Clear Height Properties adopted Claude as a firm-wide AI tool at the beginning of this year to handle industrial real estate deal intake across its Midwest markets. The Oak Brook-based firm tracks 50 to 70 acquisitions a week in Chicago, Indianapolis, Columbus, Cincinnati and Minneapolis. Before the shift, manual data entry and memo assembly consumed 10 to 20 hours of analyst time weekly.
The firm's acquisitions team was spending that time on work that did not require judgment, according to Cole Chernow, a senior analyst at Clear Height. Claude now organizes and formats raw deal information so the team moves directly to analysis.
Investment memoranda that previously took an analyst five or six hours to build from scratch now return as first drafts that are 80 percent complete. A standard memo for a deal in diligence covers the market, financials, rent roll, tenants and business plan and typically runs 12 to 15 slides. The analyst reviews, refines and finishes the draft.
The time saved on formatting and assembly is going somewhere better now, Chernow said. The pattern holds across tasks: Claude handles production, the analyst handles review.
That division of labor matters in industrial real estate acquisitions, where 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 accountability, it concentrates it. Someone still has to check the numbers.
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 tools do not touch the relationship layer that drives Midwest industrial deals. 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.
AI cannot replace being able to find the people who are bringing you deals, Chernow said. It is a relationship business, and that is not going to change.
Finding off-market deals, sourcing debt, raising equity and getting to the closing table all run through a network built over time. That holds in Chicago as much as it does in Indianapolis, Columbus or Cincinnati.
For Clear Height's acquisitions team, the result is two parallel priorities. The first is getting very good at AI tools. The second is building and maintaining the broker, lender and equity relationships that put deals together. That is the part of the job that compounds over time in ways no software will replicate.
Clear Height has bought and sold 213 assets totaling nearly one billion dollars over the past 15 years from its Oak Brook headquarters. The firm said the first half of this year has made the case for AI adoption. The administrative layer is thinner. The analytical work is deeper.