What the Sudden Crash in Real Estate's Biggest Firms Is Signalling
The Future We Build, A Brave Ideas network affiliated show featuring Alex Edds
JLL, CBRE and Cushman & Wakefield recently lost 25% of their market cap in two days. In this episode of The Future We Build, host Alex Edds sits down with Antony Slumbers to discuss why, and who in real estate is becoming expensive and exposed.
The Future We Build - Season 1, Episode 9
Antony Slumbers has spent more than two decades at the intersection of real estate and technology — first as a software company founder writing property management systems, then as one of the most widely read voices on AI in the built environment.
He runs the Generative AI for Real Estate People course, now on its 50th cohort, and has become a go-to thinker for anyone trying to understand what artificial intelligence actually means for how this industry operates.
This episode is the first of a two-part conversation.
Part One focuses on the here and now:
Where AI has already changed the game for real estate professionals, what genuine productivity transformation looks like (not 5% faster — 80% different), and why real estate, despite its slow cycles, has more reason than almost any other sector to pay close attention to technology right now.
Key Timestamps
[00:06:30] Antony’s background: 20+ years in PropTech, software businesses, and how he became a leading voice on AI in real estate
[00:09:00] Why the ‘use cases’ conversation has become almost meaningless — and how generative AI has outgrown the ‘text, code, images’ framing
[00:09:45] André Karpathy’s ‘kernel of an operating system’ idea and what natural language computing actually means in practice
[00:11:00] Why cracking Excel changes everything for real estate — and what that means for how analysts actually spend their time
[00:12:30] The data problem: why most real estate firms’ data is still ‘pretty rubbish’ and why that has to be fixed before AI can do its work
[00:13:00] Inverting the 70/30 ratio: from 70% wrangling models to 70% thinking about inputs and outcomes
[00:14:30] Why real estate developers need to pay more attention to technology than almost anyone — the seven-to-ten-year gestation problem
[00:19:30] From SaaS dashboards to outcomes-as-a-service: where the market is heading and who is already building for it
[00:21:00] The co-pilot obsession in real estate firms — and why locking people into inferior internal tools creates a governance vs capability tension
[00:22:00] From engineers writing code to engineers managing agents: how Karpathy went from 80% human/20% machine to the reverse
[00:23:30] Why JLL, CBRE and Cushman & Wakefield lost 25% of their market cap in two days — and what the market is actually pricing in
[00:24:00] The structural shift: from human-plus-software to agents-plus-APIs, and what that means for building management
[00:26:00] Domain expertise as the killer advantage: why the people getting the most out of AI right now are those who already know what wrong looks like
[00:27:30] The junior talent paradox: cutting graduate intake may look efficient now but hollows out domain knowledge in a decade
[00:31:00] Bloom’s Two Sigma problem and the prospect of AI as a personal tutor that compresses years of professional development
[00:35:30] Closing out Part One: the environmental and social paradox of AI that will be the focus of Part Two
Organisations Mentioned
OpenAI
Anthropic
Google DeepMind / Google Gemini
Tesla
Salesforce
JLL
CBRE
Cushman & Wakefield
LaSalle Investment Management
Hines
CQuel
2150
UK Green Building Council
Better Buildings Partnership
McKinsey & Company
Knight Frank
NREP
GREEN
Google (NotebookLM)
Microsoft
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