The Short Version
- Retail landlords are moving past AI experimentation and looking for practical tools that can improve leasing, operations, acquisitions, marketing and customer-experience strategy.
- Rather than chasing the newest technology, owners and operators are prioritizing AI use cases that deliver measurable efficiencies or better decisionmaking.
- Early adopters tout valuable efficiencies in document synthesis, lease processing, operations, capital allocation, acquisition strategies, customer experience and foot-traffic insights.
- Still, some landlords remain cautious as fast-changing technology, data-quality concerns and unclear ROI contribute to analysis paralysis.
- Developers, owners, managers, consultants and REIT executives share where AI is proving useful now and where adoption remains a work in progress.
Retail Landlords Move AI From Novelty to Practical Tool
As they harness AI, more and more retail landlords are moving beyond shiny object syndrome. AI is shifting from novelty to necessity in retail real estate, empowering property owners and managers to sharpen leasing, operations, capital allocation, acquisition strategies and even the customer experience. “It’s a means to an end,” said Placer.ai chief marketing officer Ethan Chernofsky.
According to Cushman & Wakefield’s AI Impact Barometer, launched in February to track adoption, “AI’s impact on the retail property market has not tilted firmly positive or negative.” Still, some users are seeing positive results from the hyped technology.
In February, Sytes launched its site-search marketplace connecting tenants, tenant representatives, landlords and developers, and every week, the platform’s AI assistant, Rio, reads hundreds of site fliers from landlords, extracts deal terms, matches them against a tenant’s criteria and emails the landlord to chase down any missing data. “By the time the tenant rep broker logs in, the noise is already filtered and the data is clean,” said Sytes CEO Rafael Weiss.
NewMark Merrill Makes AI an Operating Priority
NewMark Merrill Cos. chair, president and CEO Sandy Sigal said AI is a need-to-have, not want-to-have, tool for retail landlords. “This is not an optional exercise,” he said. “You adapt or die. Your only decision is whether you become an early adopter, a midrange adopter or a late adopter, and by the time you’re a late adopter, it’s too late.”
Nonetheless, Chernofsky cautioned against adopting AI haphazardly. “There appears to be this continuation of an AI-for-AI’s-sake notion, which isn’t healthy,” he said. Chernofsky pointed out that commercial real estate’s historically slow technology adoption has produced an unusually disciplined approach to AI. Retail landlords are looking at “what moves the needle instead of simply chasing novel technology,” he said.
To that end, Sigal said AI and other technology “really came alive for us in a big way” in 2025. “It became a practical tool,” he said. The company now employs an in-house “technology champion” management executive to monitor adoption of AI across departments like operations, leasing, marketing and acquisitions. Sigal said NewMark Merrill puts AI to work analyzing data regarding shopper behavior, event attendance and customer feedback, for example, to inform decisions about marketing, leasing and security.
Kimco Uses AI To Speed Document Review and Data Analysis
At this spring’s New York University Annual REIT Symposium, CoStar reported that Kimco CEO Conor Flynn said AI once saved the REIT roughly three weeks sifting through about 200,000 pages of merger-related documents. And on a recent earnings call, Kimco executive vice president and chief innovation and transformation officer Will Teichman said a new natural-language chatbot pairs the REIT’s property and leasing data with ChatGPT models to generate better insights about company operations.
NextRivet Sees AI Making Existing Tech Smarter
NextRivet co-founder David Blumenfeld said AI now allows landlords to generate forecasts and optimize sites more quickly than ever. In the foot traffic category, AI lets landlords go well beyond traditional shopper headcounts: Facial recognition can identify a shopper’s age range and gender, and video analytics can produce data on store visits and customer mixes. “We think of AI as making your existing tech smarter and faster,” Blumenfeld said. “It’s not a standalone robot.”
Brixmor Blends Third-Party Tools With In-House AI
On a February earnings call, Brixmor president and CEO Brian Finnegan said the REIT employs AI to more efficiently process and summarize leases, unearth tenant prospects and conduct “tenant health analysis” to detect early signs of ailing retailers. According to CoStar’s coverage of the NYU REIT symposium, Finnegan said AI has enabled Brixmor to trim lease negotiation timelines by about 15% over the past two years.
Brixmor executive vice president and chief information officer Helane Stein said the REIT takes a hybrid approach to AI by incorporating third-party tools, such as Copilot and Claude, and developing technology in-house.
The company began to embrace generative AI in 2024. Uses include automation of lease-clause summaries, production of marketing materials and property brochures and construction of in-house tools that comb through data, draft documents and summarize reports. Also in 2024, Brixmor produced its own generative AI tool, Chat BRX, to expose employees to AI and free them up to tackle higher-value work but not replace them, Stein noted. “We’re not chasing the bright, shiny object or the hype,” she said.
Retail Landlords Look for AI Results, Not Hype
Industry surveys suggest most retail landlords, however, are still finding their footing with AI. The JLL Global Real Estate Technology Survey 2025, published in fall 2025, found that 88% of investors, owners and landlords were piloting AI, up from only 5% in 2023. Yet 60% of real estate investors said they lacked the technology plans and strategies needed to put AI to work effectively.
A more recent survey, by First American Data & Analytics and DealGround, showed that although 66% of commercial real estate professionals use AI weekly or daily, only 5% trust it enough to inform real estate decisions. More than half of those surveyed said they use AI only for support. NextRivet co-founder Kyle Spencer said: “A lot of landlords are saying: ‘I have analysis paralysis because the tech is changing so fast’ … and a lot of times, that’s an excuse to do nothing.”