When commercial real estate brokers first started experimenting with AI tools, most turned to the same platforms everyone else was using: ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. They uploaded an offering memorandum, asked a question, and got an answer. It felt powerful. Then they ran into the wall.
Dan Mosher, Co-Founder and CEO of DealGround, has watched this pattern play out with brokers across the country. The issue, he says, is not that general AI tools are bad. The issue is that they are fundamentally designed for a different problem.
“You can upload an OM to ChatGPT and get a solid output – analyze this deal, is it good or bad,” Mosher says. “But that’s a point question getting a point response. It’s still just another step in the workflow. The real question is: what happens when you need ongoing intelligence across hundreds of properties over months and years?”
The Data That Never Makes It Online
General-purpose AI tools are trained on the internet. They are powerful for public information, but commercial real estate runs on private data – rent rolls that never get published, lease terms negotiated between two parties, offering memorandums shared with one buyer before a deal ever hits the market, and years of broker notes maintained in spreadsheets on desktop computers.
Mosher recalls a conversation with one broker that illustrated the point clearly. The broker opened an Excel file with 9,000 rows. Every row was an address, a tenant, a rent figure, lease terms. He had been maintaining it manually for years. That data was not on the internet. It was not in any large language model. It was sitting on his computer, waiting to become useful.
This is the distinction Mosher, and his co-founder Chris Rodriguez, built DealGround around: the difference between public AI and private AI. DealGround uses the same large language model technology that powers ChatGPT and Claude, but runs it against a broker’s private database rather than the open internet.
“When a broker asks a question in DealGround, the system is answering against their private data,” Mosher explains. “Their OMs, their rent rolls, their notes from conversations with owners, their historical comps that they’ve collected over a decade. Nobody else has that. No general AI will ever surface it, because it’s not public.”
From Weeks of Research to Minutes
The practical implications are significant. A broker searching for every 7-Eleven owner in California can type that into DealGround and have a list of 1,000 properties pinned on a map in seconds. A few clicks later, the platform returns names and phone numbers for every owner – a process that previously required weeks of manual cross-referencing across title data, secretary of state filings, and people-finder databases.
“That whole process that used to take weeks now takes minutes,” Mosher says. “And now the broker has time to actually call people.”
Intelligence That Comes to You
The same principle applies to proactive intelligence. DealGround tracks the lifecycle of every property in a broker’s database: lease expirations, rent escalations, loan maturity dates. When a debt arrangement is set to mature in 2027, the system flags it. When a tenant’s rent is about to step up from $100,000 to $120,000 annually, the broker gets an alert six months in advance – early enough to have a meaningful conversation with the owner about marketing the asset at its new, higher value.
“That’s not something you can solve by submitting things into an LLM and waiting for an answer,” Mosher says. “You have to have a system that is constantly being updated and constantly surfacing the things that matter to each individual broker, based on criteria they’ve set.”
DealGround also brings in external signals where relevant. The platform can surface news about a franchisee’s financial situation or flag environmental disclosures buried deep in an offering memorandum, weaving public information into the analysis of private data. The result is context a general AI tool simply cannot provide.
The Fuel No One Else Has
For Mosher, the larger argument is about where real competitive advantage actually lives in commercial real estate.
“The power of large language models against gigantic private databases – that’s the combination that changes the game,” he says. “The AI is the engine. But the private data is the fuel that no one else has access to. That’s where the edge is.”
About DealGround: DealGround is an AI-powered intelligence command center for commercial real estate (CRE) professionals. The platform transforms fragmented property, tenant, ownership, and market data into structured, actionable deal intelligence that helps brokers convert insights into opportunity. Built for how brokers actually work, DealGround brings together property intelligence and ownership research to help brokers generate qualified leads and move faster from prospecting to closed deals. DealGround serves the top 15 CRE brokerage firms nationwide. For more information, visit www.dealground.com
This article is based on information provided by the expert source cited above. It is intended for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, financial, or real estate advice. Readers should conduct their own research and consult qualified professionals before making any real estate or financial decisions.
Disclosure: Individuals or companies mentioned may have a commercial relationship with KeyCrew.
