Week 1: Starting My Project

My senior project started this week, and I wanted to spend the first few days really getting familiar with what I’m actually doing. My project focuses on using AI to help analyze real estate investment opportunities, specifically in low-income neighborhoods. I’m working with a real estate office where I’ll be meeting a few times a week with experienced professionals to learn the strategies they currently use and work with real data.

At the beginning of the week I spent time thinking about how opportunity zones are evaluated. Things like location, price trends, demand, and timing all play a major role and can completely change the value of an investment. I also started thinking about how AI could speed up that process by analyzing large amounts of data much faster than a person could, especially when comparing multiple areas at once.

One thing my on-site mentor emphasized, and challenged me on, was just how much data is involved in real estate. It’s not just about one property, but entire neighborhoods, different patterns, and long-term trends. That made me realize that I need to stay focused on specific zones so I don’t get overwhelmed.

Overall, I think I had a strong start. I have a clear vision of what I want to do, which is to use ChatGPT in a targeted way by developing and testing different prompts to identify potential opportunity zones. Over the next few weeks, I want to start working more directly with the data and begin running tests to see which AI prompts are actually effective.