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Nimbus co-founder Paul Davis on the need to balance innovation with caution

27/11/2025

Artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer a futuristic idea for property professionals; it is fast becoming an everyday tool that helps the industry see the market more clearly, move faster and make better decisions.

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There is a significant opportunity in combining traditional property datasets with AI-driven context. Our company already holds extensive structured information, including ownership records, comparables, building footprints, valuations and transaction histories.

For us, one of AI’s roles is to enrich what is already known, helping professionals to interpret the softer or more nuanced factors that shape market performance. For example, this can mean pairing established regression models with insights generated from large language models, allowing us to connect factual data with broader market commentary, planning activity and contextual signals.

One simple way we are using AI is to feed known information into our system and ask it to enrich that data, to help understand the nuances around specific points. The result is a sharper, more segmented picture of the market.

Previously, analysts might report market movements as a single trend line, assuming the average revealed the full story of the emerging trends. We now use AI to show us how this can mask important distinctions. It helps us see whether the market is moving as a whole or whether certain subsectors are outperforming others – for example, is prime space performing differently from secondary or tertiary stock? – because sometimes the average hides what really matters. By identifying multiple concurrent trend lines rather than one blended view, AI delivers far more accurate forecasting and clarity across asset classes.

 

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Our recently released Complete Comparable Tool is designed to provide reliable comparables in property valuations and investment decisions by drawing on contributed and researched data from 2,000 data sources, including the Land Registry, the Valuation Office Agency, planning applications, live listings and more. It uses AI-driven detection to enable the sector to identify market movements and potential transactions ahead of the open market, cross-referencing data sources to provide a view of all UK assets.

I must emphasise, however, that AI’s potential must be balanced with a realistic assessment of its risks. AI can hallucinate. It can come up with things that sound credible and that are presented confidently, but that are not factually correct. There is danger in assuming it is always right.

 

Controlled use

To mitigate this, AI output should always be checked against verified datasets, ensuring that insights drawn from large language models are grounded in real, reliable information and can be traced back to credible sources. To this end, our company uses AI to make our data richer and our decisions smarter, not to replace the solid information that underpins everything we do.

As always, there has to be clarity around risk in order to drive reliable innovation. Rather than pushing AI to do everything, we focus on where we can meaningfully strengthen reliability, transparency and understanding of the importance of reliance on accurate information for professionals.

A further use of AI is using it to analyse conversations, feedback and support interactions at scale, which in turn raises themes to us that would be impossible to pick up manually. Instead of anecdotal feedback, we can now collate user interactions to understand what customers are truly asking for and this helps us ensure that what we are building is in line with what our customers want.

AI’s role in real estate intelligence is expanding rapidly and is set to continue on this path. If one can leverage the significant benefits of AI while being mindful of its red flags and dealing with them, the opportunity is enormous. Our aim is to get ahead by using AI where it adds genuine value, while also protecting our customers from its frailties.

In a sector where clarity and trust are essential, a balance of innovation and caution is likely to define the next phase of proptech.

 

Paul Davis is co-founder and co-chief executive of Nimbus

 


 

This article originally appeared on Property Week - 26th November 2025

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