Agents are using artificial intelligence to save time and money on nearly every facet of their businesses, and those who embrace this new tech frontier are likely to gain an edge in the industry as AI evolves.
Early adopters are using AI to update their bios, write listings and social media posts, create artwork to cover the bare walls of homes for virtual tours, quickly produce video clips and make headshots appear flawless — all within minutes of typing or voicing a prompt. The time invested to learn how to use the different platforms and various levels of AI is worth it, say some of those early adopters. Videos that took hours to produce and scripts they labored over now take minutes to complete, they said.
Does this mean robots are taking over the industry and replacing jobs traditionally held by people? Not exactly. AI is only as good as the data agents put into it. A personal touch is still needed for fact-checking and making content your own. AI won’t replace agents, but it can help them stay top of mind in their sphere of influence.
AI improves efficiency
Sean Cochran’s claim to fame is his TikTok videos (@thecowboyofrealestate), where he dons a Western hat and educates viewers on the market. Cochran, a broker and Realtor with eXp Realty LLC, uses multiple social media platforms to regularly stay in touch with clients and prospects. Although most of the time he comes up with his own topics, he admits his ideas are “finite.” He puts OpenAI’s ChatGPT to use by asking it for original ideas about real estate for blogs, social media posts and TikTok.
“If you know nothing about writing, you can go to ChatGPT and say, ‘Can you give me 30 days’ worth of social media posts about living and working in Naperville, Illinois?’ And in about 24 seconds, you have all 30 ideas. Then you can say, ‘Please write me a 45-second video script on each of those ideas,’ and it will do it. Some people might say it’s cheating, but that’s debatable. The tech is out there.”
Cochran still writes his own listing descriptions; he likes to rhyme and doesn’t need help with it. But that’s not always the case. “Realistically, if I’m having a big mental block that day, I can have it write my content,” he said. He also recommends using ChatGPT for email marketing. “I asked it to write an email and got three leads from it.”
Cochran spends about an hour a day learning different AI platforms to simplify the marketing part of his job. He’s working on using AI to generate artwork for listings that don’t have furniture and suggests these websites for agents who want to give it a try: midjourney.com, stablediffusionweb.com and openai.com/product/dall-e.
He has become an expert at integrating various technologies to produce videos within minutes. Cochran uses the speech synthesis tool ElevenLabs, which uses an AI version of his voice to narrate content written by ChatGPT.
“You feed it a few seconds of your voice, read something, upload it, and a lot of people won’t know it’s not you,” he said. Then he takes that content to Pictory.ai to make a video to accompany the script and uploads the entire package to Instagram within minutes.
However, the completed product is not perfect. He said it may get the tone or inflection of your voice wrong, and you might be talking about a house when a random video of a cow pops up. But you can change it.
Writing remarks for listings used to delay Maikol Akintonde’s work. He would spend half an hour trying to figure out what to say, walk away from it and wait until the next day to finish it. Now Akintonde, a real estate professional with Coldwell Banker, inputs the general features of the property into ChatGTP and prompts it to “create a description for this property.” Within seconds, he has a set of remarks that are mostly satisfactory.
“When I read them, I may add some slight modifications, put it back into ChatGTP to regenerate and get something I can use,” he said. “Tasks that used to take hours and days are now completed within a couple minutes.”
He also uses it to write ads and generate blog posts tied to a theme. Akintonde will schedule the posts to go online on specific days, sometimes up to six months in advance. Another way he uses AI is to calculate a return on real estate investments. Although he cautioned to check it for accuracy, overall, he said it’s very helpful.
Watch for mistakes
Kevin Van Eck, executive vice president of innovation and education for @properties Christie’s International Real Estate, has seen AI’s limitations. “I had an agent who ended up with three arms in their headshot,” he said. “It seems like AI has a problem with teeth — it’s either too many teeth or big chompers — and fingers. I see a lot of six-fingered people.” He tests different AI platforms for the company, witnessing firsthand the pros and cons of using the technology.
One con is AI doesn’t understand fair housing rules, such as not including demographic information when describing a community in listings, and that puts agents who don’t proofread their work at risk of a violation, Van Eck explained. Also, if an agent just knows the basics and doesn’t understand how to give AI prompts that will elicit unique answers, it will only retrieve standard, boilerplate information. “The phrase garbage in garbage out applies here,” Van Eck said. “You have to learn how to use it effectively to get what you want out of it.”
The pros of using AI are obviously efficiency, speed and the ability for someone to do multimedia tasks without having to contract with a vendor, Van Eck explained.
He has seen agents use AI programs to reframe negative feedback from clients after showings; make photos larger without distorting the image; turn winter photos into summer; sort through a sea of emails, prioritizing which ones should be read first; and craft thoughtful replies.
Van Eck recently tested a speaking coach tool, Poised.com, that links with Zoom and Teams to give agents feedback on how to improve their presentation skills, from word choices to eye contact and body language. With so many options and levels of AI to choose from, Van Eck’s advice is to try AI and learn how to use it effectively, because then it will be effective for you. To get started, he suggests the platform Stockimg.ai. It’s for creating digital ads and physical marketing stock.
AI can help predict the future
Damian Ng, senior vice president of technology for Anywhere Real Estate, focuses on how to help brokerages grow their businesses by recruiting more agents. The company uses AI-driven data for two purposes: recruiting agents (it will identify the agent with the highest potential to grow their business) and distributing leads (it will single out who’s most likely to close the deal).
“AI has the ability to find hidden patterns in a large amount of data,” Ng explained. “You cannot humanly process all that data. AI looks at history to predict the future.”
Ng believes AI can be helpful with a lot of tasks that are manually heavy. The downside is AI cannot do 100% of the work; the agent needs to provide the information for AI to be successful.
“AI is as good as the data it’s fed,” Ng said, noting it cannot tell the difference between good input and bad input. “If you rely on it to provide you a fully written description, you have to fact-check the output.” AI also doesn’t have the capability to tell you how it came up with the conclusion it did, which is an important part of trusting that the information is correct. But Ng believes it will in the future.
In the meantime, AI can augment an agent’s work, freeing up their time to build relationships with clients and handle the emotional side of transactions.
“Real estate is a personal business,” Cochran said. “A robot cannot talk you off the ledge if you’re selling the house you grew up in, make you feel at ease about a school district or share their personal experiences about buying a house in Plainfield because they live there.”
What lies ahead
In time, Van Eck thinks AI will help more with contractual work. But even with structured forms, there’s still some level of data entry. In states where agents are writing freehand, he said AI can suggest a better, more concise, enforceable way to phrase contracts.
Cochran estimates a small percentage of agents will take advantage of AI and “leap ahead in income and knowledge.” But the vast majority will simply not use it and do things the old-school way. He urges that group to take time to learn the technology that’s available.
“The guy who sold the horse and buggy was not a fan of the car, yet here we are,” he said. “There’s so much out there to help you do your job more effectively and save time. The Realtor job is about lead generation. The more content you have, whether it’s a blog, website or Facebook post, the better your chances are to get a lead that turns into a conversation, and conversations turn into deals.”
Expert Sources
Maikol Akintonde
Real Estate Professional
Coldwell Banker
Sean Cochran
Broker
eXp Realty LLC
Damian Ng
Senior Vice President of Technology
Anywhere Real Estate
Kevin Van Eck
Executive Vice President of Innovation and Education
@properties Christie’s International Real Estate