Heimstaden selected OpenAI in June 2025 to expand the use of AI across its residential real estate operations, aiming to support employees and redesign core processes across the property lifecycle. Company leaders describe the work as an effort to make buildings easier to operate while keeping people accountable for final decisions.
AI applied to letting and listings
The operator has integrated ChatGPT into multiple steps of the lettings process: pricing recommendations, virtually staged imagery, advertisement copy and market feedback. Heimstaden reports that in the Netherlands the cost of producing a virtually staged property image fell from about
c50 to less than
c0.10, a reduction of more than 99%, and estimates annual savings potential of
c130,000 in that market alone. Employees continue to review and approve AI outputs, according to Helge Krogsb f8l, Co-CEO at Heimstaden.
Nikolaj Brammer, Chief Digital Officer, said the company’s AI strategy rests on three pillars: training and tools for employees, a central transformation office with AI champions, and preparing property management systems and data models for AI integration. Letting was chosen as an initial end-to-end example where those pillars could be applied.
Data pipelines, Codex and internal builders
Heimstaden said some projects have been built by domain experts rather than traditional engineering teams. Julia Erlandsen, Environmental Sustainability Analyst, used Codex to discover, clean and standardise public datasets for environmental risk assessments. The work produced more than six million rows of data, assessed 20,112 assets and reduced an estimated delivery requirement from five people working for a year to two people working for two months, the company reported.
Adoption across the workforce accelerated after ChatGPT Enterprise launched in September 2025: Heimstaden reports 50% employee adoption within two to three months. A central AI transformation office maintains a library of use cases and enforces approved tools and data-security rules. Andreas Kalmar Lindquist, Manager AI First Team Heimstaden, said the organisation focuses on scaling practical uses while keeping responsibilities and data controls clear.
Heimstaden is rolling out a Procurement Intelligence Platform that combines workflow automation with OpenAI models via APIs, and is co-developing Amplio Estate to enable AI-driven workflows in core systems through MCP. Employees retain responsibility for approvals and commercial decisions as these tools are deployed.
Original source: OpenAI News