The property market’s online transition, aka Proptech, has created vast data lakes of commercial detail and supporting insights that enable businesses to develop greater confidence when it comes to buying and making deals. 

And with the legal sector adopting AI at speed to update contracts and ensure compliance with the latest regulations, property leaders can cut time and costs to complete. This supports dealing in business offices, warehouse properties and corporate land acquisitions with greater confidence, as long as your due diligence is up to scratch and able to understand the complexities behind AI and big data. 

Compressing Time to Complete Through Data-Driven Due Diligence and Automation

The data accessible to leaders and operators in due diligence teams supports their risk analysis, highlights environmental/location issues, underpins the math for property and cost comparisons, and surfaces red flags faster, speeding up completion times or helping avoid investing in dubious areas.

No one aspect of business digitalization and automation works alone. The likes of big data, AI and automation support today’s commercial property solicitors, surveyors and asset managers, and their partners. They save professionals huge amounts of time, delivering near-instant results where manual processes used to take days or weeks to resolve.

Automation also means documents are ready to e-sign immediately, rather than dragging processes out even further. With this speed, trust among partners becomes key, and auditing of data sources, understanding the use of AI and performing due diligence on other non-traditional factors are a vital part of understanding the data processes that underlie faster transactions. 

And for business leaders and investors, reports and dashboards create higher-value insights into opportunities to invest in or avoid. That’s as smart data exposes physical or metaphorical cracks in buildings, market data, investment values and other risk modifiers. Solicitors and surveyors may feel that property data is another resource they have to create or use AI to build a tool to access. 

Fortunately, several solutions already exist, with the likes of Reonomy providing property intelligence and PropertyShark offering a high-value set of research tools. These data sets are based on immense amounts of property detail. Accessing the property records, ownership data, transaction histories and zoning insights in one place speeds up the process for fast movers, those new to the property market in an area, or firms looking to acquire digital powerhouse skills.

The Widening Data Gap Between Digital and Data-Poor Property Firms

For property and business leaders, it will soon become apparent which partners are capable of operating at the speed of data and digital. And which are stuck in a myriad of manual processes. There might be others who drown in data or skip some diligence checks, believing in what a report says, because the source or AI must be right. A healthy skepticism is required from leaders and professionals, tracking the maxim, “if something looks too good to be true, it probably is.” 

Modern firms can display portfolio-level intelligence, mapping risk across broad maps, continuously updating insights to match operational reality and delivering property value creation, not just crawling to the completion of a single deal.  

A recent KPMG report, “From potential to performance: Using gen AI to conduct outside-in diligence” explains how any business needs the due diligence team to look at improving performance and create an impact through their data analysis, as well as the traditional task of identifying risk and spotting mistakes. 

Similarly, those in traditional surveyor, analyst and other roles must become masters of these new skills and learn to extract powerful insights from the data in front of them, rather than using it to complete traditional box-ticking exercises. With many job roles under threat, those who can use data and AI best will stand out from their cohort. 

As the use of data insights and AI becomes the norm, companies and individuals struggling to deliver consistent data, a clear view of the truth and reliable reports will fall by the wayside. Due diligence teams must be prepared to identify issues small and large, not riding the AI and big data hype trains, as is common in some markets.

Whether the property or land is for a megabucks data center, or just a cosy office space for a growing business, the more you can save on the deal, the more the incoming company can invest in operations and staff to drive growth. 

And given the growing competition for land between retail giants, energy companies and traditional corporations, being able to move faster is essential to getting ahead of the market, whether the business is investing in a new state, city or even moving into a fresh country. 

Getting due diligence wrong, from a gaping real-world hole to a complex legality or technicality, will see a business end up in court, where its processes will be exposed, creating reputational risk and financial harm. All of which means the power and speed of data-driven due diligence still requires all the usual checks and balances to keep the final documents legitimate and clear for all parties.