There is a version of commercial real estate acquisitions work that most people outside the industry never see: the hours spent pulling deal details, formatting data, and building presentation materials before any real analysis can happen. On a team tracking 50 to 70 deals a week across Midwest markets including Chicago, Indianapolis, Columbus, Cincinnati, and Minneapolis, that administrative layer adds up fast.
Clear Height Properties, the Oak Brook-based industrial real estate firm, adopted Claude as a firm-wide AI tool at the beginning of this year. The decision was straightforward: the acquisitions team was spending too much time on work that did not require judgment, taking time away from work that did.
Cole Chernow, senior analyst, Clear Height Properties
Where the time was going
Before AI tools entered the workflow, every deal required manual data entry. Pull the details, format them, get them into the system. At a volume of 50 to 70 deals a week, that process alone consumed an estimated 10 to 20 hours of analyst time every week. Not underwriting. Not market analysis. Just moving data from one place to another.
Claude handles that intake now. Feed it the raw deal information, it organizes and formats it, and the team moves straight to analysis.
Investment memoranda followed a similar path. A standard memo for a deal in diligence, covering the market, financials, rent roll, tenants, and business plan, typically ran 12 to 15 slides and took an analyst five or six hours to build from scratch. Now the data goes into Claude, and a first draft comes back that is 80 percent complete. The analyst reviews, refines, and finishes it.
“The time we used to spend on formatting and assembly is going somewhere better now.”
The 80% rule and why the review still matters
The pattern holds across tasks: Claude handles the production, the analyst handles the review. In industrial real estate acquisitions, that distinction matters. A 50-basis-point difference in a cap rate can shift a purchase price by millions of dollars on a single asset. The efficiency gain from AI does not reduce that accountability, it concentrates it. Someone still has to check the numbers, and that person needs to know what they are looking for.
What has changed is where analyst time goes. Less of it on data entry and document assembly. More of it on market analysis, underwriting decisions, and the judgment calls that determine whether a deal is worth pursuing in the first place.
The part AI cannot touch
The shift in production work has also sharpened a more important question: what does not get automated?
Brokers bring deals to firms they trust to close. Owners return calls to people they know. Lenders commit to operators they have seen perform. Equity partners back teams whose judgment they respect. Every one of those relationships is built over time, through consistent follow-through and direct human interaction. None of it transfers to a language model, and none of it moves faster just because the intake process did.
“AI can’t replace being able to find the people who are bringing you deals. It’s a relationship business, that’s not going to change.”
In Midwest industrial markets specifically, the relationship layer is the business. Finding off-market deals, sourcing debt, raising equity, and getting to the closing table all run through a network of people who have decided to work with you. That holds in Chicago as much as it does in Indianapolis, Columbus, or Cincinnati.
Two tracks at the same time
For Clear Height’s acquisitions team, that means running two priorities in parallel. The first is getting very good at AI tools, the efficiency gap between people who use these tools well and those who do not is only going to grow. The second is building and maintaining the broker, lender, and equity relationships that put deals together, because that is the part of the job that compounds over time in ways no software will replicate.
AI tools for commercial real estate acquisitions are not a replacement for expertise. They are a multiplier on it. The firms and professionals who are figuring that out now are building a real efficiency advantage. In a business where speed and accuracy both matter, the ability to process more deals and keep analyst attention focused on higher-order work is a meaningful edge.
For Clear Height, the first half of this year has made the case clearly enough. The administrative layer is thinner. The analytical work is deeper. And the time that used to go into formatting and assembly is going somewhere better.
About Clear Height Properties
Piloted by an experienced leadership team, Clear Height Properties has built a strong platform for acquiring and operating industrial real estate in the most desirable locations throughout the central United States. From its headquarters in Oak Brook, Illinois, the firm has bought and sold 213 assets totaling nearly $1 billion over the past fifteen years, establishing a record of strong risk-adjusted returns. Driven by its core values and mission of “building wealth and creating legacies,” Clear Height is uniquely positioned to invest in, manage and add value to every asset and relationship. Learn more at clearheight.com.
Cole Chernow is a Senior Analyst on the Acquisitions team at Clear Height Properties, an industrial real estate investment firm headquartered in Oak Brook, Illinois. He focuses on deal sourcing, underwriting, and acquisitions across the firm’s Midwest and Sun Belt markets, including Chicago, Indianapolis, Columbus, Cincinnati, Minneapolis, and Dallas/Fort Worth.
