Artificial Intelligence to find real estate value

Artificial Intelligence to find real estate valueArtificial Intelligence to find real estate value

If you’re in the market for a new house in North America, your first stop might be a home-valuation estimate website like Zillow. But what if you’re an investor looking to buy an apartment complex?

Enter Skyline AI, which uses artificial intelligence, machine learning and big data to predict what a commercial real-estate investment is worth today and how it may perform in the future.

The Tel Aviv-based startup raised $18 million in August – just four months after launching to the public – on top of a $3 million seed round last year. The new financing came from Sequoia Capital and TLV Partners with participation from JLL Spark.

Skyline AI is not just a technology vendor; the company has real skin in the game. Teaming up with an investment partner, Skyline AI identified two residential complexes in Philadelphia that the company’s algorithms determined were performing below market. Skyline AI and its partner then spent some $26 million to buy the properties.

“We saw that similar assets that had already been renovated were able to increase their rents by about $300 per unit,” Skyline AI CEO Guy Zipori tells ISRAEL21c.

Identifying this kind of “mismanaged opportunity” on a national scale without Skyline’s smarts would be close to impossible. Real-estate investors do a lot of manual due diligence including visiting a property in person, says Zipori. With Skyline AI, it’s all done algorithmically and in real time. The latter is particularly important: Commercial properties are usually appraised only once or twice a year. “Every time something changes around an asset, our appraisal changes immediately,” Zipori says. Courtesy Israel21c