Artificial intelligence (AI) isn't replacing real estate professionals. It's helping them work faster, review more information, and make better-informed decisions. That matters in affordable housing, where rising construction costs, tighter capital markets, higher insurance premiums, and increasingly complex transactions leave little room for error.
Here are five practical ways developers and investors can use AI today.
1. Screen More Opportunities
McKinsey estimates that generative AI could create significant value across the real estate industry by helping organizations process large volumes of information, improve decision-making, and redesign business workflows. Development teams could benefit significantly from these capabilities: They often evaluate dozens of opportunities before pursuing one. AI can summarize offering memorandums, market reports, operating statements, public records, and other due diligence materials, integrating them into a standardized first-look package.
As a result, acquisition teams can avoid spending hours reading documents. Instead, they can quickly determine which opportunities merit deeper analysis.
2. Pressure-Test Underwriting Assumptions
No underwriting model is better than its assumptions.
AI can quickly generate alternative scenarios for rents, vacancy, operating expenses, construction costs, insurance premiums, interest rates, and lease-up timing. Rather than relying on a single projection, investment teams can compare multiple scenarios before presenting recommendations to lenders or investment committees.
AI should support these efforts, not replace them. Experienced professionals still need to validate assumptions, review calculations, and make the final investment decision. AI creates the greatest value when humans remain responsible for high-stakes financial and compliance decisions.
3. Organize Development Budgets
Affordable housing developments require input from architects, engineers, contractors, lenders, consultants, and public agencies. AI can help organize proposals, summarize bid differences, identify missing budget categories, and highlight potential cost outliers.
The technology doesn't replace estimating or value-engineering. Instead, it reduces the administrative work required to compare information from multiple sources, allowing development teams to spend more time evaluating project risks and opportunities.
4. Accelerate Due Diligence
Research from McKinsey, Stanford University, and Harvard Business School has also shown that AI can improve the efficiency and accuracy of financial document reviews while reducing manual effort. Such reviews are a hallmark of the affordable housing industry, where transactions generate thousands of pages of documents, including regulatory agreements, environmental reports, engineering studies, title commitments, loan documents, partnership agreements, and operating contracts.
AI excels at searching, summarizing, and extracting information from lengthy documents. Teams can use it to identify key dates, summarize obligations, compare versions of agreements, and locate provisions that merit closer legal or financial scrutiny.
5. Improve Investment Committee Decisions
Investment committees rarely suffer from too little information. More often, they struggle with too much. So, it’s encouraging that, according to academic research, generative AI can produce high-quality summaries of complex disclosures that help investors process information more efficiently.
AI can create concise executive summaries that highlight key risks, assumptions, sensitivities, and unanswered questions across multiple investment opportunities. Consistent summaries also make it easier to compare projects competing for limited capital.
AI won't replace the judgment required to finance, develop, or preserve affordable housing. It also shouldn't replace experienced professionals who understand markets, regulations, and local relationships. Instead, its greatest value is helping teams spend less time collecting information and more time making informed decisions. Organizations that combine AI with strong human judgment will likely gain an advantage as affordable housing transactions become increasingly complex.
Allen Feliz is vice president of product management, affordable, and public housing, at MRI Software, a leading provider of real estate software solutions.