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Artificial intelligence‘s hold on real estate — and the world — has only gotten stronger over the past year, sparking further conversation on whether large language models like ChatGPT and other categories of AI tools are doing more harm than good to education and business sectors. Despite the questions that still linger about AI, two leading Florida brokers and a proptech innovator told the Inman On Tour Miami crowd they can’t afford to eschew the technology in an increasingly fast-paced world.
Jonathan Spears
“Anytime you try to get an agent to adopt new technology, it’s like pulling teeth. I think the issue of AI with agents is that their use of the technology is driven more by fear than it is curiosity,” Spears Group founder Jonathan Spears said.
“I think we, as agents, have gone away from the curiosity of this technology that we’re afraid is going to take our job, when, in reality, we need to look at it curiously. Think about how a child asks their mom and dad questions, like ‘What does this do? What does that do?'”
“It’s touching every other industry, including the grocery store you shop at [and] your financial tech. I mean, everything’s being disrupted,” he added. “You want to get involved now — or even later — and, ultimately, be able to leverage it to multiply yourself.”
Although ChatGPT gets most of the attention, Spears, LoKation Real Estate Chief Operating Officer Jonathan Lickstein and Propy CEO Natalia Karayaneva said there are multiple ways to leverage AI.
Lickstein said he’s laser-focused on AI’s role in bolstering the end-to-end experience for agents and consumers. The CEO pointed to Zillow and Realtor.com’s lead generation systems as an example of what agents can replicate with an AI-powered customer relationship management (CRM) platform.
“You’re seeing this end-to-end solution being provided by the major portals, and it’s a lot more attainable for the individual agent and team than you might think,” he said. “There are a lot of platforms out there right now, like voice agents that will integrate to your CRM and communicate for you, much like you’re seeing from the Zillow Flex and the new Realtor.com program, where they have a call center that’s reaching out to the leads in a timely manner, satisfying that speed to lead, and then bringing that information back to allow you to operate smarter, faster and better.”
Lickstein said agents need to have an end-to-end solution to keep leads in their ecosystem. For some brokerages, that could mean investing in proprietary tech like Spears, who’s poured thousands into creating a new back-end operations platform, MyOps. And for others, that means choosing the best third-party CRM system for their agents and supercharging it with an AI integration like Speculo.ai.
“The best [CRM] is the one that you’re going to log into and actually put information,” he said. “But then working with a third-party program that will latch on to your CRM, take an incoming lead, call them instantly and extract information from that conversation to give you knowledge when you’re going into an appointment, or create the follow-up method for you is invaluable. You just plug and play. No coding experience whatsoever.”
Natalia Karayaneva
For Karayaneva, AI is best used for offloading some of the busy work that prevents agents from being fully attentive to clients. Agents should be using AI to craft engaging property descriptions, fast-track the home search process, and streamline title and escrow.
“Realtors don’t have to come to the AI conversation with fear, but instead with the abundance mindset … AI can give us more time for personal life, for our families,” she said. “We know that transactions will be simpler, and instead of 30 days of anxiety, consumers and agents will have full transactions within a day.”
“The role of the agent will keep being this human element — the psychologist, someone who knows the locality,” she added. “The role of the agent, in that sense, is never going away.”
Spears then echoed Karayaneva, saying that agents can use AI to stoke deeper conversations with buyers and sellers, many of whom have already used AI-powered tools on portals and other platforms well before signing a listing or buyer representation agreement.
“… AI can’t tell the whole story,” he said. “If you’re an agent out there who’s transacting in the market and you go sit in a listing appointment, the seller may be equipped with all the information they’re pulling from technology, whether it be Zillow or wherever, but you should be able to sit down and be like, ‘Hey, man, I was part of that deal [you saw online] and the human element [of that deal] was this, and that’s my real value to you.’ And I don’t believe technology is going to be able to do that.”
