet. CRMs replaced Rolodexes. Data aggregators promised to centralize everything. And yet, in 2026, the average broker still juggles five or six disconnected systems before making a single phone call.

Dan Mosher, Co-Founder and CEO of DealGround, has spent years studying why industries resist transformation – and why this moment is fundamentally different for CRE from every previous wave.

“Commercial real estate is, at its core, a relationship-based industry,” Mosher explains. “Deals were crafted over lunch, during golf, over drinks. It never had a centralized exchange like the stock market. It was arm’s length transactions between people. That meant data was a currency. He who had the data nobody else had held a strategic weapon.”

That culture of data hoarding shaped how the industry adopted technology. When digitization arrived, brokers embraced it slowly. When point solutions proliferated in the last decade – CRMs, comp databases, email marketing platforms, property management systems – brokers adopted them one by one, until they found themselves running eight or ten separate tools, none of which talked to each other.

Mosher talks to brokers every day, and the more advanced ones have workflows that are remarkably detailed yet cumbersome. They start in one system, pull data into another, sometimes run it through ChatGPT, drop results into a Google My Maps with color-coded pins, switch to a different system to get an owner’s phone number, and then open their CRM to check whether they have talked to that person before. Five or six systems just to make one informed phone call.

According to Mosher, the problem was never that the industry lacked technology. The problem was that each tool did one thing well, and the broker was left to be the connective tissue between all of them.

That dynamic is now changing, and the reason comes down to the nature of commercial real estate data itself.

“The unstructured data that defines CRE – offering memorandums, excel spreadsheets, lease documents, surveys, due diligence materials, property notes, contact information – that’s almost exactly what AI was made to handle,” Mosher says. “The industry has been sitting on a mountain of messy, siloed, unstructured data for decades. Large language models are extraordinarily good at synthesizing exactly that kind of information.”

For the first time, the characteristics that made CRE difficult to digitize are the same characteristics that make it ideal for AI-powered transformation. The fragmentation that frustrated earlier technology waves is now the very problem that modern AI tools are built to solve.

DealGround was designed around this insight. Rather than building another point solution, Mosher and his team set out to create a single platform where brokers, investors, and analysts could centralize their private data, access public property and title records, and query everything through a single AI-powered interface.

“We want to be the database of records,” Mosher says. “Everything that’s happening with a property – new tenants, lease expirations, rent increases, loan maturity dates – it’s all tracked in one place.”

The third wave of CRE transformation, as Mosher describes it, is not simply about adding AI features to existing workflows. It is about collapsing the entire stack. The future he envisions is one system that knows everything a broker knows, surfaces the right insights at the right time, and frees professionals to do what humans will always do better than software: build relationships and close deals.

“The goal is for brokers to spend more time on relationships and less time on administrative legwork,” he says. “Let the system do the research. Let it flag that a lease is expiring in six months, or that a loan is maturing in 2027, so the broker can call that owner with a relevant, well-informed proposition. That’s where the value is.”

After decades of watching the industry lag behind, Mosher believes the conditions for real transformation are finally in place. The data exists. The AI tools are ready. And brokers, even the most traditional ones, are starting to ask whether there is a better way.

“It’s not about replacing brokers,” he says. “It’s about giving them an unfair advantage.”

About DealGround: DealGround is an AI-powered intelligence command center for commercial real estate (CRE) professionals. The platform transforms fragmented property, tenant, ownership, and market data into structured, actionable deal intelligence that helps brokers convert insights into opportunity. Built for how brokers actually work, DealGround brings together property intelligence and ownership research to help brokers generate qualified leads and move faster from prospecting to closed deals. DealGround serves the top 15 CRE brokerage firms nationwide. For more information, visit www.dealground.com

This article is based on information provided by the expert source cited above. It is intended for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, financial, or real estate advice. Readers should conduct their own research and consult qualified professionals before making any real estate or financial decisions.

Disclosure: Individuals or companies mentioned may have a commercial relationship with KeyCrew.

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