“What Else Can You Do?”: Former Hines Executive On AI’s Expanding Role In Commercial Real Estate

Artificial intelligence is quickly evolving from a promising experiment to a practical business tool across the commercial real estate industry.

From underwriting and operational reporting to portfolio management and investment decision-making, firms are increasingly embedding AI into core workflows.

At the 2026 ULI Spring Meeting in Nashville, Tennessee, Marcio Sahade—former Hines executive and now a leader at the AI-powered real estate platform Leni—shared his perspective with ULI’s Small-Scale Development Council (Blue Flight) on how AI is reshaping the way real estate organizations operate and make decisions.

Prior to the session, Urban Land sat down with Sahade at the Union Station Nashville Yards hotel to discuss the accelerating adoption of AI, the emergence of operational intelligence, evolving office market dynamics, and the opportunities technology creates for owners and investors.

While efficiency gains often dominate the conversation around AI, Sahade argues that the technology’s greatest value may lie in expanding optionality—enabling professionals to evaluate more scenarios, consider a broader range of possibilities, and devote more time to strategic thinking.

Urban Land: You spent more than a decade in traditional real estate roles before moving into AI. How did that transition happen?

Marcio Sahade: I’m a real estate guy. I spent about 14 years, between Tishman [Speyer] and Hines, doing asset management, portfolio management, acquisitions, capital raising, and some development. More recently, I was helping build the student housing platform for Hines Canada. I had known the founders of Leni for years, through business school connections in Canada. About a year ago, there was an opportunity to join them, and at the same time I felt like I needed to learn AI. The real estate market in Canada was soft, but honestly, it was more than that. I knew the real estate side deeply, but I didn’t know anything about AI. What attracted me was seeing how powerful it could be for real estate workflows and decision-making.

Urban Land: One thing that stood out in our conversation was your distinction between dashboards and actual intelligence.

Marcio Sahade: Dashboards are commodities today. Everybody has dashboards. Power BI has been around for years. A lot of companies can visualize data. The harder part is standardizing data, integrating it, and then using AI to surface insights, automate processes, and anticipate trends. For example, if you’re a portfolio manager and you have multiple assets with different property managers using different systems—Yardi, Entrata, RealPage, whatever—it’s very hard to aggregate all that data into one coherent operational picture. That’s where AI becomes useful. What we’re doing is helping firms move from just seeing data to understanding what it means and what actions they might need to take.

Urban Land: You mentioned during our conversation that Leni started in multifamily operations but expanded quickly beyond that.

Marcio Sahade: Yes, originally the focus was integrating property-management systems for multifamily and residential portfolios because there was such a need to standardize reporting and operational data. But once we started layering AI on top of that, we realized the applications were much broader. Now we have clients using it for underwriting, acquisitions, investment reporting, loan packaging, operational analysis, and portfolio management. One thing we learned is that there’s already enormous amounts of data inside most real estate companies. The issue usually isn’t lack of data. It’s that companies don’t have effective ways to aggregate it, analyze it, or actually use it strategically.

Urban Land: Can you give an example of how that changes day-to-day operations?

Marcio Sahade: One example is reporting. When I was working as an asset manager, every Monday morning you’d spend hours compiling information from different systems and different property managers just to understand what happened the previous week.

Now imagine if all that reporting is automated and waiting for you Monday morning at 9 a.m. Instead of spending your day building reports, you spend your time analyzing what the reports actually mean and deciding what actions to take. That’s a huge shift. We had one analyst tell us she used to spend about 80 percent of Mondays pulling reports and compiling information. After implementing automation, maybe it became 5 or 10 percent of her time. The rest went toward analysis and strategy.

Urban Land: You also described some examples where AI identified operational issues before ownership teams would normally spot them.

Marcio Sahade: Yes. One client had a property where work-order completion times were roughly 30 percent higher than historical averages and peer properties’. Normally, it might take months for someone to identify that, because there are thousands of operational data points.

The AI flagged it early and basically said: If you don’t address this, it could impact tenant satisfaction, renewal rates, and ultimately NOI. It turned out there were staffing shortages and some deferred capital-improvement issues contributing to the problem. Another client discovered landscaping costs at one property were substantially above portfolio averages because they had signed a contract during Covid and never renegotiated it. Individually, those things may sound small. But across a large portfolio, those operational improvements compound.

Urban Land: One of the more interesting things you said was that, for years, real estate didn’t necessarily require this level of operational scrutiny, because market conditions were so favorable.

Marcio Sahade: Exactly. Everybody made money in real estate for a long time because it was easy. You had cap-rate compression, rent growth, and cheap capital. You didn’t need to be a genius to make money in real estate. But over the last several years, that changed. Capital isn’t as cheap. You don’t have the same rent growth. You can’t rely on market appreciation the same way. So now, firms need to look inward. How do I improve NOI? How do I increase operational efficiency? How do I extract more yield from existing assets? That’s where AI becomes very powerful.

Urban Land: Commercial real estate has historically been slow to adopt technology. Do you think AI changes that dynamic?

Marcio Sahade: I do. But . . . I think smaller firms may actually adapt faster than larger organizations. Smaller companies can move quickly. The owner or CEO is usually directly involved. They can test things, fail fast, change workflows, and move on. Larger firms absolutely have scale advantages, but implementation becomes harder, because there are more layers, more approvals, more bureaucracy. We’re seeing smaller firms move very aggressively right now.

Urban Land: So, successful adoption is less about software and more about organizational process?

Marcio Sahade: Exactly. A lot of companies think AI adoption simply means distributing licenses for ChatGPT, Claude, or another model. That’s not enough. It might increase individual productivity, but it will not create a meaningful impact across the organization, because each person has a different level of understanding and the technology is not integrated into real workflows, especially across different teams.

You need a playbook. You don’t ask your teams to deploy AI without knowing what you want to achieve. First, you identify goals. Do you want more deal flow? Faster underwriting? Better operational reporting? Better yields? Better forecasting? Then reverse engineer them to identify the low-hanging fruit—the real use cases—and then find your internal power users. The companies succeeding right now have champions inside the organization—the people experimenting, figuring out workflows, testing prompts, helping others understand the possibilities. That’s how adoption spreads.

Urban Land: The phrase you kept returning to, throughout our conversation, was: “What else can you do?” Why is that so central to how you think about AI?

Marcio Sahade: Because I think that’s the real value. People focus on productivity, but I think the bigger opportunity is optionality. If something that used to take 10 days now takes one hour, what else can you do with the other nine days? If reporting becomes automated, maybe analysts spend more time analyzing rather than compiling spreadsheets. Maybe acquisitions teams can evaluate more deals. Maybe investors can test more scenarios. Maybe firms can identify opportunities they never had time to explore before. That’s the shift.

Urban Land: So, AI changes how firms allocate cognitive time.

Marcio Sahade: Exactly. Before, people spent enormous amounts of time assembling information. Now, they can spend more time thinking strategically. You can ask different questions: What am I missing? What trends haven’t I identified? What assumptions should I challenge? What else can I analyze? That’s why I think this is much bigger than simple automation.

Urban Land: You also mentioned that AI may allow smaller teams to scale more efficiently.

Marcio Sahade: I think so, yes. I may be wrong—we’re all learning in real time—but it does feel like smaller teams will be able to scale much earlier and compete more effectively because of AI. At the same time, it raises difficult questions. If an asset manager who previously managed 10 assets can now manage 20, what happens organizationally? If firms become dramatically more efficient per employee, what does that mean for staffing levels? I don’t think anybody fully knows yet.

Urban Land: You also connected that question to office demand.

Marcio Sahade: Yes, because it’s all connected. Real estate is still physical. Property management is still human. Relationship-building still matters. I don’t think offices disappear. But if companies become much more efficient operationally, we have to ask what happens to office footprints over time. How many people will firms need? How much space will they require? Those are legitimate questions.

Urban Land: One thing that came through clearly is that you don’t think AI eliminates the need for judgment.

Marcio Sahade: No, not at all. The work still needs to be good. You still need people who understand markets, operations, relationships, negotiation, investment strategy, and execution. AI can surface possibilities. It can help identify trends. It can analyze huge amounts of information. But people still need to evaluate outputs critically and make decisions.

Urban Land: There was also an interesting part of our conversation about intuition and expertise. Some people worry that AI could weaken critical thinking over time.

Marcio Sahade: I think about that a lot, especially with my daughter. She’s 12, and one of the biggest challenges now is: How do you teach kids to use AI while still developing [their] critical thinking? I actually built a GPT tutor for her that doesn’t simply give answers. It guides her through the logic of solving a problem. Because I think understanding how to think is still critical. At the same time, AI can accelerate learning enormously if used correctly.

Urban Land: That feels relevant to commercial real estate, too. The best users may still be the people with the strongest underlying expertise.

Marcio Sahade: Exactly. The people who understand the outputs will be more valuable. If someone doesn’t understand the business, doesn’t understand operations, doesn’t understand investments, they may generate a lot of output, but the quality won’t be there. The people who combine domain expertise with AI will be much more powerful.

Urban Land: You talked about AI almost as a collaborative thinking tool rather than simply as software.

Marcio Sahade: Yes, because it opens your mind to more possibilities. For example, if you’re designing something, underwriting a deal, or analyzing a property, AI allows you to test multiple paths quickly. You can ask: What if I did this instead? What else should I look at? What other variables matter? That iterative process changes how people work.

Urban Land: Do you think parts of the industry are still underestimating how significant this transition could become?

Marcio Sahade: I think so. Some people still think it’s hype or that it’s just another software tool. But I think this is much bigger. I’m not saying everything changes tomorrow. But if firms are not paying attention today, eventually they will lag behind. The companies integrating AI into workflows, reporting, underwriting, and decision-making are going to operate differently. They’re going to move faster. They’re going to see more opportunities. They’re going to become more efficient. And over time, that compounds.

Urban Land: Last question. Are you optimistic or cautious about where this leads?

Marcio Sahade: Both. It’s exciting, because people will be able to do things they simply couldn’t do before. But it’s also a little scary, because this feels as transformative as the Industrial Revolution, in some ways. The difference is that, during the Industrial Revolution, new jobs emerged and people learned those jobs over time. Now, AI is learning alongside us. So, I think we still need to figure out what that means socially, economically, and professionally But I do think one thing is clear: This technology is going to reshape how commercial real estate operates. And the firms that learn how to use it well will have a significant advantage.

Source: Urban Land