A few weeks ago I had coffee with a friend of mine who is a partner at a Toronto-based enterprise software company called Polyform Labs. Their products are geared towards the commercial real estate industry and, since I’m a big proponent of introducing more technology into the real estate space, I thought I would share a little bit about them with you all today.
The first of their 4 main products is called Lingo, which is a machine learning tool that helps companies quickly review legal documents and contracts. In the case of commercial real estate firms, the most obvious use case is leases. These documents are often hundreds of pages long and, if you have a big portfolio of properties, I’m sure you can imagine how quickly these pages add up.
What’s neat about Lingo is that you basically upload a lease and then the tool interprets and summarizes all of the clauses for you. It then tells you where you’re potentially exposed and where your risk factors are. And if by chance it gets it wrong, you can correct it and the system will actually get smarter – hence the machine learning part.