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Welcome to the CRE AI Studio newsletter. Your regular dose of AI news and tips on putting it to work in commercial real estate.
In Case You Missed It: the Claude Cohort for CRE Pros starts August 13. 6 live, practical training sessions across 6 weeks, helping you put Claude to work in CRE. Save your seat.
AI Platform Updates You Should Know About
Claude Cowork Can Now Learn a Skill From a Screen Recording | Anthropic added Record a Skill to Claude Cowork. Record your screen while you do a task and talk through it as you go, and Claude turns the demonstration into a reusable skill it can run again. It sits in the plus menu of the Claude desktop app and is available on Pro, Max, and Team plans.
AI Automation Platform Relay.app Is Shutting Down | Relay.app, an AI-native workflow automation tool, told users on July 16 that it is winding down: free accounts stop working August 15 and paid accounts September 14, 2026. New signups and upgrades are already off, and users can export their workflows, run history, and tables now. Note: The Relay App was a fan favorite in CRE AI Studio. We’re sad to see it go, but we’re excited to see what’s next for the Relay App team.
Noda Launches Agentic AI for Building Operations | The D.C. startup launched what it calls the first agentic AI for building operations, running autonomously to find, fix, and verify issues. Across a 1,200-building, 350-million-square-foot portfolio, Noda claims it eliminated 80% of manual workflows, cut issue-resolution time by 40%, and drove 0.5 to 2% NOI growth.
The Race for Real Estate Data Heats Up
RealPage Acquires Real Estate Data Platform Cherre | RealPage acquired Cherre, an institutional real estate data platform that unifies more than 4 billion entities and $4 trillion in real assets, for undisclosed terms. Cherre keeps its brand and co-founder L.D. Salmanson moves from CEO to senior vice president.
Green Street Acquires Self-Storage Data Firm StorTrack | Green Street acquired StorTrack, a self-storage market-intelligence provider founded in 2014, for undisclosed terms. StorTrack supplies unit-level pricing, supply, and development data, which Green Street is folding into its research platform. It is the second CRE-data acquisition in the same week, alongside RealPage/Cherre.
A Pause on Data Center Momentum
New York Becomes First State to Pause New Data Centers | Governor Hochul signed Executive Order No. 62, a moratorium of up to one year on new hyperscale data centers that consume 50 megawatts or more, pausing state environmental permits while New York builds a new regulatory framework. It is the nation's first statewide data center moratorium.
AI Internet Browsing Gets More Complicated
1Password Now Lets Claude Log In Without Seeing Your Passwords | 1Password released 1Password for Claude, a browser integration that lets Claude use your saved credentials to sign in to sites without the password or the MFA code ever reaching the model, its context, or Anthropic's systems. Access is scoped to the specific items you approve for that session, and the rest of the vault stays locked while the agent has the browser. Available on Mac, connected from the Connectors section in Claude Desktop.
Meanwhile, a Popular CRE Data Provider Reminds Users AI Is Not Allowed | A major CRE data platform now displays a notice when it detects an AI browser extension on a session and blocks access, citing terms that prohibit automated agents. A reminder that AI can reach an enormous amount of data through extensions, connectors, and agents, but check your terms of service before you point AI in a direction it's not wanted.
The Relay App is shutting down. It was one of the simplest AI automation builders out there, and if you had anything running in it, you need somewhere to land. But the conversation is bigger than that. In a world of Claude skills, routines & saved tasks, there’s some workflows that no longer require an external automation platform.
This week's AI automation tutorial walks through the pros & cons of automation platform options, how to think about when you need an automation workflow vs a skill or a saved task/Claude routine, and a simple but powerful live automation build: Take incoming email leads and pipe them directly to your CRM. Hours of time saved and no code required.
The full decision framework is in Do You Need a Skill or an Automation?
Try this: the prompt behind the build.
The whole automation hinges on one AI step. Trigger it with an email label, it pulls out the needed intel, and returns structured output that gets shipped right to your CRM.
"You are my commercial real estate leads processor. From the email subject, body, and sender, extract: the first name, last name, email, phone number, title, and company of the person who inquired; the address of the property they asked about; and the square footage they are looking for."
Take it, test it, and customize it to work for you. The more complex your CRM, the more steps your workflow might need. Check out the latest tutorial to get started.
For a working example of a skill replacing an automation platform end to end, see Turn Claude Cowork Into Your Prospecting Pipeline.