Blackstone, Brookfield Are Betting On Custom AI — And Proptech Could Pay The Price

A surge of AI investment from Wall Street titans is pushing commercial real estate toward a future where major firms build their own AI systems, potentially sidelining the proptech platforms that have dominated the past decade.

Anthropic and OpenAI’s new multibillion‑dollar ventures promise custom-integrated enterprise tools designed for corporations, which could include CRE operations such as underwriting and portfolio management. 

The shift suggests artificial intelligence companies are moving upstream, targeting the core workflows proptech firms once sought to modernize. If custom AI becomes cheap and ubiquitous, the need for external software solutions could wane, forcing proptech companies to rely on their role as the industry’s trusted data layer and system of record.

“We're probably going to reach that point where you're not going to have third-party apps, you're just going to build stuff that works for you,” Fifth Wall founder and CEO Brendan Wallace said.

On May 4, Anthropic announced a $1.5B joint venture with financial leaders including Blackstone and Goldman Sachs called the Claude Partner Network, which will focus on customizing AI solutions and providing customer support to select customers. 

Anthropic engineers will not only collaborate with the engineering teams at these firms but also provide long-term support. Anthropic argues that the targeted firms, many of which are midsized companies, “lack the in-house resources to build and run frontier deployments.”

The same day, OpenAI announced the $10B OpenAI Deployment Co., a joint venture with TPG, Brookfield, Bain Capital, Advent, SoftBank and Dragoneer. A core focus of the venture will be real estate portfolio companies. 

Wallace, a leading investor in the sector, likens the moment to the arrival of the early 20th-century Royal Navy battleship the HMS Dreadnought, a technological leap that instantly rendered older models outdated. The fastest such ship, when it launched, would spark a global naval arms race. 

It will still take time to get to a point where the costs of customized software and AI tools get so low that it becomes trivial to build custom solutions, Wallace said. But the significant investment AI firms just announced suggests they are aggressively courting that future with big names in CRE. 

Part of that push started in March, when Claude introduced closer integration with Microsoft Excel. Since spreadsheets form the backbone of many analyses and risk formulas for CRE, the new integration made it that much easier to use proprietary formulas in AI. 

This whole shift presages a return to a time before enterprise software, when companies created their own bespoke, highly customized operational systems, Wallace said. 

AI’s promise of quickly integrating vast troves of data and different processes will allow companies to go back to making their own systems instead of relying on business-to-business software solutions, he said. With Brookfield and Blackstone on board, larger REITs are more likely to make the same bet. 

“​​What has started to happen is the technological and financial and human capital barriers to entry to building your own stuff are collapsing,” Wallace said.

For many existing proptech firms, this recalls the so-called “SaaS-pocalypse,” when a memo about the ability of customized AI tools and systems to replace the products of software as a service companies like Salesforce led to significant losses for these business software firms on the stock market.

Venture capital funding volumes for real estate-focused firms have suggested that VCs and investors see room for AI-native proptech to succeed. Venture capital investment in proptech reached $16.7B in 2025, a 68% increase over the previous year, according to the Center for Real Estate Technology and Innovation. 

AI-native companies, which saw $4.5B of that funding, saw their share of proptech VC dollars grow 42% year-over-year, nearly double their SaaS counterparts. 

In recent weeks, larger platforms popular in CRE, including Crexi and Dealpath, released their own AI updates as the industry’s embrace of AI accelerates. 

But amid the effort by leading AI firms to take over more of the enterprise software space, these CRE-specific companies want to remain part of the AI ecosystem. In effect, they are pitching themselves as the trusted data layer and back end that AI tools will interface with going forward. 

Dealpath’s solution, focused on institutional CRE firms, allows the firm to use its existing structured data, whether in Excel spreadsheets or earlier versions of Dealpath, and connect to them via external AI apps, including Claude, Copilot and ChatGPT.

“Being the system of record is core to our offerings,” Dealpath Vice President of Product and Design Ursula Sage said. “Of course, firms could build their own tools or their own system of record, but do you want that technology to be your core competency, beyond just making real estate investments? Do you want to be the one responsible for the security of your data and being compliant? Or do you want a trusted partner to take care of that for you?”

Crexi’s update is a bid to be the “operating system for commercial real estate,” according to Vice President of Product Growth Adam Siegel, but he also sees lasting potential in smaller firms that don’t have the resources of a company like Blackstone or Goldman Sachs to create custom software. The long tail of the market will need evolving solutions like Crexi, he said. 

“The data moat is what we really, really feel is of value,” he said. “We have this marketplace, it's a very active marketplace, and we constantly have our fingers on the pulse of what's going on and are constantly getting more data into the system.”

Part of the challenge proptech and SaaS firms will face in adapting to this coming enterprise push by AI companies, at least in multifamily, will be the challenge of gathering data and remaining integral, founder of AI XChange and SmartRent Director of Industry Strategy Justin Jones said.

With many proptech firms attempting to brand themselves as the data layer, an AI agent like Claude would still be pulling from that data, keeping the platform at the center, Jones said.

But that strategy may be challenging to orchestrate, Jones said. AI systems can often go directly to larger data sources, and it will be hard for existing proptech solutions to provide unique information as these AI-first enterprise solutions get more sophisticated.

“It’s like saying, ‘I’m going to outpace Google as the single source of truth,’” Jones said.

Dealpath’s Sage said she disagreed and that longstanding data partnerships will prevail.

“That's not something you can vibe-code your way through,” she said. “It's something that you need a trusted partner to gather and provide.”

The shift will permanently alter how companies use AI in commercial real estate, Wallace said. That leads to different priorities and possibilities in proptech investment. Enterprises like consulting and recruitment will benefit, as CRE will need better software and tech staff to build new tools and consultants to help guide companies through these challenging shifts.

He also said it opens up a window to invest in real estate firms themselves that become masters of these new custom tools. 

“If you're building an AI-native real estate company, I think your cost structure could be dramatically different while producing the exact same results as an analog company,” he said.