For the past 18 months, I have trained thousands of real estate agents across the U.S. and Canada on how to use AI. That classroom experience has given me a very different perspective from tech-centric AI instructors or agents turned AI trainers.
Agents do not need a tech person’s favorite AI tool. They need AI that fits how they work every day: creating content, communicating with clients, researching, working with images, marketing listings and running a business. That is why I do not recommend Claude as most agents’ go-to AI tool. It still does not create images, which shocks most agents when they hear it.
Real estate AI training: 10 lessons you need
These are the 10 things I teach most.
1. The best AI tools are also the safest tools
This may be the most important thing I teach: Do not run your real estate business on free AI. The best AI tools are also the safest tools, so you do not have to choose between performance and protection.
Think of it this way: If you are traveling on the freeway, would you rather be in a Ferrari or riding a horse? The Ferrari is faster, more powerful and safer: that’s your business-grade chatbot. The horse is the free version, with reduced performance and a hallucination rate that can be five times higher.
When your business, your clients and trust are involved, free is not where you want to be.
2. Start with ChatGPT Business as your primary AI tool
If an agent asks me where to start, my answer is easy: ChatGPT Business. ChatGPT Plus is terrific, but it’s still a consumer product. ChatGPT Business is an agent’s Swiss Army knife, with incredible performance, persistent memory across chats and projects, and business-grade privacy, security and controls as it defaults to never train on your data.
The bigger reason is capability. ChatGPT writes, researches, analyzes files, works with voice, remembers information, creates and edits images and decodes what it sees. The other day, Claude Pro refused to decode a PDF with more than 100 images. ChatGPT Business finished the same task swiftly.
3. Personalize your AI
Generic AI creates generic content, and that is where much of the AI slop comes from. The fix is not another clever prompt. The fix is teaching your AI who you are.
With paid AI, customize your settings and teach it your voice and brand. Feed it examples of your writing, audience, specialties, market and preferences. Tell it the words you use and the ones you never want it to use. Share your final drafts and even examples you hated.
The more your AI learns you, the less time you spend starting over. This is when AI begins to feel more like your writing assistant than a content creation machine.
4. You don’t need to be a prompt engineer
Yes, real estate agents need to learn the best prompting process. But today, they do not need to spend hours learning how to write elaborate prompts. Becoming a prompt engineer is outdated advice.
Agents simply need to talk to AI, explain what they want to accomplish and give it the details. One cheat code I share is Wispr Flow, which lets you talk to your AI, email, texts, Word or Google Docs.
Ramble, misspeak or change your mind. AI is remarkably good at unpacking messy language. Then ask it to write the prompt. That’s why I say prompt engineering is dead. AI does it better than we can.
5. Use AI as a content multiplier
My mantra is simple: Create, amplify and multiply. One good piece of original content should not remain one piece of content. Yes, Katie Lance, I’ve been listening to you!
Take a market report and turn it into a blog, email, Instagram post, Facebook post, LinkedIn post, video script and client handout. AI multiplies your best ideas without forcing you to start from scratch every time.
6. Use AI as the great converter
AI also may be the world’s greatest conversion tool. Today, you rarely need to worry about the file format before giving it to AI.
ChatGPT Business can read and interpret almost 40 different file types, from PDFs, Word documents, Excel and CSV files to PowerPoints, text files, images, audio files and even short video clips. Gemini can handle 40-plus file types, including much larger audio and video files.
AI also unlocks what a file can do. ChatGPT Business turns handwritten listing notes into an action plan, images of a home into a short story, a brainstorming session into social posts or photos of receipts into an expense report. It also converts languages: ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini all translate dozens of them.
The next time you open a document, don’t think about what it is. Instead, ask yourself: What could it become?
7. Maximize image creation, editing and decoding
Real estate is intensely visual. For a while, Gemini was my image champ. Not anymore. Today, ChatGPT trounces it for the image creation and editing work I teach agents, especially its ability to retain precision through multiple revisions.
Agents need to learn all three parts of visual AI: creating images, editing images and decoding images. None of that changes the basic rule that you should never use AI to materially misrepresent a property. That’s why California now has a new AI image law.
8. Use more than one paid chatbot
It is no longer good enough to rely on a single AI platform. They change constantly, and every few weeks one seems to gain a new superpower. I teach ABC: Always Be Comparing. Today’s best AI may not be tomorrow’s.
The best AI Cheat Code agents love: use AI to verify AI. Pit the chatbots that you pay for against each other. AI makes mistakes, especially with incomplete instructions, but another AI can often expose them. The final check, however, still rests with you.
9. Practice Safe AI
Safe AI starts with protecting client information. Never put confidential, personally identifiable or transaction-sensitive information into an AI system. When in doubt, leave it out.
Safe AI also means keeping HIM and HER in every AI workflow. HIM is the Human In the Middle: you remain the final decision-maker. HER is Human Evaluate and Review: checking accuracy, compliance, tone and common sense before anything reaches a client.
As agentic AI grows and starts taking actions instead of simply answering questions, the HIM and the HER become even more important. Never let AI replace your expertise or judgment.
10. AI is an unlicensed real estate agent
This may be the biggest warning agents need as we move into the world of AI agents. AI can increasingly send emails, interact with CRMs, schedule appointments, communicate with consumers and take other actions on an agent’s behalf. However, AI does not have a real estate license.
As real estate compliance expert Summer Goralik says, treat AI as your unlicensed assistant, because that’s what it is. Never allow it to do any task that your state law says requires a licensed agent.
Some agents are vibe coding to connect email, CRM and other systems or allowing AI platforms to reach across different ecosystems. That increases security risk and may allow an unlicensed system to perform activities state law requires a license to do.
AI has no license to lose. You do.
That’s why the biggest lesson I teach agents remains the simplest: Use the best AI you can, learn everything it can do and keep the licensed human firmly in control.
This October, Inman turns its focus to AI and its rapid rise in real estate. During Artificial Intelligence Month, we’re digging into the startups shaking things up and the established players folding AI into their offerings.
Kevin Hawkins is “The REAL AI Guy,” a national AI instructor, WAV Group partner, editor and co-founder of the REAL AI newsletter and podcast, and author of the Amazon bestseller, The REAL AI Guide for Real Estate Agents.
