AI Product Manager - Real Estate Development & Finance

Job Summary:

The AI Product Manager, Real-Estate Development & Development Finance owns the AI products that help a global real-estate business deliver approved projects on budget and keep cash flowing. The role covers the journey from project approval to handover: development management, procurement and contracts, development budgets, payments, funding, sales collections and customer handover.

This is a transactional, control-sensitive role. The products it builds handle invoices, payment certificates, budget changes, loan draw-downs and buyer payments every day.

Key Responsibilities:

Product strategy:

• Own the product vision, roadmap and backlog for AI in development management and development finance.
• Prioritise opportunities by cash and cost impact, transaction volume, control risk and data readiness.
• Assess build, buy and partner options across proptech, finance-automation and project-management vendors.

Development management:

• Define AI agents that track each project against its approved business case and flag drift in cost, time, sales or returns.
• Specify tools for permits and authority approvals, consultant appointments and development programme tracking.
• Define procurement and contract agents: tender packages, bid comparison, contract award, and the commercial assessment of variations and claims.

Budgets, cost and payments:

• Specify agents that maintain development budgets and forecast cost-to-complete from commitments, actuals and site progress.
• Define checks on contractor invoices and payment certificates against contract terms, measured progress, retention and advance recovery.
• Cover budget transfers, contingency use and change-order approvals within delegated limits.
• Design straight-through handling for routine, fully matched items, with every exception routed to a person.

Funding and cash flow:

• Define agents for rolling project and portfolio cash-flow forecasts.
• Cover construction finance: draw-down requests, covenant monitoring and lender reporting.
• Support escrow and project-account controls where local rules require them for off-plan sales.

Sales, collections and handover:

• Define agents that reconcile buyer payments to payment plans and manage overdue collections.
• Specify checks on sales contracts and bookings, and tools for snagging, handover and defect claims.

Controls and governance:

• Design every product's controls with Finance and Internal Audit before go-live: segregation of duties, approval limits and audit trails.
• Build in fraud checks such as duplicate-invoice detection and alerts on supplier bank-detail changes.
• Keep buyer and financial data compliant with data-protection, consumer-protection and real-estate sales laws in each market.

Qualifications & Experience:

Essential:

• Bachelor's degree in Civil Engineering, Construction Management, Real Estate, Finance, Accounting or a related field.
• At least 10 years' experience, including 6 or more in real-estate development management or development finance.
• Hands-on responsibility for development budgets, cost-to-complete, contractor payments and cash-flow forecasting on live projects.
• Working knowledge of construction contracts (e.g. FIDIC, JCT, NEC), variations and payment processes.
• Experience with construction finance, lender draw-downs and, ideally, off-plan sales and escrow.
• At least 3 years leading process automation, finance-system or digital transformation projects, with one or more delivered into live use.

Desirable:

• Master's degree such as an MBA or MSc in Real Estate or Construction Management.
• Professional qualification such as MRICS, a recognised accounting qualification (e.g. ACCA, CPA) or PMP.
• Experience designing internal controls with Internal Audit or risk teams.
• Experience across residential, commercial or mixed-use projects in several countries.

Technical Skills:

• Finance automation: document extraction, invoice matching, reconciliation and workflow automation tools.
• Enterprise systems: ERP (e.g. Oracle, SAP), project management platforms (e.g. Procore, Unifier) and CRM (e.g. Salesforce, Dynamics).
• Financial modelling: advanced Excel; able to audit and rebuild development budgets and cash-flow models.
• AI fluency: how large language models, document intelligence and AI agents work, and how to set thresholds, exceptions and human approval points.
• Testing: building test sets from historic transactions and measuring accuracy, false positives and false negatives.
• Product delivery: requirements, acceptance criteria, process mapping (BPMN), Agile methods and backlog tools (e.g. Jira).
• Controls: internal-control frameworks (e.g. COSO) and data protection (e.g. GDPR).

Core Competencies:

• Control mindset: treats approvals, segregation of duties and audit trails as non-negotiable.
• Attention to detail: spots the mismatch in a payment certificate that others miss.
• Commercial balance: weighs speed against risk and knows when a human check is worth the delay.
• Bridge-builder: speaks the language of both development managers and accountants.
• Customer focus: remembers that collections and handover tools affect buyers directly.
• Persistence: drives change through long processes that cross many teams and systems.
• Integrity: handles financial and personal data with care.