OpenAI's Next Target: The £50B Property Advisory Market
They disrupted content. They're now disrupting consulting. Is the largest asset class in the world next?
OpenAI just launched enterprise consulting with a $10M minimum fee. They're embedding engineers directly into Fortune 500s, building custom AI solutions that make traditional consultants look obsolete.
Today I’m writing about: what happens if OpenAI enters real estate advisory tomorrow. Not in five years. Tomorrow.
Imagine OpenAI poaching 20 top directors from JLL and Savills, pairing them with their AI, and whipping up a "OpenAI Property" branch. The technology exists. The capital exists. The only thing missing is the decision.
This brief is not to speculate about distant disruption. It’s about exploring what the biggest advisory firms in the world - companies that survived 2008, COVID, and countless cycles - need to do to survive what's coming next.
Today's Brief:
OpenAI Built a Consulting Army
Property Advisory Runs on Spreadsheets and Relationships
The Automation Timeline Is Shorter Than You Think
OpenAI's Advantages Over Traditional Firms
Traditional Firms Are Playing Defence
How To Beat Open AI
The Next Three Years
OpenAI Built a Consulting Army
While everyone obsessed over ChatGPT, OpenAI built something bigger: an enterprise consulting division that looks more like Palantir than a software company.
The numbers are staggering. OpenAI's revenue hit $12-13 billion annually, up from $5.5 billion in 2024. They've crossed 3 million paying business users and 600,000 enterprises.
Open AI is no longer just selling API access.
Their new enterprise consulting division requires a minimum $10 million engagement. They've deployed Forward Deployed Engineers to eight global cities who embed directly into client operations. These engineers don't write strategy decks. They ship code inside enterprise chaos.
Notable wins already secured:
Strategic partnership with Grab across Southeast Asia
Pennsylvania Commonwealth pilot showing 105 minutes daily time savings for government employees
Sam isn't being subtle about the ambition here either - he’s building a "$100 billion business line just selling to enterprises".
Property Advisory Runs on Spreadsheets and Relationships
The global property advisory market is a $65-75 billion behemoth employing 333,000 professionals. Four firms dominate:
CBRE: $28.9 billion revenue
Cushman & Wakefield: $9.4 billion revenue
Savills: $3.1 billion revenue
The business model hasn't fundamentally changed in decades.
Generally, I estimate revenue comes from:
Transactions (30-40%): Property sales and leasing
Property management (25-30%): Operating buildings for owners
Valuations (15-20%): Appraisals and assessments
Research & consulting (10-15%): Market reports and strategic advice
Walk into any property consultancy and you'll find armies of analysts hunched over Excel, building financial models, pulling comparables, analysing rent rolls, and assembling market reports.
Market research reports take weeks to compile. Due diligence on a portfolio acquisition involves dozens of junior staff reviewing thousands of documents.
This is exactly the kind of work AI was built to eliminate.
The Automation Timeline Is Shorter Than You Think
We’re definitely looking at a fundamental restructuring of the workforce within this decade.
Here’s my estimation for extinction vs risk:
The pattern is clear: the more structured and data-focused the role, the faster it gets automated.
Morgan Stanley thinks AI can automate 37% of all tasks in real estate, representing $34 billion in potential operating efficiencies.
This is a shockingly high stat.
What makes this particularly strong for real estate advisory is the pyramid structure of these firms. If you automate away 80% of analyst work, you don't just lose those jobs - you undermine the entire business model. Partners need associates, associates need analysts. Without the bottom of the pyramid, the whole structure becomes unstable.
OpenAI's Advantages Over Traditional Firms
If OpenAI opened a real estate advisory branch of their business tomorrow, I believe they would win on 5 fronts:
1. Speed
Clearly, OpenAI don’t bring much to real estate in terms of reputation, processes, or domain know-how.
However, this point is about the fundamental capability differences.
When Savills receives a portfolio valuation request, they initiate a human workflow: partner scopes work, associates assign analysts, analysts build models sequentially, quality control reviews everything, partners add insights. Each step has dependencies. Each person works 8-10 hours daily. The process is linear and bounded by human constraints.
I would assume OpenAI, with their financial, human, and technological bandwidth, if applied to the real estate sector with focus, could create massive competitive advantages over traditional consultancies when it comes to the 65% of work that is data and analysis.
Take a typical feasibility study. At JLL, analysts spend hours in Excel building scenarios one by one. Or they might use a piece of software that does certain bits, but still needs considerable human intervention. OpenAI could, theoretically, build something that generates 10,000 scenarios instantly, identifying optimal structures humans would never discover. The bottleneck becomes human review, not analysis.
Yes, they'd lack domain expertise initially. But OpenAI could hire 10 senior directors from Savills tomorrow - people who know exactly what clients need but are frustrated by slow delivery.
I speak to real estate decision-makers across the GCC and UK every week, and every single person I speak to is disgruntled with the pace that they are adopting AI vs the promises made to them on the LinkedIn post they saw last night prompting them to comment ‘Feasibility’.
If OpenAI bridged this gap overnight, it could be a game changer.
The reputation barrier is real but surmountable. OpenAI would win their first clients on speed and price - hedge funds needing quick analysis, PropTech companies wanting modern partners, family offices tired of waiting weeks for simple answers. Once blue-chip names experience 48-hour turnarounds on complex portfolios, word spreads fast. In professional services, performance creates reputation faster than reputation creates performance.
2. Technology
OpenAI Property would launch with exclusive access to GPT-10 and beyond - models that won't reach competitors for years. While firms like CBRE struggle to integrate third-party AI tools, OpenAI's consultancy would have direct pipelines to breakthrough capabilities the moment they're developed.
This is one of the strongest reasons in my argument.
Imagine property valuations using AI that understands architectural drawings, drone footage, and planning documents simultaneously. Or market analysis that processes satellite data, foot traffic, and social sentiment in real-time. Traditional firms or prop-tech startups are, frankly, struggling to deliver on this can't build this - they'd be playing catch up years later once Open AI releases the model publicly!
3. Economics
This is theoretical. But, the numbers would be devastating for incumbents. OpenAI Property could operate at 40-60% margins while charging 30% less than traditional firms. No pyramid of junior analysts earning £35k while billing at £150/hour. No training programs. No turnover costs.
One OpenAI Property "pod" - an AI system plus 2-3 senior advisors - could handle the workload of a 20-person traditional team. They'd win on price while maintaining higher margins. Traditional firms couldn't compete without gutting their own business model.
4. Talent
The world's best AI engineers would choose OpenAI Property over Cushman & Wakefield every time. It's not about money - it's about working on cutting-edge problems with the best technology on Earth. OpenAI could pair these engineers with top property professionals poached from traditional firms with 10x compensation packages funded by their tech margins.
Traditional firms face an impossible choice: match OpenAI's compensation (destroying profitability) or watch their best people leave. Neither option ends well.
5. Client Expectations
Once institutional investors experience OpenAI Property's service - instant analysis, perfect accuracy, predictive insights impossible without AI - traditional offerings become obsolete.
It would be like offering a Tesla owner their old diesel car back. Or asking someone who's used email to go back to fax machines.
The scariest part is OpenAI could launch this tomorrow. They have the technology, capital, and talent pipeline ready. The only question is whether they see enough value in owning the vertical versus just selling tools to it.
Traditional Firms Are Playing Defence
To their credit, traditional property consultancies aren't sitting still. There is a narrative and appetite to “get on-top of this AI thing and make sure we don’t get left behind”.
The partnership announcements come weekly.
IMKAN is partnering with Saal.ai for AI-powered development.
ROSHN Group partnered with Google Cloud for AI transformation.
Unique Properties invested $20 million in AIR Properties to build an AI-native platform.
But these efforts feel defensive rather than transformative. They're adding AI capabilities to existing services rather than reimagining the service itself.
It's like traditional taxi companies adding an app to compete with Uber - necessary but insufficient.
Meanwhile, clients are getting increasingly comfortable with DIY AI tools. Platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, and specialised real estate AI tools deliver 70-80% professional quality for many standard tasks.
The response from traditional firms has been to emphasise the human element - relationship management, local market knowledge, complex negotiation. This is a valid strategy, but it's essentially conceding the analytical and data processing work to AI. That's a huge chunk of revenue to surrender.
How To Beat Open AI
Not everything in property advisory will be automated. The question is what remains uniquely human and how much that's worth.
Complex negotiations will remain human-dominated for the foreseeable future.
The subtle dance of a multi-party transaction, reading body language, understanding unstated motivations, creative deal structuring - these require emotional intelligence and creativity that AI hasn't mastered. When a deal hangs on personal relationships and trust, you need humans in the room.
Local market knowledge and regulatory expertise create defensible niches.
AI can process public data, but it doesn't know that the planning officer prefers applications submitted on Tuesday mornings, or that the seller's divorce is driving the timeline. It doesn't understand the political dynamics of a contentious rezoning or the unwritten rules of a local market.
Crisis management and dispute resolution require human judgment and empathy.
When a development goes sideways, when partners fall out, when regulatory issues emerge - these situations demand experience, creativity, and emotional intelligence that AI can't provide.
Board-level strategic counsel remains valuable.
CEOs don't want to discuss their company's future with an AI. They want experienced advisors who understand not just the numbers but the human dynamics, competitive landscape, and strategic implications of major decisions.
That being said, these human-centric services probably represent 20-30% of current advisory revenue. The routine valuations, market reports, financial models, and data analysis that comprise the bulk of billings are all automatable. The pyramid structure of traditional consultancies, with many juniors supporting few partners, doesn't work when AI eliminates the need for juniors.
The Next Three Years
I think the transformation will happen gradually, then suddenly. Here's what to expect:
Year 1 (2025):
Early adopters gain competitive advantage
20-30% reduction in junior analyst hiring
Fee pressure begins on routine services
Clients expect faster turnarounds
Year 2 (2026):
AI-augmented services become table stakes
Traditional fees drop 15-25%
Boutique firms start consolidating
First major layoffs in data roles
OpenAI announces property-specific offerings
Year 3 (2027):
Hybrid AI-human models dominate
Traditional firms transform or specialise
AI-native advisors capture significant share
Expectations permanently reset: weeks to days, days to hour
The winners will be firms that embrace the transition early and completely. Not just adding AI tools, but fundamentally reimagining their service delivery. The losers will be those who treat AI as a threat rather than an opportunity, protecting existing business models rather than inventing new ones.
The Bottom Line
OpenAI's enterprise consulting model represents an existential threat to traditional property advisory. Not because AI will replace all human judgment - it won't.
But, because it will automate enough of the routine work to fundamentally break the business model that's sustained these firms for decades.
The Big Four property consultancies generated $65 billion in 2024 with 333,000 employees. Within five years, similar output could be achieved with half the headcount.
The question isn't whether this will happen, but who captures the value released by this efficiency gain. Will it be the traditional firms who successfully transform? New AI-native entrants? The clients themselves through lower fees? Or platform companies like OpenAI?
My guess is on a messy middle. Traditional firms will survive but be fundamentally transformed - smaller, more specialised, focused on high-value human expertise. AI-native property advisors will emerge and capture significant market share in data-heavy services. Clients will capture value through lower fees and faster service. And OpenAI - or companies like it - will build multi-billion dollar businesses selling the picks and shovels of this transformation.
The smart move isn't to resist this change or pretend it's not coming. It's to position yourself where AI amplifies your value rather than replaces it. Build expertise AI can't replicate. Create relationships AI can't form. Develop judgment AI can't exercise. And most importantly, start experimenting now, while there's still time to adapt.
The largest asset class in the world is about to be disrupted, somehow….
Thanks for reading. Please hit that subscribe button if you enjoyed this.