Technology on the frontline: advancing your real estate practice strategy with AI
Ed Bates, senior customer success manager at Avail, discusses how tactical AI adoption can cut time and costs while boosting client relationships, talent retention and market positioning
AI is no longer a novelty in real estate practices. With tools like Avail, which automates title and lease reporting, now embedded in many firms the key question is no longer whether to use these tools, but how to use them strategically.
When deployed thoughtfully, AI influences far more than turnaround times. It affects margins, pricing models, client relationships, talent retention, and ultimately, market positioning.
However, treating it purely as a cost-saving efficiency tool limits its potential. This article explores how AI can be used to advance firm strategy, rather than be treated simply as an operational upgrade.
The strategic value of structure
At its core, Avail is designed to save fee earners’ time by extracting, structuring and analysing information from title registers, leases and associated documents. However, its strategic value lies not in speed alone, but in consistency and structure.
Structured reporting is not new. Most firms rely on detailed house-style reports, yet these still allow for significant variation — individual fee earners inevitably interrogate titles differently, applying their own emphasis and style.
Therefore, while formats may be standardised, often, the underlying analysis is not. This limits traditional title review to a largely one-off exercise rather than a scalable process.
Contrastingly, Avail applies the same analytical approach to every title, producing predictable and repeatable outputs that are enhanced by mapping, planning and corporate data from multiple external sources. Once captured in this structured form, title information becomes reusable — not only for the transaction in hand, but also for pricing, portfolio analysis and deeper client insight.
Enabling volume and portfolio strategies
Many firms pursue volume strategies with institutional clients such as funds and developers. These clients value speed and clarity over bespoke drafting.
AI tools support this model by producing uniform outputs across hundreds of assets. Risks can be categorised consistently, enabling easy comparison between properties within a portfolio, making firms more attractive to clients managing large asset bases who need to make rapid commercial decisions.
For firms targeting institutional clients, AI-driven structure and insight are clear differentiators. For existing relationships, this approach shifts perception from legal adviser to critical operational partner.
Supporting productised legal services
A significant strategic opportunity created by AI is the ability to offer productised services, opening new opportunities to engage with clients.
As AI outputs are structured, in our world of title and lease review, firms are designing repeatable services such as:
- Fixed-fee title and lease review packages
- Portfolio ‘health checks’ for asset managers
- Obligation trackers
- Lender-ready title summaries delivered within guaranteed timeframes
These offerings allow firms to move away from pure time-based billing towards scalable revenue streams. Moreover, they provide new and interesting front doors for engaging prospective clients. Importantly, once a client integrates a firm’s productised service into its workflow, switching becomes costly and inconvenient.
Optimising training and talent retention
At the junior level, talent retention issues are partly due to repetitive and low-engagement work — AI title review tools can help address this problem.
By removing much of the mechanical extraction work, juniors are exposed earlier to legal judgement and commercial analysis. In turn, senior lawyers spend less time supervising basic tasks and more time mentoring.
Ambitious emerging talent values responsibility, impact and meaningful work. Firms that embrace AI can unlock a clear path for these drivers and provide more stretch-opportunities to their juniors on substantial work. How firms embrace AI will certainly impact talent acquisition, with those positioning AI as a learning and career accelerator, rather than as another IT tool, being in the strongest position to attract and retain high-quality talent in a competitive market.
Brand building with AI
Clients are increasingly sceptical of outward claims of innovation and generic legal tech messaging. Brand impact comes from lived experience: advice that is easier to engage with, processes that feel efficient and outputs that align with how clients actually operate. All of this is achieved with the consistency already discussed, though can be taken much further.
Partners bring Avail to pitches and produce Avail Scoping Reports in real-time to move the conversation from hypothetical to practical. Armed with Avail’s AI analysis, they can provide instant indicators of likely complexity and headline key risks weeks before competitors. During projects Avail’s interactive mapping features bring a visual reality to the transaction, and transaction leads can provide instant updates on title applications using Avail’s monitoring tool.
It is these tangible experiences of innovation which build brand and reputation, rather than efficiency tools which are otherwise invisible to clients.
Conclusion: technology as a strategic lever
AI tools like Avail are not inherently a strategy — their value lies in how firms redesign workflows, pricing and client delivery around them.
Firms that treat AI as a junior time-saver will see limited returns. However, those that align it with broader strategic goals such as margin protection, productisation and brand building will find it reshaping their real estate practices in far more profound ways.
In an increasingly competitive market, the firms that win will not be those with the most technology, but those who use it most deliberately.
