CRE Has Always Run On Data. Now It Has To Trust It

Evaluating a commercial property means chasing records across a lot of different places. A broker email leads to an offering memorandum. That leads to ownership records, environmental history, prior transactions, financial statements and internal notes. By the time a team has a complete picture of a single asset, they’ve touched half a dozen systems and spent time no one had to spare.

CRE workflows have run this way for decades, said Manus Clancy, head of data strategy at LightBox. This fragmentation is not a technical failure. It’s the accumulated weight of an industry that built its systems one silo at a time. In a business where timing and accuracy can determine whether a deal closes, that cost is real.

Clancy has a short answer for what the industry needs. It’s not more sources — it’s fewer places to look.

The Record Nobody Shares

“Take an appraiser,” Clancy said. “Their job is to pull together disparate data sources and create value for a specific property. What they discover or create often just resides in an electronic file cabinet and is never shared. All this data has been under lock and key.”

LightBox was founded in 2018 to change that. The company now serves more than 30,000 clients and has assembled data from approximately 155 million properties and 23 million environmental records, with appraisal data procured from more than 1,200 banks. The goal has always been the same: Give CRE professionals one place to pull what they need, whether it originates from LightBox, public records, private data sources or a lender’s own files.

“We’ve kept an eye on how we can sand away all the inefficiencies in the market, so somebody can pull all the data they need in one place,” he said.

LightBox Live puts that same logic where deals move, Clancy said. Rather than switching between systems for listings, ownership records, due diligence materials and workflow tools, professionals work a deal from first look to close without leaving the platform. 

For investors, that means a faster first read on whether a property warrants deeper attention. For brokers, lenders, appraisers and environmental professionals, it means less time reconciling records and more time on the work that requires judgment.

Artificial Intelligence Arrived Faster Than Expected

Two years ago, the AI options available to LightBox were limited, Clancy said. That changed quickly.

“We knew AI was coming, we just didn’t know how fast it was coming,” he said. “It allows us to do more now than we could’ve ever imagined.”

At LightBox, AI is an extension of the platform, not a replacement for the people who use it, Clancy said. In practice, that means AI can pull relevant information from reports and documents in minutes — details that might otherwise sit buried in PDFs through an entire due diligence cycle.

A broker spends less time organizing materials. An investor screens opportunities before committing to full underwriting. A lender reviews appraisal, environmental and collateral information with more consistency and less manual effort. What makes that possible, Clancy said, is the quality of what’s underneath.

Clancy doesn't separate the AI question from the data question. For LightBox, they're the same problem.

“CRE is still a people business, but the systems underneath it are fragmented in ways that cost everyone,” he said. “LightBox is the connective tissue that holds it together. AI doesn't work without that.”

Skepticism Is Reasonable. It Won't Last Long

CRE professionals are not rushing to trust AI outputs. But the hesitation is more about the industry itself than it is about job displacement, Clancy said.

Commercial real estate is local and asset-specific. Two properties that look similar in a database can carry very different risk profiles once zoning history, tenancy, environmental records, ownership structure and deal timing are factored in. A broker or lender who can’t verify where an AI output came from, or whether it’s describing the right property in the right context, has no basis for acting on it.

That’s why Clancy sees the data problem as the AI problem. But when the records are verified, connected and tied to a specific property, the skepticism starts to dissolve. 

For brokers who currently spend hours on research and document work before a single client conversation, the upside is significant. Clancy said it could be “nirvana.”

“I don’t think AI can replace a broker who looks at the world and says, ‘Here’s where the activity is going,’” Clancy said. “CRE is so idiosyncratic that you need boots on the ground. I don’t think AI is ready to do that yet. AI is a tremendous efficiency tool, but reading a market is something else.”

The Market Has Absorbed Bigger Shocks

Financial crises, a pandemic, tariff swings, geopolitical disruptions — CRE has absorbed all of them. Each time, the market pulled back and kept going. Clancy has watched the pattern repeat.

“Historically, when you’ve seen gut punches like that, CRE lenders and buyers pull back,” he said. “They take chips off the table. But today’s markets really haven’t done that.”

LightBox’s Activity Index has continued to show transaction activity even as conditions remain uneven. When the market is moving cautiously rather than uniformly, the ability to quickly identify which opportunities are real and which risks matter is worth more than it is in a hot market where almost anything pencils.

Clancy said the current moment will look primitive in retrospect. Within 15 years, the way CRE professionals handle data today will seem as absurd as the fax machine does now.

“We’ll tell the next generation stories — not about bike messengers or fax machines, but ‘you’re not going to believe how long it took us to create a PDF back in the day.’”

The CRE firms that get the most out of AI won’t necessarily be the fastest adopters. They’ll be the ones whose property records, environmental data, ownership information and transaction history are accurate enough to put in front of a model and trust what comes back.

The data has to be right first, Clancy said. Everything else follows.

This article was produced in collaboration between LightBox and Studio B. Bisnow news staff was not involved in the production of this content.

Studio B is Bisnow’s in-house content and design studio. To learn more about how Studio B can help your team, reach out to studio@bisnow.com.