Last Updated on July 18, 2023 by Luke Feldbrugge
AI in real estate was, not too long ago, purely speculation. Now it’s here, and rather than a robot taking your job, one AI tool has come along to help you build your business. In the heady space of technology trends, it’s easy to get caught up in the AI programs and their potential for smart contracts, real estate recommendations, listing analysis, etc. Let’s get practical. Let’s look at how it can help you do your job…today.
We will begin with the written word. A tool called ChatGPT has arrived, and you can use it to do a wide variety of tasks involving writing. Ok, that’s a huge understatement. It’s a conversational AI that can do almost all of your writing. Once you get a feel for what it can do, you need to take a step back and take a look at how much of your business involves writing. Here’s an example. We asked ChatGPT to write a thank you email for a potential client and we got this in 10 seconds:
I wanted to take a moment to express my sincere gratitude for the opportunity to work with you on your recent real estate transaction. It was truly a pleasure to help you navigate the process of buying/selling your home and to see your excitement as we reached the final stages.
As a real estate agent, nothing brings me greater satisfaction than seeing my clients achieve their goals and find the perfect property to call their own. I am honored to have been a part of this journey with you and I am grateful for the trust you placed in me to guide you through the process.
Thank you for allowing me to serve you and for being such a pleasure to work with. Please do not hesitate to reach out if you have any further real estate needs or if you simply want to catch up.
Warm regards,
Is that perfect? In some ways it is. There are no typos, and the grammar is rock solid. Does it sound like you? Maybe not, but two or three quick edits and you’ve got not just an email, you’ve also got a template for future drafts. Don’t like it? Try again and ask a more specific question such as “I need an email for my first time homebuyer clients.”
At the risk of overstating how important this one technology is, we think this will affect the future of real estate and your business. With ChatGPT, it uses machine learning to find what you want and how you want it, so it will get better at predicting and writing the text you need (using natural language processing). The learning, by the way, goes both ways. As you learn to ask more specific questions, you will get better at getting the results you want. We can’t emphasize this enough: play with it.
Correspondence…Done
The obvious task that real estate brokers do over and over again is correspondence with clients. Sitting in front of a blank screen trying to construct sentences and paragraphs can be discouraging. It can also be draining, and you could use that energy for other things like actually talking to clients. Emails, prospecting letters, direct mail, and more can be done by AI software in a few seconds with very little editing involved. That means lead generation for your real estate company.
At first it’s difficult to imagine how many ways to use AI in real estate as a way to enhance your communications with prospective buyers and sellers. Have you always wanted your own newsletter? Now you can put one together with two or three articles. Don’t want to design it? There’s an AI technology for that too. Do you want a website but are stuck on the copywriting? ChatGPT can write one for you.
One of the cornerstones of most good copywriting is having a style guide, but they take forever to create. ChatGPT will write one for you, based on some of your existing writing. Then it will use that style guide in its own writing so its responses sound more like you. You can teach it how you want it to work for you.
The possible applications go on and on, and because it’s so new, folks are discovering new growth opportunities all the time. If you want to jump right in, go ahead. If you want to learn more ways AI can help you, check out these two resources.
Property Descriptions
Writing listings and the associated property descriptions can be a significant time investment. Now, not so much. You can plug in the listing, with whatever details you’ve got, and get a property description in seconds. Again, you may want to edit it a bit. Over time, you will probably need to do less and less editing as the AI program learns how you write and what you sound like.
AI in Real Estate: Content Plans
Another word for writing in the digital age is content. Almost every digital marketing effort begins with words on page/screen. If you haven’t jumped into digital marketing yet, ChatGPT has removed a huge obstacle for you. You don’t need to write anything. In fact, you can ask the AI program to design a whole content plan for you including blogs, web pages, social media, video (it can write the script for you) and more. There’s even a tool that can convert your video script into an actual video.
What used to take a whole team of digital marketing professionals can now be accomplished with AI tools like ChatGPT. Will it be as slick and drop-dead gorgeous as you would get from an agency? The jury is still out on that, but it will be:
- Fast (as in instantaneous)
- Cheap (as in free)
Let that sink in for a bit. We’ll wait here.
One of the most time consuming commitments you can make in digital marketing is the blog. It takes enormous time and effort and planning and optimization and, frankly, payroll. Trust us on this. Most businesses never even embark on the blog journey because of time and money constraints.
Now you can blog…every week…every day if you want. Then you can use those posts on social media or repurpose them for your newsletter. Again, your first ChatGPT blogs might not be perfect, but a quick edit can get them there. There are even tools in ChatGPT that can be added on that will make your blogs search engine optimized (SEO), which is a key element in your overall digital content plan and a competitive advantage.
Social Media Plan
As much as having a good website and correspondence is important, social media plays an important role in commercial real estate. ChatGPT can write social media posts for you. Moreover, it can write a social media plan for you. Need a social media calendar? Your smart AI assistant does that too.
Social media keeps real estate professionals top of mind with your clients, so being able to simply and quickly create a strategy, a calendar and actual text for posts can give you a competitive edge …unless those real estate companies are doing the same thing with ChatGPT. If the real estate sector adopts this whole heartedly, the competitive landscape will change.
Proposals
If writing proposals is a key component of your real estate business, ChatGPT can speed up and streamline the process. Here are some ways to incorporate this tool into your proposals for commercial properties.
- Teach ChatGPT how you write proposals using templates and boilerplate language. It will learn and incorporate your style.
- ChatGPT is good at summarizing massive amounts of data.
- If your proposal has industry-specific jargon, you can teach ChatGPT to use that language.
- You can integrate this with other tools in different ways. For example, you could uses it with project management software, to generate proposals more quickly.
AI in Real Estate: Presentations
If you use Google Slides, there’s a free extension called MagicSlides that integrates the two tools – ChatGPT and Google Slides. When you install it, there’s a pull down menu that allows you to ask questions that will help ChatGPT build your presentation for you. Its ability to pull in research, large data sets, public records, market trends, home prices and property valuation from all over can supercharge your presentations. All the while it will be learning how you present, what language you prefer and how it should go together. It will even write a script for you.
Homes for Heroes
The use of AI is just going to accelerate, changing the face of the world of real estate across the United States and the world. ChatGPT is a great tool for improving your productivity, and even expanding your business. And you don’t have to be a big player to use it; in fact, it’s ideal for the smaller real estate business that can’t afford a whole team of digital marketers.
These new technologies can do tasks that will free you up so you can spend more time with buyers and sellers. That’s where Homes for Heroes can help. We connect you to community heroes – firefighters, healthcare workers, military service members, veterans, teachers, law enforcement personnel and EMS. Together we can help these heroes find a new home, or their next home, and reward them with a Hero Reward check at the end of the process. Become the agent local heroes rely on in your market by joining Homes for Heroes. Allow us to guide you on how to make your local heroes a priority, and grow your business by serving a loyal and grateful group of potential clients.
