Most real estate businesses are structurally unprepared for artificial intelligence (AI), according to research from the UK PropTech Association unveiled at Mipim this week.
Only 7% of respondents to the 2026 AI in Real Estate Survey, conducted in association with Remit Consulting and digital strategist Anthony Slumbers, said AI was fully integrated into their business, despite 93% saying their organisation now provided access to an AI service.
While 30% of respondents reported having a comprehensive AI policy, 16% said the had no policy and no plans to create one, and 29% said there was no organised group overseeing AI within their business.
The survey suggested AI was being used primarily for operational tasks such as transcription, summarisation, drafting and research, with 87% of respondents saying they wanted AI to take on administrative and repetitive work.
Respondents also said they expected automation levels to rise materially within a year, with the proportion of teams automating 25% to 50% of tasks set to nearly double.
Trust in AI dropped sharply for higher-judgement tasks, with only 16% willing to trust AI to estimate rental value.
Despite this cautious approach, 78% said their work would change to some degree if AI access were removed tomorrow and more than half estimated that they saved over 10 hours per month through AI-enabled efficiencies.
Remit Consulting partner Andrew Waller said the report’s findings highlighted a widening gap between AI experimentation and execution.
“Real estate businesses have moved quickly to provide access to AI tools, but far fewer have embedded them into formal processes,” he added. “The challenge now is organisational. It is about data quality, governance and leadership clarity. Without that, AI remains a productivity aid, rather than a source of structural advantage.”
The report’s summary said the real estate sector “continues to misjudge where AI will hit hardest”, overestimating its impact in the short term and underestimating it in the longer term.
Some 58% said they believed the traditional time-based fee model was the element of commercial real estate most at risk from AI automation. Only 6% believed client relationships alone would protect existing fee structures, and the report suggests the industry’s pricing structures are likely to change “sooner and more decisively than its job numbers”.
The report added that governance was “the largest structural weakness in the sector”, with firms yet to install AI policies exposing themselves to data risk, inconsistent outputs and unmanaged experimentation.
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