It’s 2026. Why are you still budgeting in spreadsheets?

TL;DR

The era of spreadsheet-driven CRE budgeting is ending. Purpose-built platforms with built-in AI are replacing manual processes, turning budgeting from a quarterly grind into a continuous, data-informed discipline. AppFolio’s 2026 benchmark report found that firms broadly adopting AI expect 31% portfolio growth this year, nearly triple the 12% anticipated by non-adopters. The message is clear: modernize now or risk losing ground you may not get back.

Spreadsheets had a good run. It’s over.

Let’s be fair. Spreadsheets got us here. For decades, Excel was the Swiss Army knife of CRE finance: flexible, familiar, and free (well, sort of). But the cracks have been showing for a while: version control nightmares, formula errors that go undetected for months, and the sheer impossibility of collaborating across teams without someone accidentally breaking a link.

The real issue isn’t that spreadsheets are bad tools. It’s that the demands of modern CRE budgeting have outgrown them. Portfolios are more complex. Stakeholders want faster answers. And in a world where AI can flag a variance the moment it appears, waiting for someone to manually spot it in a pivot table feels like a relic.

Purpose-built software (with AI baked in) is taking over

The biggest trend in CRE budgeting right now is the move to dedicated budgeting platforms. These are tools designed specifically for the way commercial real estate teams actually work.

Generic accounting software and homegrown spreadsheet systems don’t understand the nuances of our industry: CAM reconciliations, lease-driven revenue projections, capital expenditure planning, multi-property roll-ups. Purpose-built CRE budgeting tools handle all of this natively, so you don’t have to bend a general-purpose tool into something it was never meant to be.

What’s changed in the last year or two is that these platforms aren’t just digitizing the old process. The best ones embed AI and automation directly into the workflow: automated variance analysis that flags anomalies before your CFO does, predictive models that anticipate operating cost increases based on historical patterns and market data, and intelligent defaults that pre-populate line items based on your portfolio’s actual history rather than last year’s copy-paste.

This isn’t about replacing your finance team’s judgment. It’s about giving them better inputs so they can focus on strategy instead of data wrangling.

The gap between adopters and everyone else is real

This isn’t theoretical anymore. The numbers tell a clear story.

AppFolio’s 2026 Property Manager Benchmark Report, which surveyed 1,617 property management professionals, found that firms broadly adopting AI expect 31% portfolio growth this year. Firms that haven’t adopted? They’re projecting just 12%. That’s not a small difference. That’s a completely different trajectory.

Meanwhile, Deloitte’s 2026 Commercial Real Estate Outlook shows that the road isn’t smooth for everyone. Implementation challenges remain significant, with 27% of firms reporting technical or data issues as barriers to AI adoption. As CRE Daily noted in its coverage, AI adoption in real estate is facing real growing pains.

The takeaway isn’t that AI doesn’t work. It’s that AI without the right foundation doesn’t work. And in CRE budgeting, that foundation is clean, connected data.

The data foundation problem

Here’s where a lot of firms get stuck. AI is only as useful as the data underneath it, and for many CRE organizations, that data is a mess. Budgets live in spreadsheets. Actuals live in the accounting system. Lease data lives somewhere else entirely. Nothing talks to anything.

JLL’s survey reinforces this: more than 60% of CRE investors remain strategically, organizationally, and technically unprepared for AI. The technology is ready. The organizations, in many cases, are not.

This is why the platform shift matters so much. When your budgeting tool is purpose-built for CRE and connected to your property management and accounting systems, you finally have a clean data foundation. And once you have that, AI goes from a theoretical nice-to-have to something that actually delivers value every time you open the platform.

The firms that figure out the data piece first are the ones pulling ahead. Not because they have fancier technology, but because their technology has something useful to work with.

Collaboration changes when everyone sees the same numbers

The days of one person owning the budget in isolation are numbered. Today’s CRE organizations need property managers, asset managers, and finance teams all working from the same numbers, ideally in real time.

Cloud-based budgeting platforms make this possible without the version control chaos of emailing spreadsheets back and forth. When everyone is looking at the same live data, conversations shift from “Which version is right?” to “What should we do about this?”

Add AI to the mix and it gets more interesting. When the platform surfaces insights automatically, the whole team operates from the same set of facts and anomalies. Budget review meetings get shorter. Decisions get faster. And fewer things slip through the cracks because someone was looking at an outdated tab.

What this means for your next budget cycle

If you’re heading into your next budget season with the same tools and process you used five years ago, it’s worth asking some honest questions: How much time does your team spend on manual data entry and reconciliation? How often do errors slip through? How quickly can you produce a reforecast when conditions change?

The answers might tell you it’s time to explore what’s out there.

The good news is that making the switch doesn’t have to be a massive, disruptive project. The best CRE budgeting platforms are designed to meet teams where they are. They integrate with the property management and accounting systems you’re already using, so the transition feels more like an upgrade than an overhaul. And the AI capabilities that come with them aren’t a future roadmap promise. They’re working today, on real portfolios, producing real results.

The CRE industry is catching up to what other sectors figured out years ago: the right technology doesn’t just save time. It changes the quality of your decisions. And in this market, that’s an edge worth having.

To learn how Kardin helps CRE teams produce cleaner, more accurate budgets with less manual effort, request a demo →

Sources

1. JLL, “2025 Global Real Estate Technology Survey” (2025). Survey of 1,500+ senior CRE decision-makers across 16 markets.
2. AppFolio, “2026 Property Manager Benchmark Report” (February 2026). Survey of 1,617 U.S. property management professionals.
3. Deloitte, “2026 Commercial Real Estate Outlook” (2026).
4. CRE Daily, “AI Adoption in Real Estate Faces Growing Pains” (2025).