BRIAN DANO
NECPE:
New England Commercial Exchange: the “for-us-by-us”, listing platform has pushed several fixes in August:
August 3rd – Fixed Photos
-Non-square photos are no longer stretched in brochures/reports.
August 5th – Broadcast Emails & Account Deactivations
-The ability to send listings to all subscribers and denote who is sending the email.
-Deactivated accounts no longer get an error code but a clear “account deactivated” notice so they know to resubscribe.
August 6th – Property Pin/Addresses
-You can now drag and drop a pin when editing a property. Addresses can be adjusted via unpublishing and editing.
August 9th – Listing Traffic Data & Building Type
-Listing visits for seconds weren’t being counted, unique visitors were inflated, and your own visits were affecting the numbers. This was all fixed.
-Listings now display primary use, clearing up ambiguity with mixed use, or multiple use properties.
August 11th – Saved Search Alerts
-Keep your clients in the loop on their searches. New matches will be sent to the client and yourself.
August 13 – Mobile
-My listing bug fixes on mobile.
August 16 – Leads & Emails Reminders
-Fixed bug with lead attribution.
-Email reminders, 7 days, 1 day out and when listing expires.
August 18- Subscriber Management
-Added subscriber management tools for saved searches, with a video walk-through.
August 24th– Email Addresses & Saved Search
-Broker emails now show on profile.
-Saved search now remembers the map area you drew.
August 27th – Deleted Drafts & Photo Improvements
-Draft listings can now be deleted, as long as they have never been published.
-When uploading images, it shows progress instead of a wheel spinner.
-Images in the wrong format or which exceed file size limits give error messages.
Flock Cameras, Surveillance, and Data Centers: Demand Drivers
As we approach the end of 2026, parallels to George Orwell’s 1984 and the 2002 hit movie Minority Report are in abundance. Flock cameras are watching you drive around town, your phone in your pocket is listening to what you are saying, and your Wi-Fi router can tell where you are located in your own home.[1] The suggestion that one should have some privacy from broad, dragnet surveillance is met with the retort, “If you have nothing to hide, what are you worried about?”.
It’s safe to say I’m generally concerned about America. It seems like every day, more of our civil liberties are eroded, whether under the guise of National Security, or to protect us from the next pandemic.
The natural fear of the proliferation of such systems is easy to see. China has implemented systems that include “mass video-surveillance incorporating facial-recognition technology; voice-recognition software that can identify speakers on phone calls, all to implement a nationwide social credit system”.[2] This social credit system, to my understanding, is justified by “allowing authorities to act more flexibly than the law, adapting the scoring system to shifting priorities of the state or other national initiatives”.[3] Sharing eerie similarities to the justification of our own use of this technology for the increased safety of our society.
What does this have to do with commercial real estate? All of this information needs to be stored somewhere; I would assert that perhaps this is a large factor behind the seemingly insatiable demand for data center development.
Global internet data was 2 Zettabytes (ZB) in 2010 and will continue growing exponentially. By the end of this year global data is projected to be 221 ZB.[4] A large portion of this storage is comprised of massive tranches of data being made, collected, and stored for everyone (often by us), along with traffic and consumer behavior data stored by companies like Flock. Each new tool, app, and data collection source added to the Internet daily will continue to increase the level of data collected and, in turn, increase the amount of physical space needed to store it.
Furthermore, in mid-August, President Trump announced plans for World Liberty Financial to become a bank,[5] further stoking fears that have been long espoused by pundits and conspiracy theorists, that the United States is being pushed toward the China model. The fear, then, would be a switch from paper currency to crypto, where one’s money could be deemed unusable or shut off, in conjunction with the aforementioned social credit score system.
In conclusion, crypto miners and AI companies are both pushing for infrastructure development. An increasing amount of data is being stored every day, whether by our own doing or by institutions. The demand for data center development is not just driven by AI.
Hot Take: AI is Overrated
Call me a hipster or a contrarian, and I may be wrong, but I’m not seeing the life changing borderline apocalyptic disruptions foretold by AI evangelists.
Here are my main issues with AI:
1) Unanimous Support: “Work with it or you will be left behind.”
The saying that, “If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking” gives me pause at the unanimous support for this technology. Don’t get me wrong, the allure of having a computer readily available to complete complex tasks competently, and in only a few short minutes, is an enticing value proposition. Personally, with anything where one viewpoint (Pro AI) is dominating the debate, then I think it’s worth considering the counterpoint.
I do think AI holds significant value when it comes to coding and programming. However, for us as CRE Professionals, this same level of value has yet to be seen. My own personal use has been moderate; I’m applying it to things I would do manually and saving nominal time. Whether this value will increase exponentially just as the internet did remains to be seen. The effects I am seeing are from Gen Z (1997–2012), who are starting to exhibit a lack of critical thinking skills as a result of habitually bringing problems to AI and waiting for it to tell you what to do.
I see parallels to my parents telling me that I needed to do math manually and not use a calculator. Where this comparison differs is that calculator usage didn’t degrade the mental capacity of its users, particularly if you understood what the calculator was doing for you. Within my own generation of millennials, there are some who are incapable of reading a physical map, as we have become overly reliant on GPS/cell phone usage. For example, I know several individuals who use their GPS to leave work and go home every day. These are the two places we should be able to get without much thought at all. In a similar way, many Gen Z adults can’t even read an analog watch. All of this is to show how knowledge can be lost by over-reliance on tools.
2) Circular Investments
The incestual circular investments, by Microsoft, Anthropic, Amazon, OpenAI and Nvidia, obfuscates the true economic impact of said investments. For example, let’s say that Nvidia invests in OpenAI, OpenAI then buys Nvidia chips for the same amount of money invested in it by Nvidia to run its system. In this hypothetical example, economic impact should be zero, as X dollars were spent and X dollars came back. However, investors at OpenAI and Nvidia looking at it from their respective silos are seeing what they think is organic revenue. All of the companies we are familiar with in tech are doing this. Bloomberg calls it “a virtuous flywheel or a capital-spending bubble where suppliers are helping finance the demand for their own products”.[6]
3) AI Graphical Processing Units (GPU) Life Cycle
We know commercial nonresidential property depreciates in a straight line at 39 years. AI GPUs have a shelf life that remains to be understood, given new AI models are replacing previous models at such a fast rate that there is no opportunity for depreciation before we’ve reset the cycle. Current projections are 3–7 years; CoreWeave rents GPUs to their clients on a 6-year depreciation schedule, Meta depreciates at 5.5 years, and Amazon at 5 years[7].
As we deal with tenant improvements in CRE deals, typically tenants want to amortize said improvements over a longer term. Yet millions of dollars are going into data center development. From the outside, it seems unsustainable to make these massive investments with equipment that will potentially be obsolete in a couple of years. It is alleged by people such as Michael Burry that AI companies are manipulating this depreciation “by extending the useful life of assets, thus artificially boosts earnings”.[8]
Furthermore, for chip makers such as Nvidia, “unsold inventory sitting in warehouses does get written off if it becomes unsellable”. For example, regulatory shocks have forced direct write-offs: Nvidia had to take a massive $5.5 billion charge to write off unsellable H20 chip inventory following stricter U.S. government export bans on shipping high-end semiconductors to China.[9] So all parties are incentivized to push these chips to last as long as possible.
4) Replacing Human Labor
In my opinion, it appears that AI founders are hyping up the tools to justify the massive investments they are making in technology. A recent Stanford study found that “there is little evidence that AI is causing significant job losses right now. Unemployment among workers in occupations most exposed to AI-driven disruption is rising, but not faster than those least exposed”[10]. In July, both Ford and IBM rehired workers who had been laid off due to AI automation. However, the automation done by AI had “quality issues”[11]. This goes to show that the value, at least at the moment, may not be all it’s hyped up to be.
However, as a hiring manager, I have seen firsthand that it’s a brave new world. People applying for jobs are applying to an AI filter that will either like your resume or not. Workday is currently being sued for allegedly “using an AI-powered candidate screening feature that unlawfully filtered out applicants based on race, age, and disability”[12]. A company called Eightfold.AI in California is being sued because “their tools allegedly scraped social media profiles, location data, internet activity, and tracking data far beyond what candidates submitted. Its AI-generated “Match Scores” ranked applicants zero to five. Lower-ranked candidates were filtered out before any human reviewed their application. Applicants were never told their data was being compiled, never given copies of the reports, and never offered the chance to dispute errors. These are protections the FCRA has required of consumer reporting agencies since 1970.”[13]
It is safe to say now is the hardest time to get a job.
Conclusion
Some level of groupthink is present with the bullishness of the potential AI revolution. Looking under the hood, there appears to be some potentially misleading practices with investing in each other, artificially creating the tide that raises all boats. The advancement of newer more advanced AI models leaves older GPU chips potentially obsolete, and new datacenters filled with obsolete tech. Finally, and most notably, we have not yet seen the replacement of white-collar workers by AI. I would assert that this needs to be the goal to justify the valuations of these companies are seeking.
Of course, it is entirely possible that I am saying the internet won’t change everything in its dial up infancy. Time will tell. Let me know your thoughts.
[1] https://cybernews.com/privacy/comcast-xfinity-shield-routers-motion-sensors/
[2] https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/the-road-to-digital-unfreedom-president-xis-surveillance-state/
[3] https://sccei.fsi.stanford.edu/china-briefs/assessing-chinas-national-model-social-credit-system
[4] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/sp/visualized-all-of-the-worlds-data/
[5] https://www.wsj.com/finance/currencies/trump-familys-new-crypto-bank-is-backed-by-abu-dhabi-sheikh-38579473
[6] https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2026-ai-circular-deals/
[7] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/14/ai-gpu-depreciation-coreweave-nvidia-michael-burry.html
[8] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/michael-burry-stirs-chip-depreciation-205512754.html
[9] https://observer.com/2025/05/nvidia-earnings-china-ai-chip/
[10] https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/policy-brief/what-really-happening-jobs-separating-ai-hype-reality
[11] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/01/employers-who-laid-off-workers-for-ai-are-reversing-their-decisions.html
[12] https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/news/technology/workday-ai-lawsuit-wake-up-call-hr
[13] https://www.joneswalker.com/en/insights/blogs/ai-law-blog/ai-hiring-under-fire-what-the-eightfold-lawsuit-means-for-every-employer-using-a.html?id=102mkh2