The Real Cost of Manual Underwriting in Real Estate | Dr. Kate Jarvis

Описание: This week, I sat down with Dr. Kate Jarvis to unpack a journey that spans childhood instability, academic rigour, early machine learning, and the building of an AI native platform designed to fundamentally change how real asset decisions are made.

Kate is CEO and co founder of Fifth Dimension, a technology company powering decision making across real assets, underwriting, asset management and portfolio strategy for some of the world’s largest real estate and investment organisations. With a PhD from Stanford and more than fifteen years building machine learning backed businesses across the US, UK and Europe, Kate sits at the intersection of deep technical expertise and real world operational experience.

In this conversation, Kate shares how growing up with her family home repossessed at a young age shaped her relationship with risk, security and institutions, and why those early experiences still influence how she builds businesses today. We explore her path through linguistics and early AI research, long before machine learning became mainstream, and how understanding language, prediction and inference laid the foundations for her later work in real assets.

We discuss how Kate entered real estate through shared ownership and institutional capital deployment, where she encountered the reality of manual underwriting, endless spreadsheets, PDFs and investment committee drag. That frustration became the catalyst for Fifth Dimension. Kate explains why most AI tools fail in regulated, high stakes environments, why auditability matters more than automation, and how Fifth Dimension works alongside investment teams to amplify judgement rather than replace it. The conversation also looks ahead to what it really means to be AI native, who wins over the next decade, and why smaller, smarter teams may soon outperform incumbents with scale alone.

Key Topics Covered in This Episode

✅ From Instability to Resilience
How early life experiences shaped Kate’s approach to risk, ambition and long term thinking.

✅ From Linguistics to Machine Learning
Why language, prediction and inference sit at the heart of modern AI and real asset decision making.

✅ Why Real Estate Underwriting Is Broken
The operational drag inside institutional real estate and why spreadsheets still dominate billion pound decisions.

✅ Building Fifth Dimension
How shared ownership, manual IC processes and frustration with legacy workflows led to an AI native platform.

✅ AI as an Amplifier, Not a Replacement
Why human judgement, creativity and context still matter and how AI should support decision makers, not remove them.

And of course, I asked Kate the big question:

Who are the People, what Property, and which Place would you invest in if you had £500 million to deploy?

If you have thoughts or questions about this episode, drop them in the comments. I’d love to hear your take.

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