Almost every commercial real estate investment firm has put AI into its process, yet only about half say it’s actually saving them time, according to a survey released July 8 by Dealpath, a deal-management software company for institutional real estate investors.
In the firm’s 2026 State of AI in CRE Investing Survey, 97% of professionals said AI is integrated into their firm’s investment process. The payoff is thinner than that near-universal adoption suggests. Only 51% said AI genuinely saves time once the work of verifying its output is counted, and 41% said tasks involving AI take longer than doing them by hand, because every output has to be checked before it can inform a decision.
The survey points to data, not the models, as the main problem. Fragmented data was the most-cited reason AI falls short, named by 43% of respondents, ahead of hallucinated outputs or any limitation of the AI itself. “The single highest-leverage move institutional CRE firms can make is to centralize, structure, and ensure governance of their strategic deal data,” said Mike Sroka, Dealpath’s CEO and co-founder.
That conclusion also points back at what Dealpath sells. The company markets deal-management and data software, and launched its own product, Dealpath AI, in May 2026, positioning the survey’s fix, a cleaner data foundation, close to its own roadmap.
