Commercial real estate investors have used artificial intelligence to sift deals and spot red flags for several years. Lenders are only beginning to catch up — and a wave of loan maturities, tighter capital-raising conditions and investor demands for faster reporting is pushing them to move quicker.
That’s the assessment of Laura Krashakova, founder and CEO of Smart Capital Center, an AI-powered underwriting and portfolio-monitoring platform, who says the equity side of the business has outpaced the debt side in adopting the technology — for reasons rooted in risk exposure as much as regulation.
“If the property value goes down 20 percent, the equity investor will lose that value, or sometimes a lot more — the whole property,” says Krashakova. “The lender may not necessarily lose anything,” because loans are often made at loan-to-value ratios of 50 percent to 60 percent or lower. That gap in downside exposure, she says, has translated into a gap in urge
