Two-thirds, or 66 percent, of commercial real estate professionals now run AI every week. Only 5 percent trust it enough to shape a deal. First American Data and Analytics and DealGround surveyed 255 brokers, lenders and asset managers in April 20261. CRE Daily confirmed the same split in May5.
Commercial Brokers Use AI Weekly 13 Times More Than They Trust It With a Deal
Share of 255 commercial real estate professionals who use AI weekly versus who trust it for a deal decision
Each column is one share from the same survey: the first is weekly AI use, the second is trust for an actual deal decision.
Sources: DealGround [1]; CRE Daily [5]. Chart by Ryan Elliott Dennis.
The numbers behind this chart
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Use AI weekly | 66% |
| Trust for a deal | 5% |
The easy reading says AI stalled out in commercial brokerage. Hype promised more than busywork. Most brokers got drafts and summaries instead. That reading misses where the 5 percent sits.
Robert Sulentic runs CBRE, the largest brokerage firm in the country. He told investors in February that AI already cuts what CBRE pays to gather its own data23. "It's going to save us money in terms of accumulating the data, buying the data, and it's going to make our brokers more efficient in terms of using the data," Sulentic said. CBRE spent nearly $1.7 billion on computer hardware and software in 2025, up $300 million from the year before.
JLL put $450 million into 55 proptech startups since 20182. Deloitte counted the same pattern in September. Ninety percent of commercial real estate executives now plan to raise data and technology spending next year, up from 76 percent4. More than seven in ten still call their AI data pipeline only preliminary.
The spending points to where that 5 percent sits: inside firms big enough to buy trust ahead of everyone else.
Commercial brokerage runs on relationships and comparable-sales data. AI is reorganizing who owns both. Delta Media Group's 2026 analysis found 100 percent of agents at firms with 11 or more agents already using AI2. Firms with 10 or fewer agents reported just 81.8 percent.
Brokerages With 11 or More Agents Beat the Smallest Shops by 18 Points
Share of brokerage agents using AI, by firm size, Delta Media Group's 2026 analysis
Each bar is one group of firms by agent count; the gap is the 18-point lead firms of 11 or more agents hold over the smallest shops.
Delta Media Group's firm-size bands come from its own 2026 agent survey, reported by Propmodo on Sept. 2, 2026.
Source: Propmodo [2]. Chart by Ryan Elliott Dennis.
The numbers behind this chart
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Firms with 11 or more agents | 100% |
| Firms with 10 or fewer agents | 81.8% |
The smallest brokerages also carried the highest rate of AI holdouts, at 9.1 percent. Industry-wide refusal fell from 24.8 percent in 2024 to 3.9 percent this year.
Chris Rodriguez co-founded DealGround. He spent three decades as a commercial broker first. "In my 30 years as a broker, I don't even want to guess how many hours I spent chasing down data that turned out to be outdated, or tracking an owner that doesn't want to be found only to hit a dead end," Rodriguez said1.
A second opening appeared, open to any size. Taylor Avakian is a first vice president at Lyon Stahl Investment Real Estate. She says AI recommendation tools reward a different asset than scale2. "I would say the biggest challenge for a lot of brokers who are not 30 years in the business is just brand awareness, awareness of what you do, what differentiates you," Avakian said.
In Brooklyn, a boutique firm named Terra CRG now outranks the five largest national brokerages in AI recommendations alone. A buyer asks an AI tool who knows the Brooklyn market. The tool answers with Terra CRG's public deal record. A scattered national footprint leaves that question unanswered.
Tim Rodland built a platform, RoRo, to sell independents the kind of access CBRE buys with $1.7 billion2. "I think that most of the challenges that many independents have is they don't have access to technology. We're trying to scale independence by offering technology that was not available before," Rodland said.
The independent broker pays twice. A referral now starts inside a recommendation engine. The broker pays again for the technology budget needed to compete for visibility there. Terra CRG won that visibility through habit and a public deal record alone.
Brokerages large enough to turn $1.7 billion of hardware into cheaper data profit twice. Vendors profit too: DealGround and Rodland's RoRo both sell independents a shortcut around that bill.
The broker in the middle carries the real risk. A firm that size reads as too large to count as a specialist to a recommendation engine. The same firm reads as too small to fund a data operation the size of CBRE's.
Sulentic told CBRE's own investors something simpler. The brokerage side of his business still runs on relationships and judgment, the two things AI leaves to people.
Measured against DealGround's own numbers, that claim holds easily for the biggest firms. It strains for the smallest ones, which have only a handful of deals to test it against.
The verdict is plain. AI sorts commercial brokerage by who can afford trust. The first predictions promised a flattened playing field; the numbers show a sorted one instead. A firm with only one kind of advantage, scale or specialization, faces a harder decade than a firm with both.
Readers can watch that sort play out, deal by deal, hire by hire. Sign up for The Signal, AI Lately's daily email on who moved and what it means.
Sources
- Beth Mix, "Brokers Aren't Rejecting AI. They're Pressure-Testing It.," DealGround, May 12, 2026, https://www.dealground.com/articles/survey-report-high-usage-low-trust
- Franco Faraudo, "AI Is Making Big Brokerages Bigger and Small Ones More Visible," Propmodo, Sept. 2, 2026, https://propmodo.com/ai-real-estate-brokerage-consolidation/
- Motley Fool Transcribing, "CBRE Group (CBRE) Q4 2025 Earnings Call Transcript," The Motley Fool, Feb. 12, 2026, https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2026/02/12/cbre-group-cbre-q4-2025-earnings-call-transcript/
- Deloitte Center for Financial Services, "2027 Commercial Real Estate Outlook," Deloitte, Sept. 24, 2026, https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/industry/financial-services/commercial-real-estate-outlook.html
- Nina Dale, "CRE AI Adoption Rises, But Trust Still Lags," CRE Daily, May 12, 2026, https://www.credaily.com/briefs/cre-ai-adoption-rises-but-trust-still-lags/
