This month, we sat down with Lexi Astfalk, who is marking 13 years at The Smart Agency, to talk about what a decade-plus in CRE communications teaches you, and why the agency is investing in AI visibility as a new service for clients.
Q: Why should a CRE owner or fund manager care about AI visibility right now?
Because the audiences you work hardest to reach, the investors you raise capital from, the tenants and residents you lease to, the lenders and brokers who vet you, are already forming their first impression of your firm through AI. This is not a fringe habit. In Forrester’s latest research across 18,000 professionals making buying decisions, 94% used AI during their process, and generative AI has now overtaken company websites, industry experts, and direct outreach as the most influential source they consult.
So, before an investor weighs a commitment to your fund, or a broker decides which landlords to put in front of a tenant, or a lender sizes up your sponsorship, there is a strong chance an AI system has already described your firm for them. The only question is whether that description is accurate, credible, and complete, or thin, generic, or missing. After 13 years in this business, I have learned to move early when the way decisions get made starts to shift. This is one of those shifts.
Q: How does this show up in capital raising and leasing, not just marketing?
This is the part I want owners to really hear: it is a business input now, not a marketing nicety. Whether someone is weighing a commitment to your fund or a lease in your building, they finish most of their homework before they ever call you. Gartner’s latest buyer survey found that 67% of B2B buyers now prefer a rep-free experience, and 45% used AI during their most recent purchase. By the time you are across the table, the impression is largely set, and here is what actually shaped it: AI assembled that picture from your press coverage, your LinkedIn presence, and the expertise your firm has published.
So, when your earned media is thin, your LinkedIn goes quiet for a quarter, or your positioning is buried in a brochure the system cannot read, AI fills the gaps with whatever it can find, and you never get the chance to correct it. You just do not get the call, the tour, or the meeting. And the picture comes back wrong more often than you would think: in Forrester’s data, about one in five of those decision-makers came away less confident because the tool handed them inaccurate or unreliable information. For a firm mid-raise, or working to fill space in a competitive submarket, that is not a softer brand metric. It is capital that gets committed elsewhere and space that gets leased by someone else.
Q: Isn’t this just SEO with a new name?
I understand why people ask, but no, and the difference matters. SEO was about where you land on a page of search results. This is about what an AI system actually says about you. It is one thing to show up on a list of links someone still has to click through. It is another for a system to understand who you are, what you own and operate, your track record, and why you are credible, and then explain all of that, in its own words, to an investor or a tenant who is deciding where to go. SEO helps you get found. This determines how you get described.
They do not even pull from the same place. A Moz analysis this year found that 88% of the sources AI cites never appear in the top ten search results, and a firm’s own website tends to be only a small slice of what these systems reference. You can rank beautifully on Google and still be nearly absent from the answer an investor or a broker actually reads. Different game, different playbook.
Q: What if a CRE professional says, “My firm has a strong reputation built over decades. Doesn’t that carry over?”
Our answer is, “It is your best asset, and it does not transfer on its own.” That surprises people, so it is worth explaining why. Your reputation lives in the minds of the people who already know you, the LPs you have raised from, the brokers who know your buildings, the tenants who have renewed with you. An AI system only knows what it can read, and it leans heavily on independent, third-party coverage to decide who is credible.
Muck Rack’s ongoing study, now across tens of millions of citations from ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, keeps landing in the same place: earned media accounts for roughly 84% of what AI cites, while paid content is a rounding error at three-tenths of a percent. And these systems favor the present over the archive; a landmark deal you closed three years ago does less for you than credible coverage from last month. So, a firm with a genuinely deeper track record can lose ground to a newer name that is simply easier for the system to read and more recently in the conversation. Decades of trust are real. They just have to be visible in the places AI is reading.
Q: If a firm wants to get ahead of this, what should they expect from The Smart Agency?
We show you how AI describes your firm today, how that compares to the competitors you are measured against, and exactly where the gaps sit across your thought leadership, your LinkedIn presence, and your website. Then we create you a plan to close them.
It is honestly the same thing we have done since 1994; make sure the right audiences see the right expertise, whether those are investors, tenants, or the brokers and lenders in between. What changed is where they are looking. And the timing matters, because this compounds. The firms that build visibility now will keep pulling ahead, the same way reputation has always compounded in this business: slowly, and then all at once. Getting there first is the advantage. Frankly, being early to shifts like this one is a big part of why I am still here 13 years in.
