In just a few very short years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has infiltrated virtually every sector of business across the world. Real estate is not exempt. However, real estate agents concerned about being replaced by an AI agent shouldn’t be losing any sleep. If anything, the growing use of AI in real estate will make their jobs simpler, yet more effective.
Machine Learning
When we think of AI in real estate, we’re actually thinking of a specific niche of AI called Machine Learning. Focusing on data analysis, Machine Learning seeks out patterns to achieve a profound degree of predictability. Of course, this heavily depends on the quality and quantity of data that the AI observes. The real estate industry heavily employs an even more specific category of Machine Learning called Deep Learning. Deep Learning attempts to emulate the task-based behaviors of the human brain. With Deep Learning, brokerages can provide services tailored to a potential client’s behavior.
Predictive Property Valuations
One of the most immediately popular uses of AI in real estate allows us to generate property valuations in mere moments. By consulting a vast variety of nuanced factors, AI applications accurately assess a predictive model of a specific property’s value. When we say AI takes into account a wide range of factors, we’re not kidding. Examples include:
- Crime rates
- Historical home status
- Market trends
- Neighborhood reputation
- Parks and recreation
- Pollution
- Property features
- School districts
- Transit options
Whereas agents could spend a significant amount of their time calculating a home’s value, AI in real estate pricing allows them to get an answer in seconds.
Narrowing Down the Most Interested Buyers
AI in real estate can also be used to quickly identify interested buyers and the strongest contenders for potential clients based on their online behaviors. Chatbots present perhaps the most popular employment of AI-based buyer pinpointing. When a chatbot prompts engaged guests, its questions are finetuned to collect important data that qualify whether the interviewee poses a strong chance of seriously pursuing homeownership. The information these chatbots discover will put these guests in the crosshairs of targeted marketing campaigns that fit their client profile. By using AI for buyer identification purposes, real estate agents can save time that may have been spent on guests who were just vaguely curious rather than interested.
House Hunters Make Way for House Gatherers
Searching for a dream home can be one of the most enjoyable phases of the real estate journey. But when it starts to drag out or move further away from the ideal, it quickly loses its novelty. We can use AI in real estate searches to whittle down the options to a fine point with more accuracy than a client left to their own devices. Factors that AI can use to narrow down a client search include:
- Budgetary constraints
- Color preferences
- Filtered searches
- Property views
- Purchase history
- Real-time search paths
- Structural features
When a client does fall in love with a home, the use of AI in real estate market research allows agents to provide comprehensive facts in moments. The information runs the gamut from crime rates and natural disaster probability to predicted rainfall and sunlight exposure.
Picture Yourself in Your Dream Home
Buyer’s agents and prospective homeowners alike may need to tour several properties in a month, a week, or even a day. Sure, it can be fun, but it’s also exhausting more often than not. But advances in AI in real estate now allow clients immersive virtual touring opportunities that allow them to tour as many properties as they’d like without any acrobatic scheduling or physical exhaustion. AI uses a plethora of data and technology to allow users the convenience of touring these properties without leaving their living room. Technology utilized to this end includes:
- 3D modeling
- Augmented reality (AR)
- Collected data
- Photographs
Similar software can also be utilized to provide virtual staging. In this way, users can get a more personalized feel for the space of a property and how their style might work in its context.
Using AI in Real Estate Compliance
AI can also ensure that MLS descriptions and photographs are free of violations. And that’s a surprisingly big deal for a lot of real estate brokerages. MLS violations are taken very seriously and come with swift and far-reaching consequences that can impact MLS coordinators all the way up to real estate brokers. By employing AI to sweep property descriptions and photos, firms can identify fraudulence or image manipulation early enough to eliminate it.
AI Benefits in Commercial Real Estate
Commercial real estate is also starting to see the benefits of AI with advanced property management tools such as automated energy-saving amenities. Everyone from investors to tenants enjoys the cost-saving features of automated air conditioning and heating. But even the organizational aspects of property management can be refined with real estate applications. By relying on AI in real estate property management, some operations could even half their expenses.
It’s one thing to announce real-time market shifts. It’s another to pivot to them in real time. Yet, this is what AI is offering commercial real estate investors. Now, investment portfolios can move at market speed. Even with long-term approaches, nuanced dynamic responses minimize risks with up-to-the-second certainty.
The Unique Challenges That Come with AI
Despite the numerous benefits, the introduction of AI in real estate isn’t all roses. New advances come with new challenges, and the biggest facing AI’s incorporation into the real estate industry is security. While safeguards are continuously evolving, so are the risks of compromised data. Along those same lines, AI needs significant amounts of data to be effective. Therefore, inadequate data can also stunt an AI application’s efforts.
We still have yet to see even a fraction of the way AI will change the world and, with it, this industry. But agents don’t need to worry about AI taking their jobs. Real estate is a human business and will always need a human touch. AI will just allow real estate professionals to put even more time and attention into that crucial aspect.
Contributor, designer & admin for JohnHart Gazette.
