There is a lot of talk in the news about artificial intelligence (AI). What was once pure science fiction has become somewhat of a reality. The robots aren’t ready to take over the world just yet, but we do see AI-generated art, music and writing all over the place. The trend will probably continue to grow as the technology evolves.
Enhancing Real Estate with Technology
At The Cyr Team, we have always embraced technology as a tool to enhance our real estate business. The human element should and always will come first. However, there are advancements that we can utilize to better serve home buyers and sellers. It would be foolish to ignore them. Tools like interactive virtual tours and social media have been great for real estate marketing. AI brings plenty of value, as well. It just needs to be properly understood and certain aspects of this technology ought to be taken with a grain of salt.
How AI Can Benefit the Real Estate Process
AI can be helpful in our business with property descriptions, customer service, marketing content, and other aspects of providing answers to discreet questions. However, this does not mean we should assume every answer that an AI program like ChatGPT is correct or applies to the specific needs of our team or our clients. It can be used as one source of input among many to help people come to an important decision.
Property Descriptions & Web Content
Let’s look at property descriptions as an example. AI can pull data and info from billions of online sources simultaneously to generate a decent property description of a house for sale. Information about the house, its location and other useful details can be generated almost immediately. Yet, AI is still just a starting point. It cannot replace the human insight of an experienced real estate agent or the current homeowner who knows more about the property than anyone else. We can take a basic description written by AI and personalize it. We need to make sure the information is correct and properly representing the home that is being sold. It also needs to be written to attract the right buyers.
The same can be said for blogs. You can use an AI bot to write a blog on any given subject that is fully optimized for search engines, but it will just look and sound exactly like everyone else’s blog. Again, AI can be a good starting point to come up with relevant topics and content outlines, but that only takes you so far. Our blogs are written by humans and for humans. This is what makes the content unique and relatable—every time.
Customer Service Benefits
Some customer service responses to general questions can certainly be answered by a bot. People use Google every day to ask questions like “What school district is this property in?” or “What is the crime rate of this neighborhood?” However, it is the personal desires, concerns and goals expressed by a home buyer that help lead to finding the perfect house for their needs. Even things like body language play a very important role in our business. A search engine AI can show you house listings that meet certain criteria. They cannot read your true physical and emotional reactions when you see a home in person. Only a human can put all the pieces together to help you make the right personal decisions.
We view AI as another tool to help our team be more productive. It can streamline certain processes by providing some fast ideas. Then, we can then build on those frameworks for the most effective strategies for real estate marketing, customer service, problem solving and other aspects of our business.
If you are buying or selling a home in Southeastern Pennsylvania or Northern Delaware and want to work with a team that brings a human touch to real estate, contact The Cyr Team today!