European residential real estate operator Heimstaden is using OpenAI tools to change how it manages thousands of homes. After leadership decided in June 2025 to accelerate its AI work and chose OpenAI, the company set two goals: empower employees and rethink core business processes. Heimstaden‘s longer-term ambition is to move toward increasingly self-operating buildings, where AI helps anticipate needs, coordinate work, and support decisions across the property lifecycle, with people still responsible for reviewing and approving decisions.

Heimstaden‘s letting process shows how AI now supports pricing, advertising, listing review, and market feedback. In the Netherlands, the cost of producing a virtually staged property image fell from about €50 to less than €0.10, a reduction of more than 99%; Heimstaden estimates annual savings potential of €130,000 in that market alone. Chief Digital Officer Nikolaj Brammer describes a three-pillar strategy: empower employees through training and tools, run a central transformation office with a network of AI champions for larger initiatives, and strengthen foundations by making property management systems and data models ready for AI. Letting uses all three pillars, but employees still review listings and make final decisions.

Some of the biggest changes came outside software teams. Julia Erlandsen, an environmental sustainability analyst without a software development background, used Codex to help discover, clean, and standardize scattered environmental risk data, build quality checks, and create repeatable processing pipelines. The result was 20,112 assets assessed, more than six million rows of useful data, and an estimated delivery requirement reduced from five people working for a year to two people working for two months. Heimstaden also avoided hiring external consultants, and what began as an analytical project is becoming a repeatable capability for climate-risk assessments, reporting, and investor decision-making.

Adoption was rapid after ChatGPT Enterprise launched in September 2025: half of employees were using it within two to three months. A central AI transformation office maintains a library of use cases, and employees use approved tools within data-security rules. Adoption has spread even to real estate caretakers, including some initially sceptical; in Norway, one caretaker used ChatGPT to assess a neglected apartment and draft a prioritised refurbishment plan.

Heimstaden is preparing for AI that works across systems and coordinates multi-step processes. Its Procurement Intelligence Platform, currently being rolled out, combines workflow automation with OpenAI models accessed through APIs. Designed to operate across Outlook, SharePoint, and Teams, it supports contract analysis, negotiation preparation, and contract lifecycle management, with employees retaining responsibility for commercial decisions. The longer-term roadmap includes Amplio Estate, a property management system co-developed to support AI-powered workflows through MCP. The goal is for employees to use AI like ChatGPT to retrieve property information and take action in core business systems with appropriate human oversight.

The company frames the effort around people: adoption and imagination are the bottlenecks, not technology; champions drive local change; and AI will not fix a broken process but can dramatically scale a good one. Heimstaden‘s vision is not buildings without people, but properties supported by increasingly intelligent systems that improve employee decision-making and customer outcomes.