6 months ago, nobody in the real estate space was talking about ChatGPT, Artificial Intelligence, or their impact on the real estate space. Agents last November had their hands full with finding homes to sell and were keeping an eye on rising interest rates. Many were doing their normal business plan for the coming year.
And now, an important piece of the marketing environment has changed… and will continue to change from now on.
The reaction has been both positive and negative.
For some ChatGPT (and generative AI in general…) is a scary sign of the times. For some it is an exciting new opportunity to differentiate from competition. But almost all real estate professionals agree that it is an irreversable change. There is no putting the ChatGPT genie back in the bottle.
It will not replace REALTORS but it will change how they do things. Here are some typical reactions in the news as the real estate community has absorbed these new tools:
From CNN. From CBS News. From the NY Times.
Brokerages and teams are learning to leverage the wave of new time saving tools for their marketing efforts as well as their systems. Brokerages that are focused on training and tools are taking it one step farther and finding generative (that’s the G part of ChatGPT) AI an amazing opportunity to help their agents get the most out of their time and increasing their reach.
Gary Lundholm with The Real Estate Group in Hampton Roads VA sums it up this way, “ Our agents are busy building their careers and their businesses. We need to help them find the BEST practices and the BEST tools to leverage their efforts. Our goal is to help them by sifting through all the shiny objects and helping them find what WORKS – Actionable practices that are efficient and impact their bottom line. We have been at this for months with ChatGPT and AI and have already held training classes with our agents. This will be ongoing because we know that there will be more and more changes and new opportunities as this technology matures. We want our agents to have the support they need to take advantage of this innovation, while being aware of its issues. We are working with industry experts as well as our in-house staff to make sure our agents have the latest information, training, and support as this grows and evolves.”
One of the challenges busy REALTORS face is a barrage of people trying to sell them stuff. Some of it works. Some does not. It seems like everybody is a ChatGPT expert and there is no way to say they are not because the technology is brand new and changing all the time.
So what do we know works for sure so far?
Creating content is getting easier. Literally it is getting easier and faster to create all kinds of content by the day. This means that more agents will create more content as part of their marketing efforts than ever before, and they will expand their reach as they do.
The content you create needs to be edited and have your personal voice in order to be authentic and engaging. No tool, however well it is trained or learns, will be perfect. The data for ChatGPT currently is based on 2021 data, so there will be events that happened more recently that it will simply not be aware of. Additionally it needs to be edited to avoid issues with fair housing as well as fact checked for incorrect references.
You do not need many of the current PAID AI tools. Many of the functions that they offer can be accomplished by using the FREE version of ChatGPT effectively. You can get it here. Note: The paid version of ChatGPT ($20 per month) does give you 24/7 access (no waiting) as well as access to the latest version (Chat GPT4) but the FREE version works fine to start.
Use more precise prompts and questions. Specific queries yield the best responses. Ask ChatGPT to refine the results until they look like what you want.
Start with text. Generative AI has a lot of potential to generate videos and photos, but the biggest time savings are currently being made by creating text and then editing it. This saves real estate agents time in tasks like:
- Responding to Emails
- Writing Property Descriptions
- Creating Social Media Tag Lines & Content
- Creating blogs
- Creating correct hashtags for your social media strategy
- Creating Creative Video Scripts
- Creating Customer Service Ideas
To get the most return on your time investment, text is where to start.
Share Ideas and Collaborate. These tools are going to continue to evolve and thus the best practices for using them will change day by day as well. There will be new issues discovered as well as new use cases. Being a part of a brokerage, team or group of like minded agents that collaborate freely is a critical part of staying ahead of all this change.
Get Help. If you feel like you are not currently getting the help you need to keep up with the pace of change with all the tools in the industry, reach out. Find brokerages, teams or friends who are ready and willing to work alongside you in building your business. For real estate agents getting the support and tools you need has never been more important.
