Artificial intelligence is a branch of computer science that studies the theory, methods and practical applications of software and hardware systems that are able to replicate those activities of a computer that may seem typical of human intelligence.
Already applied in many other fields, artificial intelligence is now also appearing in the real estate industry, where it has the potential to induce significant change and progress.
A brief history of artificial intelligence and its applications
Born in US academia in the 1950s, artificial intelligence was originally a discipline that had, as its goal, the creation of a machine capable of autonomously solving complex problems, even those that were not strictly mathematical.
Within a short time, this knowledge passed from academia to industry, which used artificial intelligence to significantly reduce a wide range of costs.
Artificial intelligence has thus been employed in a wide variety of fields such as medicine, the stock market, robotics, law and scientific research. In some contexts, such as those of robotics and programming, it has become so widespread that it is no longer perceived as an external element, but has become an inseparable component of it
Like so many innovations of the 19th and 20th centuries, such as the telegraph, the telephone and finally computers, the world of finance was one of those that saw artificial intelligence as a valid element of innovation and progress. The first use of artificial intelligence in banks dates back to 1987, when the US Security Pacific National Bank set up a task force to prevent fraud related to the unauthorised use of credit cards. Today, neural networks are used to identify phenomena that cannot be attributed to nominal behaviour and that require human intervention.
Potential areas of application in the real estate industry
The real estate sector is based on data, a huge mass of elements of a varied nature, which a human being would not be able to analyse alone with a high level of reliability, such as market data, historical and potential transactions, management data, building performance data, etc.
Among the various fields of application, that of data analysis and the rendering of recurring patterns and patterns, with high speed and complexity, is certainly one of the most intuitive in the real estate industry.
In particular, the areas of application are diverse including:
- quelli commerciali, volti al miglioramento dei servizi offerti ai soggetti coinvolti nelle trattative, e capaci di perseguire migliori risultati per loro;
- those of market analysis, aimed at returning increasingly reliable market representation models and schemes (prices, values, costs, etc.);
- those supporting real estate management, designed to assist specialists in the historical and forecasting analysis of the management parameters of increasingly complex real estate portfolios;
- those of living, aimed at making people’s lives in buildings more comfortable and environmentally friendly.
Future scenarios
Looking to the future, artificial intelligence will play an ever-increasing role in the complexity of the real estate industry, both within the operators of this industry and the end users of real estate.
The human component will be increasingly limited to the control phase, and the great self-learning capabilities of artificial intelligence will conclude tasks in seconds that today take an ordinary employee days.
Obviously, this change will also require specialised figures, who will need to be equipped with highly specialised digital skills.