Inman and Lofty are building the next version of the Inman platform together, the companies announced at Inman Connect San Diego on Wednesday. Lofty founder and CEO Joe Chen joined Inman CEO Tom Bohn on stage to detail a suite of artificial intelligence tools set to roll out by January.
Joe Chen | Lofty
The partnership centers on 3 new features: Ask Inman, an AI research tool built on Inman’s editorial archive and live market data; Social Studio, a hyperlocal content generator pulling from Inman articles; and an expanded AI certification program for agents.
“This is not a sponsorship. It isn’t a logo on a slide,” Bohn said. “It’s two companies who believe in the same thing: that the industry deserves leading-edge tools built by people who actually understand how real estate works.”
Token costs will fall faster than they break the business
Chen framed the timing around a broader shift in AI economics. Two years ago, he said, leading AI labs were generating an estimated $10 billion to $20 billion in combined annual revenue. Today that figure is closer to $200 billion, with combined valuations exceeding the entire market cap of the Russell 2000.
Real estate has been slower than other industries to adopt the technology, Chen said, largely because brokerage work is relationship-driven rather than computational.
“We are an industry of salespeople,” Chen said. “As salespeople, we spend most of the time talking to customers, talking to each other, facilitating transactions. So even though we all want to consume tokens, the nature of our work just doesn’t generate that much AI usage on its own.”
That, he argued, is starting to change as AI tools move beyond coding applications and into sales support and back-office operations, areas he said weren’t viable even two years ago.
Chen said Lofty is betting that token costs will keep falling as AI infrastructure investment continues, making sales-oriented AI tools cheaper to deploy at scale. He also acknowledged the tension in that bet. Lofty’s own AI sales agent product recently drew strong customer reviews alongside runaway token costs that, in some cases, made the offering unprofitable.
“I believe research and new startups in the AI chip space will dramatically lower token costs, and each token will also become more powerful, delivering more value per token,” Chen said.
2 new tools: a research assistant and a content generator
Ask Inman is designed to combine large language models with two data sets Chen said aren’t readily available to major AI labs: live market data and four decades of Inman editorial content.
“Whatever question, whatever query that the agent has, they’re going to get [an] answer from Ask Inman,” Chen said.
Bohn said early testing has shown agents gravitating toward hyperlocal queries — questions about what’s happening in their specific market on a given day — which the company is addressing through a companion feature called Market Day.
Tom Bohn | Inman
Social Studio, meanwhile, lets agents feed Inman 2.0 articles and data into an AI tool that generates localized social media scripts branded with the agent’s own logo.
Bohn said the idea originated from an internal staff meeting after the company noticed agents already repurposing Inman stories for their own social feeds.
“Why are we fighting that?” Bohn said he recalled asking. “Why don’t we build something that makes it easier for them to share that and use it, put their logo on it and extend our brand overall?”
Chen compared the idea behind Social Studio to the invention of the machine gun.
“Every piece of content is a bullet. In a competitive market, everyone’s shooting at the same target,” he said. “If you have more bullets, and bigger bullets, coming out of your gun, your chances of hitting the target go up. So we’re giving agents a more powerful weapon. Upgrading them with the power of AI, and making it generally available to everyone.”
The new implicit license for a ‘future-proof agent’
The companies are also expanding a joint AI certification program aimed at helping agents use AI sales tools “professionally,” in Chen’s words, rather than relying on adoption alone.
“Today, other than the real estate license, there’s another implicit license that you can get,” Chen said. “I think the Inman-Lofty AI certificate is the driver’s license equivalent for a future-proof agent.”
Asked how the companies plan to keep the tools from becoming outdated as AI capabilities shift, Chen pointed to token consumption itself as the intended barometer of success. If the partnership works as intended, he said, usage will climb high enough that the companies eventually have to cap consumption or introduce variable pricing.
“If we can’t get there, then we’re not successful enough,” Chen said.
Chen added that as long as the Inman-Lofty software and its AI’s capabilities ride on the fundamental improvement of AI itself — as long as they keep feeding it user queries and the latest data — the product will keep getting better.
“Not just because we work hard to keep up, but because of the underlying power of AI itself,” Chen said. “There are trillions of dollars invested in AI right now, and the people who invested that capital want returns. The only way to get those returns is for industries outside of AI to adopt it and pay for it.”
