Unless you’ve been held hostage at an open house for the past few weeks, you’ve probably seen the story about the homeowner who skipped working with an agent and instead relied on ChatGPT to sell his home himself.
If you’re anything like most agents or brokers, your first reaction was probably something along the lines of, “He got lucky, but that approach won’t work out well for most people.”
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You’re not wrong. But at the same time, this is an issue that’s only going to get more common, and it’s one that we can’t afford to dismiss.
Yes, AI platforms like ChatGPT can be powerful, but they also often provide advice that overlooks key details, and when it comes to complex financial decisions, that can lead to dangerous outcomes.
Unfortunately, the people who are the least financially literate are also the people most likely to take the DIY/ChatGPT approach in an effort to “save” some money on the transaction. They’re also the people most likely to be financially devastated by a bad financial decision.
But since we have a vested interest in homebuyers and sellers using an agent, we can’t just tell people that relying on AI for their real estate transactions can be dangerous — we have to demonstrate exactly why it can be dangerous in a way they can understand.
Brokers who fail to teach their agents how to do that are going to suffer in the coming years, so in this article, I’m going to share exactly how I’m training my agents to handle this scenario.
Build a personal brand
Anyone who has talked to me for more than three minutes knows that my views on building a personal brand border on cult-like.
That’s because I know firsthand the impact it can have on agents. A strong personal brand helps you stand out in a sea of 1.5 million other agents, most of which are seen as commodities because they’ve done nothing to differentiate themselves. It helps you to demonstrate your expertise. And most importantly, it helps you to build trust with your audience.
I’ve covered personal branding in depth in previous articles here at Inman, including:
- How to build a powerful personal brand to attract and retain clients
- How to protect your business during a brokerage merger
- 5 videos every real estate agent should make and repurpose
Your personal brand will help you differentiate yourself from competitors, attract more prospects, and help you build and nurture relationships with them. Remember, homebuyers and sellers who choose not to hire an experienced agent are doing so because they don’t see evidence that they provide any real value.
A personal brand changes that in your favor.
Demonstrate your expertise
Your content should consistently demonstrate your expertise by educating your audience, but there’s an area that you’re going to focus on specifically here, and that’s to create content that clearly explains the risks that come with relying on AI tools for real estate transactions while demonstrating your expertise.
One way to do that is to break down a particular aspect of a real estate transaction, highlighting all of the variables involved, explaining the impact of getting something wrong, and then asking AI tools like ChatGPT, Grok and Perplexity to give advice on a real-world scenario. It helps to use a more complicated scenario here because that gives you a greater chance of the tool giving you a wrong answer.
And considering all of the variables involved in a typical real estate transaction, this will give you hundreds if not thousands of potential topics to create content around.
The beauty of this approach is that it’s not you saying, “AI tools can be dangerous for real estate transactions.” Instead, that is demonstrated by the tools themselves.
And you’re not only informing them of the risks. You’re also demonstrating your expertise, both in your understanding of the process itself and in your ability to identify and mitigate potential landmines that could derail a transaction.
Side note: One aspect that often goes overlooked is the tax implications of a transaction, which obviously, AI will likely overlook as well unless specifically prompted and all relevant information is provided. Although you may have a fair understanding of this particular topic, it’s important to stay in your lane and leave tax advice related to real estate transactions to a licensed tax professional. But you can mention the risk that AI will overlook this in your content.
This won’t change everyone’s mind, but nothing will.
Build and nurture relationships
A lot of agents are great throughout the transaction, but they fall short when it comes to nurturing the relationship afterwards, so many don’t get any follow-up business from the clients they’ve worked so hard to earn.
This is a huge missed opportunity.
You could provide the best service in the world to a client, but if they’re looking at moving and you’re not at the forefront of their mind at that time, they’re more likely to find a new agent or worse yet, rely on AI tools like ChatGPT, Grok and Perplexity. Especially in today’s economy, where everyone is counting every potential dollar they spend.
Email and text are both very effective for this, but be careful not to overdo it. You want to send useful information often enough to maintain top-of-mind awareness, but not so often that they unsubscribe. The key here is to make sure it’s genuinely useful to them, from their perspective, and that it’s engaging. Phone can be another effective channel. It requires a larger time commitment, but you can build far stronger relationships with a phone call compared to email and text.
You can also host local events that you invite your clients and prospects to from time to time. This is a great way to nurture relationships, especially if you can connect attendees with others who might be valuable connections in some way. Just be prepared for a substantial investment of time and capital to pull this off.
The goal here is to stay in touch with your clients and prospects at all times so that your name is the first that comes to mind when they think of real estate.
Bottom line — you need to always demonstrate and provide value
As AI tools become more commonly used, more people will flock to them for complicated tasks like real estate transactions, so this problem isn’t going away for us or the people who rely on them. In fact, it’s only going to become bigger.
Proactive brokers will train their agents on how to demonstrate why they’re still needed in an increasingly AI-driven world. Those brokers (and their agents) will thrive, provided that they master the fundamentals, while those who don’t will suffer.
So if you want to remain competitive in today’s increasingly challenging market, you need to get ahead of the AI “agent” landmine that’s been planted firmly in our path.
Derek Carlson runs Realty ONE Group in Naples, Florida.
