How AI is Transforming the Real Estate Industry

Damian Ng, Senior Vice President, Technologyat Anywhere Real Estate

Damian Ng, Senior Vice President, Technologyat Anywhere Real Estate

Asking a device a question, and then awaiting a response is nothing new, as we have been doing this for many years. However, ChatGPT will still likely be one of the most disruptive technology toolsin recent years. Recently, it reached 100 million users in about two months, making it the fastest adoption of new technology in history. Not only does ChatGPT answer follow-up questions, but it also admits mistakes, challenges incorrect assumptions and rejects inappropriate requests.

I am a fan of artificial intelligence (AI) and especially what it means for the real estate industry – a human-centered business that, while it is becoming more tech-driven, requires a human touch. Though the industry isoften viewed as a technology laggard because of its heavy reliance on paper, more residential real estate brokerages are transforming to become digital first.

Especially in the last several years, the industry has leveraged technology, including AI, to help agents focus on higher level tasks. Agents and brokers are beginning to use ChatGPT to assist in their daily activitiessuch as drafting a listing, writing social media posts, sending follow-up emails, draftingblogs, etc., so they can spend more time interacting with their clientsand doing things only humans can do.

Besides helping agents with their daily tasks, the transformative power of AI can be used to help brokers perform critical activities such as identifying agent growth potential and compatibilityfor potentialleads. Today, we use various AI tools to help analyze agents’ historical performance and use it to predict their future growth potential – so that brokers can focus on recruiting agents that will most likely excel in the future. We also use AI tools to look at lead compatibility, so we can match agents who are most likely to close a lead instead of applying a round robin approach based on agent availability. This data-drivenapproach complements the intuition and experience of our brokers, making them more efficient.

AI can potentiallyprovide valuable insights into an agent’s performance and potential growth, identifying trends and patterns across localities, helping real estate companies identify opportunities to develop agents’ skills and abilities which can contribute to agent success.

As we continue toleverage data broadly, such as agentinteractions, buyer reactions to floor plans, surroundings or décor,AI can potentially help agents identify the “right house” for a buyer a lot quicker, reducing the number of visits (physical or virtual) to multiple properties.

This can enhance both the customer experience and agent efficiency.A similar concept can also be leveraged to personalize the negotiation and pricing process by analyzing the preferences of buyers and sellers.

Transparency of Data and Decision

In a perfect world, AI could be used to remove unconscious bias in real estate by providing objective and data-driven decision-making, which could then increase diverse home ownership. We are seeing the combined use of data, analytics, and AI to identify decision patterns, accelerate automation, and provide intelligence.

However, tools optimized by AI are only as useful as the comprehensiveness of the data that powers them. Organizations maintain a responsibility to ensure their data usage and collection is holistic, secure, and free from discrimination.

Improving transparency of the AI model through understanding how itactually makes recommendations will also build trust in AI. Recent research and advancement on Explainable AI, Model Visualization, and other technology, which focus on helping individuals understand and interpret how machines make decisions, will also continue to help AI adoption in real estate.

More to come

Today, we can ask ChatGPT to draft (and re-generate many times) a listing of a house with twobedrooms, three baths and a basement. However, if you ask ChatGPT to write a listing with just the address, the result will be a lot less usable; where an experienced agent will be able to provide much richer context (or know exactly where to find that information). Given the advancement of technology and innovation, I strongly believe the real estate industry will continue to converge AI with other mature mechanisms such as API Integration and Robotic Process Automation to bring more efficiency and value to everyone in the ecosystem.

AI can potentially provide valuable insights into an agent’s performance and potential growth, identifying trends and patterns across localities, helping real estate companies identify opportunities to develop agents’ skills and abilities which can contribute to agent success.

As I shared earlier, technology can augment, but never replace human-to-human social interactions. We are seeing a focus on AI to enhance and empower human relationships as virtual and hybrid business environments expand.

About Damian

Damian Ng is Senior Vice President of Technology overseeing enterprise architecture, application modernization, operations, and application reliability across all Anywhere business units. In this role, Damian drives and executes the Anywhere technology strategy to accelerate open platform connectivity, simplicity, and productivity for real estate agents, consumers, partners, and developers.

Damian is a frequent speaker at technology conferences and has more than twenty-five years of global experience in e-commerce, payments, fintech, and healthcare. His career path has included various engineering and architecture leadership roles, ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies.

Damian holds an M.S. from the University of Waterloo and a B.S. from the University of Toronto. He lives in St. Louis and enjoys family time and outdoor activities in the Missouri area.