Real estate brokerage Douglas Elliman bets AI can cut costs, create new revenue

Douglas Elliman Inc. is betting that artificial intelligence can help it operate with fewer employees — and that the luxury brokerage’s internal real estate data can become a business of its own.

The Miami-based company, which owns Manhattan-based Douglas Elliman Realty, is working with Google Cloud to implement AI tools and workflows aimed at increasing productivity and reducing staffing needs in back-office roles such as accounting, marketing and compliance, CEO Michael Liebowitz said.

At the same time, the publicly traded company is developing Elius, a subscription data business that would sell real estate agents access to Douglas Elliman’s residential market information and listings. Together, the initiatives represent a two-part strategy to cut operating costs and create a new source of revenue.

"In order to really take your company to the next level, you’ve got to partner up with one of the major AI businesses, and we met with a lot of them," Liebowitz said.

Residential brokerages nationwide have increasingly turned to AI tools to reduce costs and automate work previously handled by employees, industry observers said. Whether those savings will lower the fees consumers pay is less certain.

Liebowitz said AI would allow Elliman to reduce staffing in parts of the business, including its commission department. He did not say how many jobs would be eliminated, left vacant or otherwise affected. Nor did he say how many employees currently work in the departments he identified.

Financial filings for 2025 show the company had approximately 580 employees, including 180 employees at the firm’s Manhattan headquarters, and 5,800 independent contracted agents. On Long Island, Douglas Elliman has 1,339 agents, including 445 agents in the Hamptons and on the North Fork, a company spokesperson said.

The company has also made a board appointment tied to its new technology push.

On July 10, the company’s board of directors appointed Sanghyun Lee as a director. Lee serves as head of Asia-Pacific global affairs at OpenAI, and worked in senior government affairs and public policy roles at Google until March, according to Elliman’s SEC filings.

A company spokesperson said Elliman will use Google AI capabilities across existing tools including Gemini, Google Cloud and Google Workspace. The spokesperson described the initiative as a partnership in which Google would work with Elliman to build customized software for the real estate company.

Liebowitz said the company expects the initiative to produce cost savings over a three-year period.

Elliman’s shares, which began trading publicly in late 2021, were down more than 38% from a year earlier and traded at $1.76 on July 27, according to the New York Stock Exchange.

The company reported first-quarter revenue of $214.3 million, down from $253.4 million in revenue during the same quarter last year, according to results released in May. The company reported a $16.3 million net loss for the quarter.

For the year ended Dec. 31, 2025, corporate revenue was $1.0 billion, compared to $995.6 million the year earlier, according to financial filings. Net income for 2025 was $15.2 million, compared to a net loss of $76.3 million in 2024. 

Turning real estate data into revenue

Beyond cost-cutting, Elliman is trying to create a new revenue stream from its data.

Elliman is developing Elius, an online real estate information portal that would offer agents, homebuyers and sellers access to the brokerage’s proprietary pricing data, transaction history and development pipeline updates for a subscription fee, the company said.

A spokesperson for Elliman said the goal is to change how real estate decisions are made by offering a service that "can identify patterns earlier, anticipate demand, match people and properties more intelligently, and inform pricing."

No release date for Elius has been set, but Liebowitz said products from the new business could reach the market as soon as late 2027.

"We’re very ambitious," he said.

How AI is changing real estate work

A survey of 225 real estate professionals who are members of the National Association of Realtors found that 92% of respondents said they used AI in their business or planned to do so, according to a 2026 report from Realtors Property Resource. The survey measured respondents’ self-reported behavior and preferences.

"I don’t know that it necessarily means savings for the consumer," Jack Miller, president and CEO of T3 Sixty, an Austin, Texas-based residential real estate consulting and research firm, said of the industry’s adoption of AI.

Miller said residential brokerages have used AI tools for four or five years to lower the internal cost of processing transactions.

"We’re really talking about internal expenses. That does not necessarily translate to what the consumer is charged for the transaction because that’s between the agent and their client," he said.

Andrew Spieler, a professor of finance at Hofstra University’s Frank G. Zarb School of Business, said brokerages, like businesses in other industries, are unlikely to pass savings on to consumers at a time of elevated costs.

"Inflation means prices go up, but prices are not coming down" just because costs might, he said.

Spieler said back-office positions have been a target for AI automation because the work is often repetitive, done on a computer and performed in a prescribed way.

"It sounds like what everyone else is doing: using AI to cut costs internally," Spieler said. "It’s an arms race."

Time-saver for solo agents 

The technology is also changing the work of individual agents.

Massapequa resident Dennis Saglam, a Douglas Elliman agent, said he has used generative AI tools for the past several years for tasks ranging from drafting listings to conducting market analysis.

As an independent agent, "you are wearing a lot of hats at all moments," Saglam said.

AI has "really empowered solo agents to buy back their time in a sense, and get rid of the repetitive tasks that aren’t directly correlated with making money but are essential to running a business," he said.

His experience with AI prompted him in 2023 to launch Listingcopy.ai, an online subscription platform that allows agents to enter property information and quickly generate property listings.

Richard Murdocco, an adjunct professor at Stony Brook University who studies public policy and housing issues on Long Island, said AI can help agents follow anti-discrimination rules and multiple listing service guidelines that apply to home listings.

But Murdocco said generative AI tools can hallucinate or fabricate information, so agents have to be diligent about checking the real estate analysis the tools produce.

"The models are only as good as what’s fed into them," he said. "There should be a human behind it to verify."

Saglam said Douglas Elliman’s corporate investment in AI makes sense given what he has seen in the industry.

"Being able to adapt to a very turbulent time in real estate and a rapidly changing environment has never been more important than it is today," he said. "The brokerages that don’t adapt in this way are going to be left behind."