The Short Version

• Retail real estate owners are building increasingly sophisticated proptech stacks that connect property management, leasing, finance, analytics and AI-driven operations.
• Tech-stack complexity scales with portfolio size, as larger owners and landlords continuously refine digital infrastructure to improve efficiency, performance and decisionmaking.
• Integrated data shapes leasing strategy, tenant mix, customer experience and net operating income.
• Artificial intelligence, including emerging agentic AI in commercial real estate, is accelerating automation and unlocking deeper operational and consumer insights.

From Slow Adopter to Proptech Power User

The commercial real estate industry, including retail real estate, has officially memory-holed its reputation as a sluggish adopter of technology. A decade ago, software firms emerged to build solutions for the space, and now landlords and property managers reference their “tech stacks” without blinking. 

The tools in retail real estate tech stacks range from software for accounting, work order fulfillment and other administrative tasks to more exotic solutions like personalized marketing campaigns based on cameras and beacons that follow consumers in shopping centers. A primary goal of the tech stack, real estate professionals say, is to harness and parse data to inform and improve decision-making processes.

What Typically Lives in a Retail Proptech Stack?

Most retail landlords’ tech stacks blend core operating platforms and newer tools like:

• property management platforms from providers like MRI Real Estate Software and Yardi
• customer relationship management, or CRM, systems like Salesforce
• accounting and enterprise resource planning, or ERP, software like Oracle’s JD Edwards
• content management systems, or CMS, like Mall Maverick
• visualization and analytics platforms like Datex Property Solutions
• smart-parking and dynamic-pricing solutions like AirGarage
• smart cameras and foot-traffic analytics tools
• artificial intelligence-powered automation and decision-support software

Tech Stack Sophistication Depends on Owner Size

Tech stack sizes depend on the size and sophistication of property owners, said Evan Walke, a managing director and national retail lead of asset services for Cushman & Wakefield. Mom-and-pop investors that have relied on spreadsheets to track operations may be unaware of the time and cost savings provided by solutions from vendors like Altus Group, Yardi and MRI, he added. Meanwhile, larger and more sophisticated retail center owners that tend to have robust tech stacks still want to ensure their tools are delivering optimal value. “Proptech has come a long way, and it continues to advance,” Walke observed. “We’re constantly vetting new technologies because it’s important to make recommendations that make sense for each particular retail asset owner.”

Customizing the Stack: Building Around the Core

Brixmor’s tech stack numbers around 100 products spanning leasing, marketing, legal, property management, security, maintenance and other operational tools, said chief information officer Helane Stein. The REIT uses Salesforce to compile and visualize tenant sales, lease data and other performance measures, all of which drives marketing and leasing across its 63 million-square-foot portfolio. She described the CRM and similar systems as Lego-like building blocks: foundations the company then customizes with additional tools. Brixmor also uses Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne suite of applications for accounting and back-office reporting and adds other solutions that integrate with those.

“Owners and retailers have access to many of the same tools, but today, it’s about who can use the information from those tools in the best or most relevant ways and who can access it faster,” Stein added. “We have portfolio reviews where our leasing people can get information about current or prospective tenants faster than [the tenants] can get the information themselves.”

Artificial Intelligence and the Rise of Agentic AI

AI is accelerating landlords’ ability to make timely decisions, Stein and other said. Brixmor is exploring agentic AI, in which bots with different specialties automatically share data with each other and make decisions autonomously based on specific goals. That’s quicker than humans feeding information to various agents manually. “We’ll still need human controls and humans making final decisions, but agentic AI opens up full end-to-end automation capabilities,” Stein said.

MORE FROM C+CT: The Next Phase of Proptech: Agentic AI Takes Hold in 2026

Proptech That Impacts Revenue

Vestar, which owns more than 30 million square feet of retail and mixed-use in the U.S., uses a host of solutions to help its departments and employees perform their roles, said vice president of finance and development Kean Thomas, who also oversees accounting and IT. Vestar employs shopper-facing technology, too. It uses AirGarage, for example, to automate and manage a parking garage in The Gateway, a mixed-use district that includes more than 325,000 square feet of retail and entertainment space next to the Delta Center arena in downtown Salt Lake City. AirGarage combines license plate-reading cameras and AI to enable dynamic pricing and process payments. “That’s the kind of proptech that really moves the needle,” Thomas said. “It can boost revenue for owners and improve the customer parking experience.”

Platform Consolidation Versus Best-in-Class Tools

Vestar has used MRI for accounting and operations for several years but is adding Yardi to an expanding portion of its portfolio, as well, Thomas said. He noted that the two are approaching the AI revolution in different ways, and thus they likely will advance at different paces and offer different innovations going forward. “We’re keeping a close eye on changes in the proptech industry,” Thomas remarked. “We prioritize reliability, but at the same time, we don’t want to put our eggs in one basket or stop thinking about the next innovation.”

Enhancing Visualization: Turning Data Into Insight

Vestar links its MRI data to Datex Property Solutions systems, which among other services helps landlords visualize tenant health, rent collections, occupancy and other metrics. NewMark Merrill Cos. similarly integrates its data into Datex, including information related to customer preferences and behaviors gathered at its roughly 13 million square feet of shopping centers. NewMark Merrill’s proptech fund affiliate, BrightStreet Ventures, is an investor in Datex. Newmark Merrill also collects cellphone information from the Wi-Fi networks at its properties and notes shopper demographic data and moods with MRI OnLocation smart cameras, said NewMark Merrill president and CEO Sandy Sigal. It also gauges shopper experiences via sentiment data that Merchant Centric aggregates from Google, Facebook, Yelp and other review sites.

Personalization Comes to Physical Retail

NewMark Merrill uses those tools and the resulting data to deliver digital coupons and other incentives to shoppers — pairing restaurant discounts and movie tickets on slower weekday nights, for example — and to inform tenant mixes that maximize dwell times and rent revenue. Sigal also anticipates that AI will drive further insights into the data in the future.

MORE FROM C+CT: Shopping Centers Adopt E-Commerce-Style Personalization To Target Shoppers

“The data continues to evolve and get better, but there can be too much of it to keep track of,” said Sigal, whose brother, Mark Sigal, co-founded Datex. “But when we put all the data in Datex and then put AI over the top of it, AI starts making connections and drawing conclusions that aren’t immediately apparent from human analysis.”