Ravi Prakash Pandey, Founder and Chairman Amrawati Group
For decades, real estate investment in India felt like an art form, shaped by insider tips, gut instinct and the right connections at the local municipality. When things worked out, the investor looked like a visionary. When they did not, the loss simply became another story in a volatile and unpredictable market known for it swings. As we have arrived into 2026, that familiar narrative is quietly being rewritten by a new technology, artificial intelligence.
This shift goes far beyond chatbots answering routine questions on brokerage websites. Decisions that were once taken on the basis of instinct are now being guided by predictive data that is precise, fast and difficult to ignore.
If you want to understand where the market is heading, it helps to watch corporate behavior. The transformation inside corporate real estate has been striking. Only a couple of years ago, barely five percent of companies were seriously experimenting with artificial intelligence in their real estate operations. Today that figure has surged to ninety one percent, according to JLL’s Ambition Meets Reality report released in December 2025.
This is not cautious experimentation. It is full commitment. Indian organizations are moving faster than many global counterparts, with ninety three percent expecting to expand their technology budgets. Nearly half of the decision makers plan to increase spending by at least fifteen percent over the next three years. The reason is simple. Real estate is no longer viewed as a passive cost burden. It is being treated as a strategic asset that deserves the same analytical attention as an investment portfolio.
For individual and institutional investors, this level of technological adoption changes the rules entirely. Property valuation once depended on a quick look at a few recent transactions nearby, followed by an educated guess about future appreciation.
Machine learning models do the data crunching and are processing thousands of variables within seconds. They consider historical pricing, upcoming infrastructure, regulatory movement and even subtle shifts in local sentiment. The outcome is a level of valuation accuracy that was difficult to imagine not long ago.
What truly stands out is the predictive strength of these systems. Artificial intelligence can now read the early signals of neighborhood growth long before they appear in prices or public attention. It also highlights the undervalued pockets in emerging cities that traditional analysis might miss. Investors gain the ability to plan entry and exit with a level of confidence that earlier generations simply did not have.
What makes this transformation even more interesting is how closely it mirrors India’s broader economic journey. Rapid urban expansion is generating enormous volumes of data. Grant Thornton Bharat’s FY 2025 to 2026 assessment emphasizes that artificial intelligence, blockchain and large scale data analysis together create the transparency that Indian real estate has historically struggled to achieve.
On the global stage, the artificial intelligence driven real estate market is expected to move beyond three hundred billion dollars in value and India is clearly part of that momentum. A retail buyer can now explore a home in Pune through a digital platform, while an institutional investor can simulate complex risk scenarios for commercial assets in Bengaluru. Barriers that once slowed decision making are steadily fading.
Technology, for all its promise, is never a complete answer by itself. The real question over the next few years is who truly gets to use it. These powerful tools must reach smaller cities rather than remain concentrated in major metros. Even so, the direction is unmistakable. Investment decisions are becoming more democratic, more data driven and far more efficient than before.
For Indian investors, this shift may be the most encouraging development in decades. Guesswork is slowly giving way to clarity and in its place a more transparent, intelligent, and potentially rewarding real estate landscape is taking shape.
