‘AI’ to turn around realty sector

New Delhi: According to Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI), the value of business acquisitions worldwide will rise to $9.6 trillion in the coming years. Like many other industries, the real estate industry is switching to a “data-driven” world and is creating use cases of artificial intelligence.

‘Artificial Intelligence’ (AI) is entering the real estate business from consumer buying and selling strategies to investing in the designing, and construction of large commercial, residential and mixed use projects.

Knight Frank 2022 report projects around 5 per cent capital value growth for the residential property segment in the country in 2022. While AI describes technology that can draw logical conclusions and learn on its own, today’s AI is actually closer to advanced Machine Learning (ML) with sophisticated algorithms that processes huge amount of predefined input or user behaviour to make accurate and near-term predictions.

The current global crisis due to Omicron and Covid cases are also pushing both, developers and customers, to go for online booking of retail and residential spaces. This would eventually compel the arrival of AI and ML in the Indian real-estate sector. As of now, Indian real-estate sector remains in the early stages of deploying AI or ML in retail as well as the residential sector.

Pankaj Bansal, director, M3M India said, “The technology should be able to suggest thousands of designs and construction options. As a developer, we would like to know sun light, vastu, wind direction, carpet area, etc., before we conceive or design a project for customers. Once the project is of the liking of customers, selling will never be an issue. ”

Research reports suggest that AI is also able to support the analysis by studying market preferences. A very important advantage that comes with the use of AI algorithms is that it can be adapted to reflect special market segments and it can also be automatically retrained and adjusted to include new information.

Most of the individuals and institutions also take loans to buy an asset and timely possession becomes a critical factor. “When you have history, reputation and structural information of the project developer at your access, and if you are convinced about the real-timeline of the delivery of the projects; you would certainly try to look into many easy loan repayment options,” Pankaj added. Looking at the real-estate developer perspective, ‘AI’ and ‘ML’ will become prominent tools for lead generation for a developer.

Adoption of ‘AI’ and ‘ML’ in the real-estate sector will also help Government housing projects, particularly the 100 smart city project across India. When the real-estate sector is looking forward to contributing 13 per cent to India’s GDP by 2025 and reach a market size of $1 trillion by 2030, how AI and ML will be aligned in this vision is yet to be seen.