For years, positive market conditions helped boost the commercial real estate market. Rising property values, low interest rates and cap rate compression acted as a rising tide that lifted all boats. Any inefficiencies in everyday operations could be easily offset by market tailwinds.
However, those tailwinds have stalled. Higher borrowing costs are putting more pressure on owners to fine tune operations within their portfolios in order to create more value.
In the Urban Land Institute and PwC’s Emerging Trends in Real Estate 2026 Report, researchers concluded that, in light of the challenging market conditions, operations will be a “critical component” for outperformance in this cycle.
Faced with this challenging landscape, property owners must focus on day-to-day performance and closing operational leakage. By using sophisticated AI software to focus on more than just time-consuming, mundane tasks, and instead target workflows that directly impact asset performance and NOI, owners can overcome the market hurdles that are holding many companies back.
Moving Beyond “Hours Saved”
Today, it isn’t about whether a commercial real estate company is looking at AI tech tools, it’s which kind. Across the country, firms large and small are increasingly embracing using AI to increase efficiency. Many of these companies are measuring success with the tools by focusing on the number of hours saved by using automation for routine tasks.
Freeing up hundreds of hours a month can indeed provide property professionals with more time to focus on deals and high-level decision-making. For instance, JLL researchers studying the impacts of AI on commercial real estate looked specifically at portfolio analysis time. The team ran a client’s full portfolio analytics manually, a process that took four weeks. When running it using AI, the process took just minutes.
But quantifying AI performance by just “time saved,” while meaningful, is ultimately a soft operational metric, not a line item on an owner’s financial model. In this way, AI is treated as a time-saving tool budgeted as administrative overhead rather than a strategic asset.
Instead, owners should shift their thinking from the amount of time AI can save the company to where AI can close operational leakage and how it directly impacts NOI.
Where Operational Gaps Occur
Revenue leakage shows up as income that was earned but never billed, costs that were recoverable but never passed on, and cash that was owed but collected late. In commercial real estate, it concentrates in five areas, each with a direct line to asset performance: recoveries, collections, lease events, tenant retention, and team capacity.
Mistakes in recovery leakage can be costly. Poor execution can lead to missed income, recoveries or cash collection. In CRE, there are a handful of workflows where operational leakage that directly impacts asset performance occurs: recovery leakage, arrears, lease events, and tenant retention.
“What a lease says you should earn and what you actually collect aren’t always the same thing,” said Tom Wallace, CEO of Re-Leased. “A rent in commercial real estate lease can be missed. A recoverable cost might never be billed. An overdue balance can sit unnoticed. Individually these can seem small, but across a portfolio they add up.”
Consider a single lease at $120,000 a year with a 3% annual escalation. If that increase is missed, $3,600 never reaches the rent roll. With no offsetting cost, the full amount comes out of NOI. At a 6% cap rate, one missed escalation is $60,000 of asset value. Three across a portfolio is $180,000.
This is the kind of gap that stays invisible until someone goes looking for it. By using AI platforms like Re-Leased, companies can identify chargeable costs, check lease terms and complete reconciliations before recoveries are missed or disputed. Re-Leased connects property operations and financial records through accounting integrations including programs like QuickBooks Online, NetSuite, Sage Intacct and Xero.
Time is of the essence when dealing with delinquent tenants. AI can help owners detect exceptions earlier, prioritize follow-up with tenants, and reduce the number of days cash remains outstanding. Re-Leased supports tracking delinquent balances and follow-up, while Credia AI, a suite built directly into Re-Leased, can help with preparing the next communication for review.
AI tools can also assist in capturing rent reviews, expirations, termination options and notice dates early enough that team members can act. Keeping good tenants helps protect occupancy figures and avoids the costs of incentives and replacement. Teams can identify visibility of key dates, rent escalations and renewal opportunities through Re-Leased’s calendar dashboard, a major benefit when managing multiple sites.
Going further, AI can help tighten operations in other workflows like checking lease information for any inaccuracies, processing supplier invoices, keeping track of insurance certificates and other compliance documents, and processing maintenance requests.
How Companies Solved Operational Leakage
AI is proving to be more than just a time-saver for commercial real estate firms. It can act as a guard against things falling through the cracks, by helping find the right data, flagging what needs attention, and reducing the amount of manual work involved.
For example, Re-Leased worked with an international customer to centralize tracking of past-due balances and automate invoicing, resulting in the customer collecting the equivalent of approximately $225,000 in overdue rent and CAM charges that had been hidden by fragmented legacy systems. Once the team was able to see the money that was already owed, they were able to act.
At Oakwood Properties, splitting an invoice across three tenants often took an entire morning. After using Re-Leased software, the company was able to reduce administrative burden and ensure recoverable costs didn’t fall through the gaps by setting up allocation percentages to run automatically.
With another customer, Pittsburgh’s Berger Investment Group, staff was managing CAM reconciliations and other core processes across multiple spreadsheets, accounting software and manual workflows. By using Re-Leased, the company was able to centralize core processes by moving to shared property and financial records, providing team members better visibility and coordination and cutting down time spent retrieving information.
InFocus Commercial Real Estate was able to cut down its time spent on data entry from two hours to 45 minutes using Re-Leased’s built-in tool Credia AI, while at the same time, AI-assisted lease checking helped the team catch any errors before they caused problems down the line.
The Sharper Operator Wins
In the current environment, focusing AI use on increasing NOI will remain crucial for commercial real estate property owners. Already, the industry is discovering the connection. A study undertaken by the Institute of Real Estate Management (IREM) found that companies promoting the use of AI are outperforming their peers. According to the report, 70 percent of firms that encourage AI use are more likely to say NOI has increased over the past 12 months. Of those, 24 percent indicate a gain of 10 percent or more.
However, there is nuance within the workflows. The improvements made to processes can lead to different financial benefits. For example, ensuring rent increases and recoverable costs are billed can protect income, while collecting overdue rent faster improves a company’s cash flow.
“The value of AI isn’t just in making tasks faster. It’s in helping teams act sooner and making sure important things don’t get missed,” said Wallace.
AI tools are evolving, and as market conditions shift, commercial real estate owners must stay nimble and open to using AI in ways that make sense for today’s reality. Empowered by AI, the back office is now a powerful tool to increase property value.
