Alexandre Grellier, chief executive and co-founder of Drooms, said real estate transactions are taking longer to complete as financing requirements become more demanding and investors request increasingly detailed documentation. He added that concerns around digital sovereignty are reshaping how firms deploy AI tools in Europe. Speaking to Real Asset Media’s Richard Betts, Grellier said Drooms’ research showed average deal durations had risen to around 368 days by the end of 2025, reflecting prolonged due diligence processes and tighter lending scrutiny. “We did research at the end of last year, which is interesting that the duration of the deals have been increasingly taking more time, and so we are at a high point of more than a year,” he said. He said some market participants initially viewed stabilising transaction timelines at the end of last year as a potential turning point for European real estate markets, with more deals entering preparation phases during the first quarter of 2026. However, many transactions still struggled to complete. “What we have seen since is that we had more activity, we had more deals which were in preparation, which were trying to get over the line, but this hasn’t materialised yet,” Grellier said. He linked the slowdown partly to the growing complexity of financing processes, with banks demanding significantly more information before committing capital. “Banks are requiring far more information,” he said. “What we hear from customers is that they get through multiple request rounds with regards to more information, more information, more information, so that globally deals are taking much longer.” Grellier added that data room volumes were increasing as investors and lenders requested deeper and more specialised documentation throughout the transaction process. “What I hear from the market is that the bid-ask gap is not yet closed,” he said. Alongside transaction trends, Grellier said digital sovereignty had become a major issue for European companies adopting AI technologies, particularly those handling sensitive customer data. “Digital sovereignty has become a major topic,” he said. “The question that you’re asking yourself is — where is my data going?” He said the issue extended beyond the physical location of servers and centred increasingly on ownership and control of the underlying platforms and AI models. “Digital sovereignty doesn’t just mean, where does the data lie? It’s really — who does the data belong to?” he said. “Because independently where you have your data, it’s like if the company who is holding your data is not a EU-based company, a EU-owned company, it’s pretty difficult to comply with GDPR.” Grellier said the rapid adoption of publicly available AI systems — including tools such as Claude, Gemini and ChatGPT — created additional compliance challenges because many companies lacked control over how underlying models processed and retained information. “And now if you turn it into AI, and this is where we are all really working hard on and getting really good solutions for our customers, it’s like, who is owning the models you are then using to analyse data, to analyse content?” he said. Drooms has therefore opted to run its own large language model infrastructure internally to maintain regulatory compliance and greater control over customer information. “We decided to have a large language model which is running on our servers, which is really compliant with all kinds of laws that you would need to be able to use these tools,” Grellier said. Despite growing adoption, he cautioned that AI still required careful oversight and could not yet replace human judgement in critical business decisions. “The impact of AI is undeniable,” he said. “Is AI reliable to a point where you would just base everything on AI? Definitely not. At least not yet.” He added that businesses still needed robust safeguards to minimise inaccurate or misleading outputs from AI systems. “You really need to put the system in place which is not hallucinating too much, which is providing the right results,” he said. Grellier said sentiment around transaction activity had improved earlier this year, but renewed geopolitical uncertainty and conflict had again weakened confidence. “A couple of weeks ago, I would have said yes,” he said when asked whether markets were improving. “Now, with the global economic situation in the world, with the wars that you see, I want to say that there is a lot of things, again, being postponed.” www.realassetinsight.com
