Perhaps the most interesting development in the real estate industry right now is the one you can see the least. No spectacular architecture, no new skyscraper, no futuristic building. Instead, algorithms are making decisions in the background before anyone even steps inside a property. AI has long since become more than the new buzzword at every real estate conference. According to the current “Emerging Trends in Real Estate Europe 2026” study by PwC and the Urban Land Institute, 75 percent of European real estate executives now use AI or GenAI in their business — compared with 51 percent the previous year. The interesting question is therefore no longer whether AI is arriving in real estate. It has already arrived.

Gen Z, the most digital generation in history, buys vinyl, shoots on analogue film — and drives thirty-year-old cars with manual transmissions. This isn't nostalgia. It's a statement. There is a generation that grew up with the internet before it could walk. A generation that had its first social interaction on a platform before it even knew what a platform was. A generation that, by the age of eighteen, had accumulated more digital experience than most people do in an entire lifetime. And this very generation — the most connected, fastest, and most algorithmically shaped generation there has ever been — is now turning around. Not away from technology, but toward something it cannot find there: the physical. The tactile. The real. Vinyl.

A few days ago, I saw an Instagram Story that stayed with me longer than it probably should have. Someone was talking about how influencers sometimes forget that despite millions of followers, luxury trips, brand deals, and all the beautiful things we see on Instagram, at the end of the day, they are still one thing: human. At first, I thought: Yes. Obviously. And then I thought: Actually, that might be exactly the problem right now.