From the laboratory to the business world: the REAL project brings artificial intelligence to real estate

On Monday, December 1, at 10:30 a.m., in the Aula Magna Storica of the Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa, the results of REAL will be presented – Real Estate Analytics Laboratory, the research project born from the collaboration between the Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa and Devitalia, a Pisa-based technology partner that has always been committed to the challenges of innovation, and developed jointly with researchers from the CNR, the University of Florence, and the IUAV University of Venice, as well as leading operators in the sector.

REAL was created with a clear objective: to innovate the real estate sector through the integration of heterogeneous data, analyzed using artificial intelligence algorithms.

Experiments conducted in the province of Pisa have highlighted the opportunity to leverage a wide range of information—prices, building characteristics, environmental and service quality, risks and opportunities related to the territory—by integrating it into models capable of describing the real estate market in an objective and verifiable manner. The ambition, on the one hand, is to understand how much a property is worth today, how its value could evolve over time, and what factors influence the dynamics of the territories; on the other hand, leveraging these methodologies to activate new digital services for industry operators and financial investors.

The REAL project has given rise to Dometria, a new start-up that will bring the results of the research to a national level. One of Dometria's most important projects is the creation of a digital platform that will allow professional operators in the real estate sector to share their databases confidentially, contributing to the creation of a unique ‘off-market’ information resource in Italy. Thanks to AI and the ability to cross-reference large amounts of heterogeneous data, Dometria will facilitate the matching of supply and qualified demand, reduce information asymmetries, and enable the correct valuation of even the most complex assets.

Statements

“Dometria integrates the scientific, heterogeneous, and complementary skills of the researchers involved in the REAL project,” says Roberto Barontini, professor of Corporate Finance at the Sant'Anna School of Pisa. . “It is an extremely rare case of collaboration between professors from different institutions—the Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies, the CNR, the University of Florence, and the IUAV in Venice—and operators in the real estate and telecommunications markets. It is an extremely challenging project that aims to develop transparent technologies that are useful to operators in the sector.”

“It is a project that starts in Pisa but speaks to the whole country: smarter cities, more efficient markets, and simpler relationships between those who offer and those who seek value in real estate,” emphasizes Alessandro Bianchi, real estate operator and partner at Dometria.

"Dometria is a concrete example of how innovation can arise from a dynamic territory like ours and become a value for the entire country. This project demonstrates the strength of collaboration between businesses and research and confirms Devitalia's desire to put its technological expertise—particularly through its advanced cloud services—at the service of solutions that improve markets, enable new digital models, and generate concrete opportunities for industry operators," adds Fabio Calabrese, CEO of Devitalia.

During the event, researchers and professors will recount the journey that transformed a research project into a platform capable of connecting science and the market, offering innovative tools to real estate operators.