Commercial real estate has had a long reputation for adopting new technology only after every other industry has already moved on to the next thing. But 2025 marked a rare shift: Class A office leasing jumped 12.5%, the strongest performance since 2019, and the spike didn’t come from traditional tactics. It came from owners who finally embraced AI as a measurable revenue engine rather than a buzzword.
RealtyAds, the AI-native digital advertising platform built specifically for commercial real estate, has released “The Class A Office Leasing Report: How AI Delivered Measurable ROI.” And unlike many industry reports that lean heavily on projections, estimates, and optimism, this one deals in hard numbers drawn from real deployments across Class A assets.
The findings are blunt: assets using CRE-specific AI captured the growth. Everyone else left opportunity on the table.
Traditional CRE marketing typically reaches just 11% of brokers in a given market. RealtyAds says its platform pushed that figure to 89%. That gap alone tells the story of a market where “digital” has shifted from optional to existential.
Trevor Marticke, Founder at RealtyAds, summed up the industry’s long-standing challenge: “For years, commercial real estate has lagged behind other industries in digital marketing adoption. This report proves what we’ve seen firsthand: when Class A assets leverage AI-driven, CRE-specific technology, they don’t just compete better — they win more deals.”
What the Data Says: AI Helped Find, Advance, and Close Bigger Deals
RealtyAds analyzed aggregated performance across Class A office assets using its platform throughout 2025. Across the board, AI produced quantifiable gains that dwarf the returns of legacy marketing.
2025 Performance Snapshot
- $5.56B in deals found
- $10.5B in deals advanced
- $1.49B in deals closed
- 4.8x improvement in broker reach within 30 days
- 89% broker market coverage vs. 11% via traditional outreach
- +30% increase in property tours
- +18% increase in closed deals
- $874 returned for every $1 invested in AI-driven digital marketing
Those figures paint a clear pattern: owners who digitized early saw leasing activity shift in their favor. Owners who didn’t are now competing against assets with dramatically wider broker visibility, deeper market intelligence, and automated engagement cycles that run long after a typical campaign would go dark.
Marticke emphasized the point: “These aren’t projections or best-case scenarios. This is what Class A office owners achieved by closing the digital gap between commercial real estate and AI-driven strategies.”
Why CRE-Specific AI Outperforms Generic Digital Tools
A key argument in the report is that not all digital marketing is created equal. Broad consumer advertising platforms simply weren’t designed for CRE’s long sales cycles, shrinking pipelines, and notorious data fragmentation. RealtyAds argues that CRE needs purpose-built systems — and their platform is engineered around three core differentiators:
1. Proprietary Market Intelligence
RealtyAds pulls in 5 million+ daily API calls, capturing:
- broker activity trends
- tenant funding shifts
- lease expiration cycles
- real-time market movement
This intelligence helps pinpoint who is actually active in a market — not just who clicked an ad.
2. AI-Driven Budget Optimization
The platform continuously reallocates spend based on engagement patterns, eliminating the classic “set it and forget it” problem that drains budgets. In practice, this means money flows where real broker activity is happening in real time.
3. Sustained Engagement Across Long Deal Cycles
CRE deal cycles are infamously slow. According to RealtyAds, 86% of deals die after initial tours because follow-up engagement fades. Their AI system maintains consistent visibility and outreach throughout extended decision-making timelines, which can last months or years.
Put simply: AI takes the repetitive, timing-sensitive components of deal nurturing and turns them into automated, data-driven workflows that humans rarely have time to perform manually.
A Market in Flux: Why Digital Maturity Will Determine 2026 Winners
The report also takes a forward-looking stance, arguing that the digital gap in CRE is only going to widen in 2026 due to several converging pressures.
Key Dynamics Shaping the Next 12 Months
- Shrinking Prime Inventory: New construction remains 62% below 10-year averages, which tightens competition for quality space.
- Extended Decision Cycles: Tenants are evaluating options more methodically and require sustained digital presence from owners.
- Digitally-First Brokers: Discovery and evaluation increasingly begin online—even before phone calls or tour scheduling.
- Intensifying Competition: Demand for top-tier spaces is climbing, but so is the number of landlords chasing the same limited set of creditworthy tenants.
As Marticke put it: “The question for Class A office owners isn’t whether to adopt digital strategies — it’s whether they’ll implement the right ones before their competitors do.”
RealtyAds’ thesis is that the CRE industry is entering a new era where digital maturity is as critical as location or amenity packages. In a tightening market with elongated decision cycles, owners can no longer rely on traditional outreach to get in front of brokers and tenants. They need automated systems that ensure visibility at every stage — from initial discovery to final negotiation.
How This Fits Into the Industry’s Larger Tech Shift
The CRE tech ecosystem has exploded over the past five years, but much of it remains siloed: tools for valuation, tools for tenant experience, tools for operations, tools for analytics, and so on. RealtyAds is betting that marketing and leasing will be the next major vertical to undergo true AI-driven transformation.
And their report suggests they may be right.
The industry’s earlier experiments with digital marketing felt like forcing a consumer playbook onto a B2B market with entirely different incentives, timelines, and stakeholders. CRE-specific AI finally flips that script: data, budget optimization, and automated engagement built for office leasing cycles — not repurposed from retail or ecommerce.
If early adopters are getting 4.8x broker reach and triple-digit ROAS, competitive pressure alone will force laggards to follow.
The Bottom Line
RealtyAds’ report is less about a single platform and more about the broader reality it reveals:
digital competence has become a core competitive advantage in Class A office leasing.
The owners who embraced AI early are capturing more market share, advancing more deals, and closing more business. Those relying solely on traditional tactics are reaching just 11% of brokers—and competing for the leftovers.
If 2025 was the year AI proved its value in CRE leasing, 2026 may be the year it becomes unavoidable.
