A persistent argument about the use of artificial intelligence in the real estate industry is that there will soon be a stark divide between agents who use AI and those who don’t.
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Yet surveys consistently show that a large majority of real estate agents already use AI to some extent. The real gap that’s emerging, according to interviews with several industry professionals, is between agents who’ve adopted an AI tool and agents who’ve rebuilt their workflows around one in an increasingly challenging market.
Everyone uses AI, but not everyone is using it right
Realtors Property Resource’s February 2026 survey of 225 National Association of Realtors members found that AI adoption was at 82 percent.
NAR’s own 2025 survey — drawing from a much larger random sample — put the figure at 68 percent. The gap likely reflects more than a six-month surge, but the directional story is the same: Adoption is near-universal.
Cameron Walker, who manages the real estate agent network at Clever Offers and tracks agent performance metrics across major markets, says the adoption number obscures more than it reveals. Adoption numbers only tell half the story. How agents deploy AI matters more than whether they do.
“Right now, speed is everything,” Walker told Inman.
Walker noted that, according to RPR’s 2026 data, 68 percent of agents save at least one hour per week using AI, and 34 percent save more than four hours.
“Most of this time is being used to increase their speed in responding to leads,” he said. “A two-minute reply from the agent beats a two-hour response every single time, and AI makes the first response possible.”
The key thing Walker is seeing is not merely adoption of AI, but conversion.
According to NAR’s 2025 Technology Survey, 17 percent of agents reported a significant positive impact from AI on their work, another 33 percent reported a moderate positive impact, and 46 percent reported no noticeable impact.
“The conclusion is that success does not come only with purchasing a tool. It comes from rebuilding one’s strategy around it,” Walker said. “Those agents in our network who treat AI as a lead-response tool, not something new to toy with, are the ones whose volume remained consistent despite the market’s shrinkage.”
The agent who built a second business with AI
Andrew Fortune, a brokerage owner and Realtor with 14 years in the business in Colorado Springs, Colorado, is among the agents who say AI has unlocked scale he couldn’t have built manually.
“I use AI for everything in my business,” Fortune told Inman. “I used it to set up Google AdWords campaigns, then analyze and adjust the campaigns over time to make them perform better. I rely heavily on AI to research and write new content for my thousands of webpages and blog posts.”
His success with AI tools led him to start a second company, Peak 5 Digital, to write content for other agents’ websites to help them rank better. The use of AI has also allowed Fortune to expand his business from Colorado Springs to Denver.
“I’ve been planning to do that for more than a decade, but the task was too big,” he said. “Now I feel I can handle it and succeed at it.”
Fortune said the agents he is watching struggle right now are not bad at their jobs.
“They are doing everything manually in a market that now rewards leverage,” he said. “When transactions are plentiful, that is fine, but when they are scarce, the manual agent spends all day on tasks that AI handles in the background, leaving them with little time to actually talk to clients.”
Fortune acknowledges that AI can’t replace relationships or local knowledge, but says it can dramatically influence lead generation, which is the heart of the real estate business.
“It just frees up the hours to spend on the parts of the job that actually close deals at a high volume,” he said.
‘The main issue is speed’
Natalia Bassova, a licensed real estate agent and owner of Resort Real Estate Inc. in Summit County, Colorado, believes agents are not losing to AI but rather to other agents who have chosen to use AI alongside their local knowledge base.
“The main issue is speed,” Bassova told Inman. “Prior to even attending a client’s first listing meeting, AI can produce a competitive market analysis, draft listing copy, market the property in a fraction of the time it takes a person to perform these tasks, and send a list of filtered listings based on criteria entered by the buyer when the new listing goes live.”
As far as retention is concerned, Bassova said her clients typically don’t rush into making a purchase decision. From the time a potential buyer first contacts her office until they sign the final contract can take anywhere from 6 to 18 months.
“During this period, there are many opportunities for our clients to travel back and forth to Summit County and/or conduct site visits before purchasing the home,” she said. “Unfortunately, unless you have a CRM system that tracks each and every relationship you maintain with your clients, you risk losing track of them in the middle of this long process.”
Bassova said that when you lose contact with a client during this timeframe, they end up contacting and hiring the agent who was last able to reach them.
“Using AI, we create profiles for each buyer and generate customized communications that continue to engage them throughout their search,” she said.
For instance, if one of her Houston-based buyers contacted them in January, indicating their interest in purchasing in Silverthorne, Colorado, they would use AI tools to begin sending them targeted updates via email, phone, and text message from February through May.
“This keeps the client engaged with our team and eliminates the need to recreate conversations with each subsequent interaction,” Bassova said. “By the time our clients schedule a visit to see the properties they are interested in purchasing, we have already established an existing relationship with them.”
‘Like competing with 1 hand tied behind one’s back’
Walker draws on Gallup research showing that technology sector employees who rarely use AI are three times as likely to be laid off as peers who use it frequently. He argues that the pattern is playing out in real estate through a slower, less visible mechanism. Nobody fires a self-employed agent. The market does it for them.
“When agents compete in an already difficult market with the part-timers and low-volume agents getting squeezed, refusing to use AI is like competing with one hand tied behind one’s back,” Walker said. “Over the next two years, those who will survive are the agents who will let AI do the speed work and paperwork while spending time on the human element of closing a deal.”
