From left, Shelly Vincent, Laura O’Connor, Dan Troup, Shaleen Khatod and moderator Dave Garland. Photo by AJ Canaria.
It isn’t as shiny and new as it was a couple years ago, when ChatGPT took the world by storm, but AI, or large language models, are still highly influential and fast-evolving pieces of technology that real estate professionals can’t ignore in their businesses.
In a session titled How to Explore and Expand AI to Your Advantage, at RISMedia’s 36th Annual CEO & Leadership Exchange this past September, a panel of real estate thought leaders from different backgrounds found a more reflective tone, sharing both their strategies in the short and long term as well as their higher-level hopes and worries for AI technology.
“I look at AI from a broad perspective,” said Shaleen Khatod, SVP of product management & strategic alliances at CoreLogic. “You have this idea of having the best ingredients. AI, it’s like having a meal, and when you care about the meal, there are three things, which is—one, do you have the best ingredients that make up that meal? Two, do you have the right recipes that can provide that meal? And three, how are you presenting that meal?”
With so many different products vying for your attention—and so many in the industry already using these tools—the idea of using boxed macaroni and cheese as your ingredients should give you pause, Khatod says, with those cheap noodles and artificial cheese representing the data that powers an AI model.
“I think it’s really important to get those best ingredients if you want the best AI,” he said, touting CoreLogic’s 5 billion data points gathered over 50 years.
Laura O’Connor, COO of JPAR, said one of the challenges is putting the work into finding those sources of good ingredients—the partners that can work best with you as a real estate business. She said JPAR is sending team members to three day or longer bootcamps, ensuring that members of the company are “empowered” to explore the complex ecosystem.
Before attending the conference—which took place at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C.—O’Connor said she polled team members on what programs they used or found useful. She said they gave her recommendations for 20 text-focused AI programs, 29 for images, 33 for audio, eight for music, 27 for video and 87 action-related products.
That depth and breadth of options brings up another important point: safety.
“How do we give them the guardrails to safely use this in a way that they’re not jeopardizing their fiduciary responsibilities?” O’Connor asks. “It takes one disgruntled employee to put all of your private company information out for the public. It can also take one really well-meaning staff person that’s trying to be helpful, that doesn’t understand the implication.”
O’Connor recommends creating some “solid guardrails” before pushing out AI programs, but also focusing on giving team members “the real fun stuff” that they can use and get excited about.
Shelly Vincent, employing broker at HomeSmart, reiterated how quickly AI can become a problem without those guardrails.
“One of the things we need to watch out for is—we have so many photorealistic images coming out of AI,” she said. “When you’re talking about staging, when you’re talking about reimagining home renovations, things like that, having those photographs can be great in helping to sell a house, but we need to ensure the consumer understands that these are possibilities. This is not the actual photos of the current home, and so we need to make sure there’s disclaimers in place and this is what it could look like.”
AI can also be used to solve these same problems, with MLSs starting to jump into AI for compliance, according to Vincent.
Dave Garland, managing partner at Second Century Ventures/Reach who moderated the panel, pointed to the regulatory landscape, specifically highlighting a Department of Justice lawsuit targeting property management giant RealPage, which is accused of price-fixing rentals using AI tech.
“Implementing some of these new technologies by making you better, quicker, faster— giving you superpowers—it’s going to call into question some of the basic practices of our inputs and outputs, of what we do,” he said.
But the skies are not all cloudy. All members of the panel had plenty of short- and longer-term things to be excited about.
Dan Troup, CEO of the Broker Public Portal, said one of the more exciting but less flashy opportunities created by AI is on the developer side, letting smaller, leaner tech-focused companies grow “at a pace we’ve never been able to move before”—even as some of the tools are in the early stages.
“We call (these tools) interns. They’re interns because they’re young still. You’ve got to push them a little bit. They don’t always get it right, but you can have as many as you want, which makes it amazing,” he says.
Vincent also highlighted how AI can help with lead-farming, helping get contacts, social media and estimates on when an address is most likely to sell. O’Connor touted an AI tool that can turn text into a training, and also gives you an “avatar (that) never has a bad hair day.”
Khatod took those small positives back to that higher level, saying that what real estate practitioners will be best off looking at what consumers want from AI tools. That almost always goes back to the basics—the “dream of homeownership.”
“That dream is about people being able to dream, and not whether they’re asking for AI. They’re asking, ‘What are the ways that I can reimagine, how can I see things that actually contribute to that dream?’” he says. “I think that translates to the agent, and being able to be the provider of tools that enable that dream.”
