Ones To Watch: Innovators In Commercial Real Estate: Jared Rehberg, Besen Partners

Industry Outlook:

I think the biggest opportunity is in how the industry uses its own data. CRE generates enormous amounts of information, including leases, operating costs, foot traffic, energy usage, and tenant feedback, but much of it still sits in PDFs, spreadsheets, and disconnected systems. Firms that can pull that together and actually analyze it will make better decisions on everything from pricing a lease to deciding which buildings to reposition or sell. AI makes this much more achievable now, because it can extract and organize information from documents that used to require manual review.

Innovation in Action:

The biggest difference for me has been technology changing where I spend my time. A lot of work that used to eat up hours, like pulling comps, building first drafts of underwriting models, summarizing leases, or cleaning up market data, can now be done much faster with better data platforms and AI tools. That doesn’t replace judgment, but it frees me up to focus on the parts that actually move a deal or a client relationship forward: stress-testing assumptions, understanding the tenant’s real needs, and spending more time talking to people rather than formatting spreadsheets.