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While investors wiped billions off CRE stocks last week, with JLL, CBRE, and Newmark all seeing 20%+ stock declines on fears that AI will disrupt traditional brokerage, RealtyAds’ AI platform was powering more than 10,000 leasing campaigns across 125 markets, saving clients an average of $8,000 per month compared to traditional advertising services.

RealtyAds, the first and largest provider of AI services in commercial real estate, believes the industry needs a clearer distinction between speculative fears and practical reality.

“Not all AI is designed to replace people,” said Trevor Marticke, CEO of RealtyAds. “In leasing, the most effective AI is purpose-built to help professionals perform better, not necessarily remove them from the process.”

AI Adoption Is Rising, But the Reality Is Still Early-Stage
Across commercial real estate, AI adoption is accelerating. Owners, operators, and service firms are actively piloting new tools, experimenting with automation, and exploring how data can improve decision-making. Yet much of this is occurring at the individual broker level, with limited examples of scaled, repeatable deployment by large corporations across their entire leasing platforms.

This gap between quick individual adoption versus slower corporate adoption has contributed to uncertainty in commercial real estate, particularly among investors and industry professionals concerned about job displacement, service disruption, and long-term relevance.

“The narrative has moved faster than the corporations,” Marticke added. “We’re seeing early adopters already deploying RealtyAds’ agents to help them transact, but individuals alone are not enough to combat the onslaught of market sentiment that corporations at large are not adopting AI fast enough.”

What’s Driving the Market’s Anxiety
Recent selloffs across CRE-focused public companies reflect fears that AI could reduce demand for labor-intensive services or fundamentally alter how deals are sourced and executed. However, much of this concern is rooted in broad assumptions about AI rather than how it is being deployed in practice within leasing workflows.

Leasing remains relationship-driven, highly localized, and dependent on human judgment, factors that AI alone cannot replicate. The most effective applications of AI today are those that support professionals with better data, sharper targeting, and clearer performance insights that ultimately, improve brokerage revenues across the board.

AI Built to Augment Leasing Performance, Not Replace It
RealtyAds was founded in 2019 as an AI-native platform specifically for commercial real estate leasing. Its AI Agents are designed to enhance human decision-making by helping deal teams identify and target decision makers more accurately, engage more prospects, and connect online engagement through to real leasing outcomes.

Rather than automating away roles, RealtyAds AI focuses on improving performance across the full leasing lifecycle by helping clients find, advance, and close more deals. This outcome-based approach helps teams move faster, allocate resources more effectively, and focus efforts where they are most likely to drive revenue.

Clarity Over Complexity
Many CRE organizations face challenges around fragmented systems, disconnected metrics, and siloed data. RealtyAds works with owners, brokers, and asset managers to unify digital channels, property websites, CRM systems, and leasing data into actionable insights that support real transactions.

“When AI is tied to outcomes, it becomes empowering,” Marticke said. “When it isn’t, it just adds noise.”

Looking Ahead
As AI continues to evolve, RealtyAds remains committed to helping the industry cut through hype and focus on what drives leasing performance. Through ongoing research, education, and practical frameworks, the company aims to give CRE professionals confidence about the role of AI in their work.

Source: “RealtyAds Clarifies AI’s Role in Commercial Real Estate Amid Market Volatility“

U.S. retail projections remain unchanged through 2026 in a just-released forecast from CoStar, the leading global provider of online real estate marketplaces, information and analytics in the property markets.

Consistent with the previous forecast, which had U.S. retail vacancy peaking at just under 4.4%, the metric is expected to rise minimally in the first half of 2026 before falling slightly during the latter half of the year and into 2027.

Though receding, store closures are expected to increase in the first half of 2026 as the bifurcated retail sales environment pushes certain tenants to trim locations. Full-year net absorption is forecasted to total just over 16 million square feet, which would be the third lowest level of annual demand formation recorded in the past decade, behind 2020 and 2025.

“Underpinning the stable outlook was the resumption of positive demand in the back half of 2025,” said Brandon Svec, national director of retail analytics at CoStar Group. “After two consecutive quarters of falling demand, retail fundamentals stabilized in the third quarter as the pace of closures slowed and backfill demand surged. With higher demand, the wave of store closures seemingly cresting, and new supply remaining elusive, performance is forecasted to remain in balance for the foreseeable future.”

“There are both upside and downside risks to the forecast, though the balance currently tilts to the downside,” said Svec. “Continued uncertainty persists around the impact of tariffs, and although retailers and suppliers have largely absorbed these costs so far, many are signaling imminent price increases, which could further strain household budgets and dampen discretionary spending.”

The full forecast can be found here.

Source: “CoStar’s U.S. Retail Projections Remain Steady Through 2026“