Brokerage, in Taylor Avakian's words, is the comparison business. His entire AI strategy is built so that when an owner lines up five brokers, he is the one who looks nothing like the other four.
QUICK SHOUTOUT: IntellCRE
IntellCRE is an AI platform that turns raw deal data into investor-ready BOVs, OMs, pitch decks, and listing websites in minutes. Purpose built for brokers, investors, and lenders who want professional, on-brand deal packages without the manual grind, just drop in a rent roll or a P&L, and it extracts the data, runs the underwriting against real-time market comps, and pushes that analysis straight into a branded brochure or listing site.
AI for CRE Collective members get 20% off annual plans. Discount code located in the AI for CRE Tool Database.
WHAT’S COMING UP
Drafted AI Podcast drops | Wednesday, June 17 | 12AM PT | Nick Donahue, Founder and CEO of Drafted AI. Nick grew up in the home-building business. His father built homes for major developers, his mother sold to big-box builders on the East Coast, and he spent years trying to fix why custom home design costs a fortune and takes forever. Drafted is his answer: an AI platform that generates complete floor plans and 3D home designs in seconds from a description and a set of constraints. Built on a proprietary model trained on real house plans that passed permitting, it costs a fraction of a cent per design versus 13 cents for general-purpose AI. More than 300,000 plans generated last month alone.
Kolena Webinar | Monday, June 23 | 12 PM PT / 3 PM ET | A working walkthrough on real documents, with questions taken throughout. Acquisition teams don’t lose deals to bad analysis. They lose them to slow document work: lease files nobody’s abstracted, T-12s re-keyed into the model, loan docs waiting on review. In this session, Kolena will walk one CRE deal from sourcing to close, live, with AI doing the document layer at every stage: lease abstraction and lease audits during diligence, extraction straight into your underwriting model, and appraisal-to-loan-sizing on the financing side. If you’re in acquisitions, asset management, finance teams, or are just the deal guy (or gal) at your investment or operating firm, this is for you.
INTERVIEW OF THE WEEK: Taylor Avakian, Founder, The Group CRE
Taylor Avakian started in multifamily investment sales in 2018, cold-calling five to six hundred owners a week at Matthews. In 2023 he launched The Group CRE, his own team operating under Lyon Stahl Investment Real Estate in Los Angeles. Since then he has valued more than 500 apartment buildings across LA, set multiple pricing records, and built one of the most followed broker brands in the market through his No Vacancy podcast. He also wakes up at 4:30 every morning, which tracks once you hear how much he is building.
The comparison business. Taylor's framing for brokerage is blunt: it is the comparison business. An owner deciding who lists their building is comparing five brokers in five rooms, and most of them look, sound, and pitch the same. His whole AI strategy exists to break that sameness. As he put it, proof over promise.
Taylor's AI stack:
The interactive BOV. The broker opinion of value has been a static three-page PDF for 30-plus years. Taylor rebuilt it as a live website owners can actually play with: move rent growth, flex NOI, run scenarios, and watch the value change in real time. He built it himself in Claude Code, having not known what a CLI (i.e. Command Line Interface) or GitHub (AI and automation tools to build and ship software) even was six months earlier (frankly, we weren’t too far ahead of him). When he tells an owner he is technology-forward, the interactive BOV is the proof.
A CRE brain on top of HubSpot. He connected his HubSpot CRM to Claude and other frontier models through MCPs and APIs, so he can hold a conversation with his own data: notes, contacts, buildings, sales and rent comps, every prior owner conversation. He feeds it public records and historical sales so it gets sharper over time.
An executive assistant that knows his pipeline. With Gmail and calendar wired in, he can ask it to surface the 15 most motivated sellers based on the language they used in past conversations, or who he has not followed up with. At 100 conversations a week, that is the difference between a lead worked and a lead lost.
Podcast and content prep. He runs deep research on guests and owners before recording, pulling proprietary sales history most people cannot find on the public web, which sharpens the questions he asks. For social, he uses AI as a brainstorming partner to find a better hook or a clearer line, never to write the post for him.
Taylor's line on content resonates with us (i.e. given we’re start-up influencers and content creators). He uses AI to magnify and improve his own voice, not to produce “slop” in someone else's. The limit, in his words, is not the tool. It is your creativity, and your willingness to question the assumption that the job, specifically, the job as a commercial real estate broker or agent, has to be done the way it always has.
Our honest take.
Taylor is living, walking, breathing proof that the edge here is not simply buying a tool, it is building with one. The interactive BOV and the HubSpot brain only exist because he blocked off Saturdays to learn Claude Code from zero and kept messing with it until it clicked.
His own advice to brokers who don't know where to start is: “follow people who are doing it [on social media], download the thing, give it one real task, and accept that the first few attempts will be messy.” You have to actually “do the thing.”
BONUS
Six hours before we recorded, Taylor was at his sister's UC Santa Barbara graduation. A stranger sitting in front of him kept turning around, then finally asked if he had a podcast.
That is the part of putting yourself out there that no analytics dashboard captures. You have no idea who you are reaching, or who is about to become your next client. If you’re using AI and building your social media presence & brand, you’re lightyears ahead (to infinity, and beyond!).
Watch the Full Episode Here:
Connect with Taylor:
Email: [email protected]Office: (424) 220-8893 (he’s always there - 24/7 - you’ll reach him)Cell: (916) 996-4421LinkedInThe Group CREPodcast
June Promo
The AI for CRE Collective’s annual promo windows are closing soon.
Standard: $279/year ($23/month vs $79/month standard)
Premium: $799/year ($67/month vs $199/month standard)
THE CLAUDE FOR CRE MASTERCLASS HAS ARRIVED
Weeks of heads-down work, and it is finally here. The most comprehensive Claude Masterclass for commercial real estate is live. 15 modules that map every Claude capability to real CRE work: underwriting a stack of OMs, building institutional decks in your brand, wiring Claude into Yardi, Gmail, your calendar, and more.
It opened to the public yesterday at $797.
Premium Collective Members already have it. It is sitting in your classroom right now. Go watch Module 1.
Standard Collective Members can grab it as a standalone for $249 during the first 7 days, then the price goes up. Upgrade to Premium later and we reimburse the difference, so there is no penalty for jumping in now.
If you get in before it goes live, we have one ask. Go through it, then tell us what lands and what does not. That feedback matters to us.
WHO WE ARE
We run the AI for CRE Collective: the place where 765+ CRE professionals learn how to implement AI into their business.
Hundreds of video walkthroughs and live demos for practical use cases.
A community of brokers, operators, developers, investors, and managers who share what’s actually working.
650+ AI tools in the database with exclusive discounts & community benefits.
If you’d like more hands-on-help, we work with several large enterprise and institutional clients helping them learn, utilize, and implement AI into their business.
Every story above got a full breakdown inside the Collective this week. Podcast drops, live demos, the prompt and skill library, the tool database, the workflows members are actually running on live deals. Step inside the room where AI in CRE isn’t a trend piece, it’s the daily practice.