How Agentic AI is Changing Office Real Estate Brokerage
Office space brokerage, particularly for large multinational companies, is changing.
With less certainty around headcount, less certainty around long-term business strategy, and faster product cycles driven by AI, companies’ real estate portfolios are more fragmented, generally on shorter agreements, and more reliant on flexible workspace.
For brokers, that means a larger number of smaller office requirements, that change more often. Speak to almost any broker and they’ll tell you how much time these smaller deals can take.
This creates an uncomfortable reality for the economics of office real estate brokerage:
If more time is being spent on a larger volume of smaller deals, with shorter term lengths, the economics start to fall apart.
Which leads us to ask what can be done about it?
It seems that 2026 is the year agentic AI has moved from being difficult to deploy, insecure, and hard to control, to genuinely useful assistants that can automate a significant share of manual, low-skill work.
There’s a meaningful prospect of this freeing up time for the broker to focus on the high-value, strategic side of the job, and making the economics of servicing all of a client’s needs viable.
How brokerage for small deals works today.
It’s still the case today that flexible workspace brokerage depends fully on human coordination to move deals forward.
A client briefs a broker. The broker reaches out to workspace providers with their requirements.
The broker needs to understand the inventory of a local market, which often requires a fair amount of googling, and information gathering (with varying end results).
Quotes then come back in different formats, on different timelines, with different levels of detail.
Someone sends multiple emails for missing information.
Someone translates everything that has come back into something presentable.
Someone compares options manually.
Then the requirement changes, and the whole process starts all over again.
It’s an incredibly manual, and an incredibly time-consuming process.
We’ve heard numerous stories from brokers of small requirements literally taking months of time and attention, with potentially only hundreds of dollars in fees generated.
For large multinational clients, they will receive different levels of service, different quality of data with different response times, on completely different presentations - from the same broker depending on where in the world they use them.
It’s all a bit of a mess.
Today, we’re excited to say this full process can now be almost entirely automated.
What does Desana’s Agentic Broker platform do?
Over the past 12 months, we’ve worked with our largest clients and their brokerage teams to understand the challenges in the long tail of their real estate portfolios.
To solve their problem, we had to go much deeper than just quote collection automation, having to think more broadly about the full workflow.
What we’ve built is a fully end-to-end broker-to-client platform that:
automates sourcing and presenting options from the global flexible workspace market for the broker
streamlines procurement, portfolio management, and measurement of flexible workspace for the global client.
From the broker’s perspective, here’s what that looks like:
Source
View the global flexible workspace market in a single place.
Single-click “request a quote with Agent” against a defined client requirement.
The agent fully automates email correspondence, like a human assistant, to collect all relevant information on the broker’s behalf, with the broker cc’d on the email thread.
It will follow up with providers automatically to collect quotes and missing details.
The broker can interject in the email if needed; the agent will keep the context and continue to complete the task.
Present
The agent will automatically extract quote information from emails and attachments into a standard format for the broker to evaluate
The broker can then share all quotes in a normalised format within an interactive quote page where they can see a map, images, floor plans, pricing, and other information, create favourites - and more.
Procure
Present direct pricing from the workspace, alongside Desana’s Fast Track MSA - providing an option to significantly accelerate the procurement process for the client.
Manage
Maintain centralized oversight of every client’s portfolio (both for facilitated and non-facilitated transactions).
Track renewals, key dates, and terms across all of their flexible workspace portfolios.
Access data-driven insights that power better client advisory and more consultative decisions.
…it goes much further than automation.
The opportunity for real estate brokerage:
This new platform offers a significant opportunity to:
spend less time on mundane, repetitive tasks
be more data-driven in client portfolio decision-making
stay ahead of upcoming portfolio events
move faster through every step of the process for every stakeholder.
For brokers that adopt early and implement well, that should mean faster service delivery, better economics, better client experience, and more capacity to handle fragmented client portfolio demand at scale - an important consideration for modern brokerages servicing global clients in the age of AI.
For firms that do not, the risk is not immediate collapse. It is slow erosion of market share - just like every other technology paradigm shift.
Find out more about Desana’s Agentic Broker Platform at: desana.io/broker-platform