Dealpath, the AI-powered operating system for real estate investing, today released findings from a new survey of institutional real estate investors on the impact of AI on investment decisions. The survey’s findings reveal the gap between AI adoption and measurable returns, why data infrastructure limits results, the output verification tax firms are paying, and next steps to resolve these inefficiencies.
Three findings define this year’s report:
- 97% of professionals report that AI is integrated into their firm’s investment process. Yet only 51% of professionals say AI actually saves them time once output verification is factored in, and 41% say work involving AI takes longer than doing it manually, because every output must be checked before it can inform a decision.
- When AI falls short, fragmented data is the most commonly cited reason, named by 43% of professionals, ahead of hallucinated outputs or any limitation of the models themselves.
- 83% of professionals rate their firm’s data infrastructure as mostly or fully AI-ready. 90% say data quality or fragmentation has limited AI’s impact at their firm. That seven-point gap is the clearest signal in this year’s data: the industry’s biggest AI constraint is the one most professionals believe their firm has already solved.
The report introduces two concepts to explain the gap. The Verification Tax describes what happens when AI outputs can’t be trusted on sight: teams verify everything, and verification erases the savings for nearly half of respondents. The Trust Spectrum describes where AI has earned trust and where it hasn’t, with firms far more willing to let AI summarize a diligence document (55%) than score a deal (35%). Both trace back to the same root cause: the data underneath.
“Dealpath’s survey findings reinforce that even with universal AI adoption, the data problem persists. 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, CEO and Co-Founder of Dealpath. “The winners of the next decade won’t be decided by who adopts AI, but by who built the foundation to make it trustworthy.”
To measure AI’s real impact on CRE investment, Dealpath surveyed 100+ investment and technology professionals at institutional CRE firms, including REITs, private equity real estate firms, pension funds, insurance companies, banks, real estate investment firms, and trusts across the United States and Canada. Respondents spanned analysts to the C-suite, at organizations managing $500 million to more than $40 billion in AUM, and all use AI in their roles. Fieldwork was completed in Q2 2026.
You can find additional analyses of the survey data HERE.
About Dealpath
Dealpath is the premier AI-powered operating system for real estate investing, fueled by the world’s largest real assets data network. Dealpath unites the only private exchange for institutional real estate listings, investment data, and intelligent execution workflows into a single platform. To date, Dealpath has supported more than $10 trillion in transactions, partnering with hundreds of firms, including leading global institutions such as Blackstone, Nuveen, LaSalle, CBRE IM, MetLife, Newmark, New York Life, UBS, Manulife, DWS, and Principal. Dealpath enables firms to capture more opportunities, make faster decisions, execute efficiently, and deliver superior returns.
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