Embracing AI in Real Estate: A Lesson in Productivity and Personal Connection

The infusion of artificial intelligence within the workspace evokes a mix of excitement and apprehension. AI has already revolutionized healthcare, finance, and manufacturing, but how can AI help people in an oriented workplace without removing the personal touch that clients want?

In the dynamic real estate industry, which thrives on personal relationships, the introduction of AI presents unique challenges and opportunities. Let’s delve into how AI has been integrated into our real estate brokerage, not only to drive productivity, but also to enrich the personal touch we offer our agents, paving the way for a more efficient and promising future.

Implementing AI in Our Brokerage

Our journey with AI started by identifying key areas where automation and advanced analytics could yield immediate value. We discovered that our team strength is the ability to connect with REALTORS®, and by using AI to automate repetitive and routine tasks, we are free to do that.

Two specific examples highlight our approach:

Analyzing Reports with AI: We have applied a large language model to analyze complex reports and distill them into actionable insights for our management. Agents can report back using a narrative style, usually just writing a few sentences about their interactions. Then, we use AI to extract relevant data and report it to the management team in charts and graphs. These reports have saved time for our REALTORS® in the field and raised the quality of decision-making by our management team by providing accurate and tailored information.

Automating Lead Routing: Based on several criteria, we route the leads through automation services to the most appropriate agents. This task is highly repetitive; we receive valuable leads from multiple online services, both in-house and third parties, with the additional challenge of requiring separate client relation management (CRM) systems. We were able to route all of our leads to a central automation hub that evaluates the lead and routes it to the most appropriate CRM and agent. The agent is immediately notified of the new contact. The speed at which this process happens improves lead response time by removing the delay of manual lead routing by the management team, and clients are linked to the appropriate professionals faster. This approach also has the added benefit of improving the equity of lead distribution by following a predefined set of criteria.

Challenges Encountered

The adoption of AI came with its challenges. One major challenge was the fear of job redundancy among team members who viewed automation as a threat to their current job status. We implemented a two-fold approach to handling this challenge:

Training: We held training meetings and had one-on-one discussions with our team members to show them that the use of AI supplements their efforts and does not necessarily replace it. We demonstrated that the AI could handle repetitive and mundane tasks, which assured them that the new roles would let them focus more on the creative and interpersonal dimensions of their roles. In turn, they can focus on new tasks from which they feel our organization can benefit.

Transparency and inclusion: We engaged our team members through the implementation process by encouraging them to raise concerns and areas where they felt AI could be helpful. Team members evaluated their day-to-day roles to recommend automatable aspects of the position they held, and then we worked together to create automation to simplify or eliminate that task from their workload. Being inclusive actually built trust and a collaborative environment.

Productivity and Personal Connection

AI has tremendously affected our brokerage. As a management team, we have more time for one-on-one personal communication with agents. For instance, AI has helped us identify agents’ strengths and preferences, allowing us to assign leads that align with their skills and interests. With the time saved from manual lead routing, we can offer individual support and increase relationship building—the most essential aspect of real estate. Moreover, these efficiency gains through AI translate into better service for our clients and further enhance our success.

Ongoing Improvements and Future Plans

Our journey with AI is continuous. We are constantly refining and iterating our processes to extract the maximum benefit from automation. In our collaborative culture, we actively encourage our team to identify new opportunities for AI integration, making them feel included and part of the process.

We look forward to working on advanced AI applications for the future, making business operations more efficient and enhancing our REALTORS® clients’ experience. For instance, we are looking to implement an AI-powered REALTOR® hub to include custom chatbots that can provide instant responses to our REALTORS®, helping them to navigate the evolving real estate landscape, AI-search powered documents to help improve brand standards, and self-service marketing to empower agents 24-hours a day. We are enhancing our client’s experience as well with improved search results and customer service documentation on our front-end websites and automated home value estimates from multiple sources to give buyers and sellers a full view of where they stand in the real estate market before they meet with an agent.

The key takeaway is that with thoughtful application, AI can pay big dividends in productivity and personal interaction. As intimidating as it feels to introduce AI into any space in the first place, proper education and collaboration can transform it from a Big Scary Monster into a powerful tool that genuinely enhances the daily activity of your workforce. We invite other companies to reflect on how they can apply AI thoughtfully in their operations to realize comparable successes.