However you may feel about artificial intelligence (AI), whether you believe it to be the future of innovation or the end of it, the technology’s recent surge has shown us that one thing is for certain—AI is not to be ignored.
As such, leaders across the span of industry, from manufacturing to security to retail, are finding ways to implement this booming technology to streamline their processes.
In real estate, top brokerages are embracing AI as a means to make their business more human, however counterintuitive that may sound, says Michael Rossi of Midtown-based Elegran, who, along with RETSY founder Chris Morrison in Scottsdale, Arizona, and principal broker at Hawaii Life, Matt Beall, participated in a recent Forbes Global Properties web panel.
“It’s about realizing that this technology is not the end-all-be-all. It’s about leveraging the technology, about pointing back to how we create efficiency or give our agents back time so they can have those human interactions.”
Morrison echoed the sentiment, adding, “I’m a big fan of supplementing, not automating. You can’t automate who you are, but you can use these tools to do your job better.”
Below is a closer look at how these leading brokers are leveraging AI to make the selling and buying of homes faster and easier for themselves and their clients. The panelist comments have been edited for clarity.
Language processing tools may not entirely replace written listing descriptions but they can be used to improve the quality of the writing.
AI Improves Quality and Consistency in Property Descriptions
One of the most notable AI developments to hit the mainstream in the last year has been language processing tools like ChatGPT. While these tools may be capable of completely writing property descriptions, Beall, who was recently named Board Chair of Forbes Global Properties, cautions agents to rely too heavily upon the technology.
“Over time, the consumer will call that bluff. If they read a blog post that was written by AI, and they pick up the phone to call you, and you sound like you’re bumbling your way through the topic, that’s going to be very obvious. You still need to be able to write and articulate clearly what your insight is.”
That being said, Morrison added that although language processing tools should not entirely replace personally written listing descriptions, they can be used to improve the quality of the writing.
“I write my description but I’m not always happy with what I wrote. So, I’ll select sentences and use these tools to make them sound more poetic. But it starts with you writing it all out first—you should be able to know how to write a paragraph about your listing.”
AI-Enhanced Imagery for Smarter Property Analysis and Showcase
With recent advancements in computer-generated imagery (CGI) virtual rendering have become a common practice in the real estate industry and, now with AI, that process has never been easier, said Morrison.
“You can take a photo of the house, and you can lasso the entire backyard and say show me this backyard with a negative edge pool. AI just puts it in there and you can’t tell the difference. You can do the same with renderings. I’ve had people that are actually angry when they’re standing in front of this empty lot and thinking there was a house on it.”
In addition to renderings, Beall says that virtual staging done by AI has allowed agents to change interiors to suit any profile of buyer. “Normally, if you’re going to stage a property, you kind of have to keep it bland in order to leave room for the imagination. When you’re doing virtual staging with AI, you can spice it up however you want.”
AI will be an increasingly useful tool in the world of real estate data management.
Data Management Will Be Increasingly Important in Real Estate
In a market as large as New York, Rossi says that managing leads can be overwhelming and that his brokerage utilizes AI to ease that burden.
“If you have this huge database of 500,000 leads, how did they engage them? How do you find that diamond in the rough, that client that’s ready to enter the market? So, we use AI to surface that in multiple ways, whether that be to help manage the forefront funnel, those that are coming to open houses or by leveraging big data to find out the clients who are the most likely to engage with an agent at that time.”
The Elegran CEO added, “You want to give your agents as many opportunities as you can, so you layer in technology and see if it’s sustainable and if it increases those interactions.”
Supercharging Daily Productivity and Operations
While many AI tools can be applied specifically to real estate, many are useful to any working professional. Morrison says he uses a number of these tools in order to make his day-to-day simpler.
“I wake up every morning with 700 emails, so I use a tool called Spark to classify my emails as spam, newsletters, receipts for services paid for, and then actual people. That way, I can separate important notes from all that noise.”
He continued, “There’s now a plugin where you can upload a PDF and then ask a question and have that paragraph you want to focus on highlighted so you don’t have to read 180 pages. It’s all about making your job easier.”
Closing out the panel, Beall stated, “It’s an exciting time. I think, the more we allow ourselves to play with AI, and learn about it, the more we’ll answer these questions about the ways in which it’s going to augment our businesses.”
