Matias and Eglae Recchia are tech-savvy brother and sister. Immersed in artificial intelligence, they are both discovering, from different ends of the business, what this technology can do to make the world of commercial real estate more efficient and more impactful. Matias, the founder and CEO of Keyway, is deploying AI to bring speed, transparency and extra dollops of smartness to real estate transactions. Eglae, an MIT grad who worked for Goldman Sachs and was Berkadia’s chief product officer, is a recognized technology expert in CRE and is now expanding her focus to advise clients in technology and investments across the industry.
Coming to real estate and artificial intelligence from varied but parallel places — Matias heads a startup and focuses on technology, while Eglae is on the institutional side and puts her attention into finance — the brainy siblings agree that real estate is ripe for disruption. They represent a new generation of innovators who blend deep domain expertise with digital innovation.
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Interviewed together for Commercial Observer, Matias and Eglae explain how they work and the growing role that artificial intelligence plays in each of their worlds.
Commercial Observer: Matias and Eglae, you work independently from one another, but you are both entrenched in the world of AI and explore the ways in which businesses can use it. How do you each benefit from one another’s perspective?
Matias: We’re a little bit of each other’s sounding board. AI is already a niche industry, and for real estate it is very niche. But we just happen to be early in this market that is evolving in terms of bringing in large corporations. Eglae has the perspective of thinking about internal AI strategy, what to build, and what to license. I’m building tools that large companies can license in order to automate workflows and be faster while spending less money on third-party contracts.
Eglae: Matias and I do a lot of brainstorming on how to take the [real estate] industry forward with AI. Matias and I lean on each other to better understand the value as well as the adoption of AI, and then to hopefully change the industry for the better.
Family dinners must be interesting.
Eglae: They are! Our family dinners quickly become AI In Real Estate dinners.
Speaking of which, Keyway launched in 2020. That would have been prior to the big boom in artificial intelligence that we are currently experiencing. Matias, what was the original plan with Keyway?
Matias: Initially, we used machine learning and data science to transact properties. We acquired around $400 million in assets with the thesis of leveraging technology to find mispriced opportunities and acquire them with investors. Then we pivoted to simply licensing the software. Once AI started rising, we saw a big opportunity for creating a new type of SAAS company for real estate.
How do you see AI impacting real estate right now?
Matias: Eglae and I were talking about this the other day. We see something very positive with the growth of AI that may sound a little counterintuitive.
Can you explain?
Matias: Used correctly, artificial intelligence is taking real estate back to its roots. A great real estate person will be good with people. A skilled property manager builds great relationships with tenants. But spreadsheets do not bring out the best in them. AI allows them to spend more time doing the people things — the very things that AI cannot do — while AI does all the back-office work, which used to be very labor intensive.
Eglae: It gives time back to the individuals. That is invaluable in our business. Suddenly you have the time to meet with clients and, armed with information gleaned from AI, bring insights and real solutions to their problems. You’re doing much of the same work that you used to do, but now you are seven steps ahead right from the start.
Eglae, can you explain how that gets leveraged into a business advantage for the entities that bring you on?
Eglae: Instead of slowly building toward having the main conversation with your client — whether you are discussing acquisitions or sales or whatever else — you come in with an idea, a process, a plan, straight away. You turn to execution much faster. It’s automation on steroids.
Keyway has gone from running software for clients to licensing it to them. How has that changed things?
Matias: It allows them to craft software to their specific needs. AI solutions are much easier and cheaper to customize [than regular software].
And what is the upshot of that?
Absolutely. Take something as fundamental—and time-consuming—as document management. One of our clients, a senior asset manager overseeing a multifamily portfolio, was spending dozens of hours each month manually reviewing leases and service contracts just to track expirations, rent bumps, and compliance clauses.
With Keydocs, our AI-powered document tool, she uploaded 700+ documents in one go. The system extracted key terms—like escalation schedules, termination rights, and CAM charges—and fed them directly into her internal trackers. What used to take weeks of junior analyst time was reduced to a few hours.
She told us, “Now I spend my time making portfolio decisions—not reading PDFs.”
In concrete terms, it saved her team about 40 hours a month and made their reporting and negotiations significantly faster and more accurate. For firms managing complex portfolios, that kind of operational leverage is a game changer.
Your AI solutions also help with data fragmentation. Can you explain that?
Eglae: AI allows you to have a bunch of dispersed data sources suddenly talking to each other. You get insights from the data and can avoid paying people a ton of money and having them spend a lot of time in analyzing many documents manually while trying to interpret them.
Matias: Real estate data is notoriously fragmented—ownership records, loan terms, leasing data, tenant sentiment—they all live in separate systems and formats. Our AI connects those dots.
We pull from dozens of sources—public records, servicer reports, leases, even news—and structure it into a single, searchable view. That allows asset managers and investors to quickly answer complex questions like: Which owners are in distress? What assets do they hold? What debt is tied to those assets?
What used to take weeks of manual research can now be done in minutes, unlocking faster, more informed decisions.
And I’m guessing that the programming done by Keyway makes all the difference as opposed to, say, using Chat GPT or something off the shelf or free.
Eglae: That’s right. To do well in our different spaces, Matias and I give the AI guardrails. We don’t just feed it data; we teach it how to think like a real estate professional. That means knowing when to apply Fannie Mae’s 2025 underwriting guidelines, not 2022’s. Or pulling rent roll trends from the last six months—because that’s what actually drives valuation today, not data from two years ago.
This kind of contextual intelligence only comes from industry-specific training and a clear decision framework. It’s the difference between generic answers and investment-grade insights.
It’s interesting that with your very different backgrounds and, obviously, with a Chinese wall between both of you, you still managed to influence and inspire one another to expand the use of AI in real estate. Can you share your goals for the future?
Eglae: We’re trying to influence the industry from two different aspects: enabling by giving better tools to individuals as well as companies. Then we hope that both of those sides propel the industry forward for better adoption, allowing for better data and insights. Commercial real estate has extremely rich data, and we need to materialize that data into insights.
Matias: I think our combined hope is that with AI we’ll see the market become a little more liquid regardless of the external circumstances. We’re pushing toward a world where you have a lot of data on all aspects of all the buildings. We want to benefit everybody — the brokers, the service providers, the developers — by reducing friction and increasing transactions that can help everyone, no matter which side of the market they happen to be on.