Any tools that help real estate agents free up time to focus on client relationships are usually a win-win. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has entered the chat.
With AI-powered tools like ChatGPT, agents can automate their email marketing, quickly write property listing descriptions, create housing market forecasts and much more. Although AI has long been used in the real estate technology stack at a higher level, the warp-speed adoption of tools like ChatGPT is being seen within the real estate industry—and just about everywhere else.
It begs the question: Is AI the new frontier in real estate marketing? Or is it the new, shiny marketing toy tempting us to sacrifice real estate’s traditional human-centered approach on the altar of convenience and speed?
While the answer may depend on who you ask, it’s clear that real estate agents and brokerages alike are going all-in with AI—with a healthy dose of discretion.
“In a nutshell, the reason why we’re being methodical in how we leverage AI in our portfolio is there’s a lot of newness to this,” says Dan Djuric, head of enterprise data and advanced analytics at Keller Williams. The global real estate firm has more than 200,000 agents worldwide.
At Keller Williams, generative AI integrations are in development for its Command product, a smart CRM-plus solution that launched in 2019. A key focus of these new AI integrations will center on email campaign automation, along with allowing the company to be “more surgical than ever before” in building its tech stack, Djuric says.
How AI is streamlining real estate marketing
OpenAI’s ChatGPT is the tool everyone is raving about. The AI-powered chatbot uses its broad knowledge and specific domain expertise to respond to complex prompts in conversational language. The wildly popular tool reached a record-breaking 100 million monthly active users in January 2023 just two months after OpenAI provided free access to the public, making it the fastest-growing app of all time.
In the real estate space, ChatGPT and other AI tools have a number of uses, including:
- Creating attractive property descriptions
- Drafting informative blog and social media content
- Retooling content that an agent has written, such as video scripts, informational pieces and/or personal outreach letters
- Streamlining property searches and consumer data collection (i.e., forms)
- Simplifying real estate transaction tasks
- Writing advertising copy
- Developing marketing action plans
- Crafting negotiation emails with other agents
- Developing cold-call scripts based on client or market type
- Writing agent biographies
In deciding whether or not to use AI in your real estate marketing, agents should consider what tasks they can automate to save time and money. This gives them more time to do what they do best: nurture client relationships and close deals.
Real estate marketing experts like Bondilyn Jolly prefer to think of ChatGPT as more of a virtual personal assistant. Jolly is CEO of bcollective.agency, a creative consulting firm and marketing division leader with WAV Group. Because ChatGPT is easy to learn, the tool can be a time-saver and a good starting point in writing marketing copy—a task many agents struggle with and tend to farm out to an assistant, Jolly points out.
“What it can do is help real estate professionals be better communicators, help find the words when your own mind can’t, spark ideas and creativity for marketing and sales outreach, and save time that can be focused elsewhere in the day-to-day,” Jolly says.
Real estate agents are finding that in addition to streamlining marketing tasks, ChatGPT can also help keep them better organized with meetings and generating new ideas for their businesses.
Kimberly Jay, an associate broker with Compass in New York City, says her manager used an AI tool to transcribe a recent meeting in which Jay brainstormed goals and ideas for her business. The tool provided a summary readout of the meeting the same day, which Jay says enabled them both to be more organized and stay focused on the conversation instead of taking notes.
At the brokerage level, Jay says she loves Compass’ “Likely to Sell” AI tool, which uses numerous public data points to forecast when sellers in an agent’s database might be most inclined to sell their homes. This provides agents with a more targeted way to identify seller leads, connect with past clients and close deals.
The main allure of having these AI-powered tools at her fingertips, Jay says, is the time it adds back to her schedule to focus on negotiating deals and working with clients. But it’s not a replacement for keeping your skills sharp, she advises.
“You still have to be knowledgeable,” Jay says. “These tools are not going to make you a better agent if you don’t have the knowledge.”
Proceed with caution when using AI tools
Automating certain marketing tasks can undoubtedly add more time back to your day to spend face-to-face with clients. But relying too much on AI without proper oversight or considering the potential drawbacks may be a risky bet.
“ChatGPT is still in its infancy,” Jolly says. “It’s riddled with plagiarism and a general lack of accuracy due to searching the web for information, which includes a lot of misinformation. As a marketing and copywriting professional, I find a lot of its outcomes underwhelming in that they read more like a Wikipedia entry versus a thoughtful, meaningful human perspective.”
Additionally, ChatGPT’s outputs are entirely dependent on the initial prompts from whoever is requesting the information. That means the result you get depends on the quality of the command and the expertise of the person making the request, Jolly cautions.
“Keep in mind that ChatGPT is a doer, not a thinker,” Jolly says. “There is a reliance on the approach and thoughtfulness of the thinker behind the process.”
For example, take listing descriptions as a use case. While many agents abhor the idea of having to come up with this copy, relying on ChatGPT to create it for you without careful editing and review may be problematic, according to Susan Abrams, an associate broker with Coldwell Banker Warburg in New York City.
Abrams notes that listing descriptions must follow state and Fair Housing laws, which prohibit housing-related discrimination due to race, color, national origin, religion, sex (including gender identity and sexual orientation), familial status and disability. A listing description generated entirely by ChatGPT may not take those critical rules into account.
“The seller’s broker must make sure the description meets all legal and ethical requirements and that the description is applicable to your specific property or area,” Abrams says.
AI may be the future, but human connection is still key.
There’s no doubt that AI is here to stay and, naturally, some real estate agents might worry that AI will one day replace them.
But AI’s application to the real estate space should be viewed through a lens of enablement rather than fear, says Djuric.
“I’m advocating that we should embrace the change with what enables us to do better, what enables us to do more, enables us to become a more dominant player in the space and, quite honestly, what enables us to serve our consumers,” Djuric says.
The human value and connection that real estate professionals bring to homebuyers and sellers are difficult to replicate with AI. Jay says that agents should ensure they add their own flavor to AI-generated content so their emails and marketing materials reflect their own voice.
“This is a relationship business. People connect with other people, not with robots,” Jay says. “One of the reasons your clients like to work with you is because of who you are. Maintain authenticity.”
Other experts agree
“ChatGPT cannot take potential buyers to see properties of interest. It can’t negotiate or close your transaction. And it definitely can’t establish a personal relationship,” Jolly says. “At the end of the day, there is nothing that can beat the human element, and the real estate transaction is about humans. It’s about reading the emotions of the people on both sides of the transaction. It’s about creating personal connections to establish trust and rapport.”
