Top producer Jennifer Hernandez has been a licensed real estate professional for over 16 years now. Initially entering the industry to help other military families with the rental and home-buying process, she has consistently ranked at the top of the highly competitive northern Virginia and Washington, D.C., market. Now with CENTURY 21, Hernandez spoke with RISMedia about her experience using artificial intelligence (AI) in her work—and how it powers new thinking and new business opportunities.
RISMedia: What AI programs are already implemented at CENTURY 21 Real Estate, and how do you use them in your daily life?
Jennifer Hernandez: Follow Up Boss is golden, as you can take all the time in the world to craft a text message or an email to a client, and they won’t respond. So what I do in the morning when I’m looking through my clients is get into Follow Up Boss, and the AI is so awesome. You can say “text follow up” and it gives you all these prompts automatically—and people who don’t normally respond to me, they all respond.
That has changed my thinking with AI, when I began to see all this time I spent writing emails, which is very time-consuming. So I started letting the AI kind of take over. For example, Follow Up Boss goes through and reads the whole history of what you’ve done in notes and comms with the client, and it tailors a response in about 20 seconds.
RealScout is also a game-changer because it can automatically send updated listings and change search parameters for clients. So again, that saves you and your client a lot of time, and I love it. A lot of my clients aren’t so savvy anymore, and they notice little things because of what RealScout does. My clients think I’m just “Johnny-on-the-spot.” They think they’re my one and only client, that I’m on top of everything, and it’s really because AI has simplified my life. I embrace everything CENTURY 21 gives us.
Cloud CMA, which is tied to our MLS, is a program that can quickly give you all the comps with pictures, price per square foot, etc. You can put in the address, and as an agent, you can ask it to pick out all the comparables for you (or import them). The interface is what my clients love most about Cloud CMA, because more and more, everyone is loving a computer interface with their comparative market analysis (CMA)—and with this one, you can click on maps and pick up different comps as well as the history.
RISMedia: What could the integration of AI technology into the industry look like? Is there any training in place to help agents understand how to better work with AI?
JH: CENTURY 21 offers training daily, specifically with Follow Up Boss, because that’s where the majority of the AI sits. That’s the other great thing about CENTURY 21. They have trainings that are out there and available on a daily basis so that you can get on and learn all the ins and outs of Follow Up Boss if you haven’t yet taken the time to do it. There’s a lot, and it’s a really powerful CRM.
RISMedia: What AI programs/technology would you like to see implemented at CENTURY 21 in the future, if any?
JH: As agents, we’re always in the car, and we’re always driving and always talking to clients, so if we could take those notes from that call and have them automatically uploaded into our CRM, that would be a game-changer. I’d really love to see something like that, with all of the AI interfaces connected.
RISMedia: Do you think client-facing AI technology could affect client/agent relationships in any way?
JH: I remember before the internet, everybody was scared of it, thinking that it was going to change real estate. Now, everyone thinks AI is going to change real estate, but AI cannot change compassion. Or me, as a person, or me, who knows a neighborhood.
AI is just a tool to enhance your business and to make you a better agent, to help you with time management and help you control that. It allows you to spend more one-on-one face time with your clients—either getting a coffee, showing property or going to their house and doing a listing appointment. It frees up your time to do that.
Since I began implementing AI, my listing appointments have probably tripled in what I normally do—and it’s because using the AI, sending home value reports, they see all that.
But, I’m the one who responds to everything, because again, I know the neighborhood. AI can understand the neighborhood and scour all the listings and give you all the comps and tell you all the pluses and minuses, but it doesn’t actually know the neighborhood or the family owned stores or the parks. I mean, it might, but it doesn’t know the context to that—so I don’t think AI is ever going to replace or hurt an agent as long as an agent embraces it.
RISMedia: What excites you most about the future of AI in real estate?
JH: The fact that it saves me time. You can never, ever get time back. I have a family—I have grandkids and my kids—and I want to spend time with people I love. And as an agent, I’m consumed seven days a week helping other people with their lives and with real estate. So, using AI saves me time, and that’s what excites me most.
At first I was kind of like, this is taking over, but then I realized how much time it saved me by doing AI photos for my listings and writing my listing descriptions. I’m getting time back that I could have never had before by implementing AI in so many different parts of my real estate business.
RISMedia: What concerns you most about the future of AI in real estate?
JH: Well that, probably with any industry, is there are no safeguards on it. AI continually learns, continually gets better, but again, AI isn’t a true person and it doesn’t have the critical thinking like a person would have. It doesn’t have the empathy or the emotion that a person would have. As AI gets stronger and stronger, I hope that we don’t lose the empathy and the emotion that a person brings.
