Ep. 36 How Do Realtors Use AI?

Unlock the secrets of transforming the real estate game with cutting-edge AI technology. We've just returned from the PacWest Pacific West convention and are here to share how tools like ChatGPT 4.0 are revolutionizing the Vancouver real estate market. Imagine effortlessly finding the last time boilers were replaced in strata documents without the traditional hassle and cost. Whether you're a seasoned realtor or new to the field, this episode promises insights into AI's untapped potential and why only a select few are currently taking advantage of these game-changing tools.

Join us as we investigate the exciting role of virtual staging and AI-driven marketing trends in real estate. Learn how virtual staging can help potential buyers visualize a property's full potential, making vacant units more appealing. We discuss AI's ability to create SEO-friendly content and generate insightful data analyses, all while maintaining that essential human touch in connecting families with their future homes. This conversation is a blend of technology enthusiasm and personal reflections on evolving practices, ensuring you're informed and inspired about the future of the real estate industry.

Chapters

• 0:00 AI in Real Estate
• 7:22 AI in Real Estate Marketing Trends
• 13:58 Utilizing AI in Real Estate

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hey friends, welcome back to Keeping it Real, the Vancouver and area residential real estate podcast that aims to keep things real so that you know what you're talking about when people ask you about real estate in Vancouver. My name is Jackie McCarnan, I am a residential realtor here on the North Shore and I got something kind of cool to talk to you about today. As always, I like to just throw in a little disclaimer that anything you hear on the podcast is my own research coupled with my experience and lots of different opinions from other agents, and I actually think that my opinions are probably less common among realtors, but you be the judge of that. That said, this particular episode is not very opinionated and it's definitely not political. It's kind of fun and I hope you enjoy it.

Speaker 1: 0:52

We are going to talk about AI and the use of AI in real estate, and I'll tell you why in a second. All right, so I just spent the last two weeks at a convention here in Vancouver called PacWest Pacific West and this is a convention put on by our board and a couple other boards around the province, and it basically is an opportunity to bring together a bunch of realtors and a bunch of real estate adjacent businesses like mortgage brokers and gift givers and banks and that sort of thing, and the idea is that we all get together and we do some learning and we have a whole bunch of sessions. It's basically like a pretty cool forum for us to both network and learn. Some new things attended the conference this week were the discussions about AI. We probably could have done a whole conference just on the use of artificial intelligence and how it is going to be a game changer for the real estate industry. Having said that, in my last eight and a half years as a realtor, I have heard the word game changer a number of times and nothing really changes the game.

Speaker 1: 2:26

We have a lot of tech tools. There are myriad of ways that realtors can, myriad of things realtors can use to market themselves and try to cut themselves out of all the noise around real estate and marketing. I think I mean, obviously, this podcast is one of those things that are available to us, one of those tech tools that are available to us. Not very many people do a podcast. I don't know that it actually gets me any business, but it does get feedback and people do sometimes recognize me for the podcast, which is kind of cool. I like that and I do get a lot of questions that come up from the information that I dole out in this podcast. So, as far as marketing goes, I call it a win because it provides some sort of name recognition. But when it comes to real estate marketing and understanding real estate conditions, ai truly is going to be a game changer.

Speaker 1: 3:30

I don't know if you guys know this or not, but when we list a condominium for sale we have to include the strata documents for the last three years. So oftentimes we can get those through the portal or we can contact the strata management company, which is and I bet you, not one agent is going to argue with this almost always a nightmare to contact the property management company or strata management company to get the documents. We very often have to go through something called eStrata Hub, which has all of the documents for everybody, and they charge an arm and a leg and the argument can be made that realtors make enough money to pay these fees. But it feels a lot like extortion because they are pretty much a monopoly on strata documents and there are a couple of lower mainland realtors who are working on changing that, which is kind of cool, but anyway I digress. So when you list a condo for sale you have to have all the three years of documents from the strata. You have to have the depreciation report. Stratas are supposed to redo a depreciation report I think it's every three years. It might be two years. They can defer it if they have a good reason. Seems most strata places have a good reason. I don't really know what constitutes a good reason with BCFSA, but lots of places don't have their depreciation reports, sometimes an engineering report. All the strata documents, the AGM, any special assessments and something called a Form B, all have to be sorted out prior to listing the unit for sale. Most brokerages require this before they will put the listing online. There are some brokerages that don't require it and will put it up without the documents. But I work at REMAX and REMAX is nothing but compliant. So under compliancy we like to have all the documents there so that there aren't any arguments later those strata documents look like.

Speaker 1: 5:50

So the minutes. So every year strata corporations have to have an annual general meeting and oftentimes they have special meetings throughout the year to decide on specific things. Like, let's say, a boiler blows up, they have to have a meeting to determine whether or not they're going to buy a new boiler and how they're going to pay for it. Will they use the contingency reserve fund or will they ask the members for money to pay for it, that sort of thing and so each of those meetings have minutes, like regular meetings, and we have to read through all those, which is great, super fun, as you can imagine. Sometimes stratas are really on top of it and they have lots of meetings, which means great, super fun, as you can imagine, sometimes stratas are really on top of it and they have lots of meetings, which means there are lots and lots of minutes.

Speaker 1: 6:31

So one of the ways that AI can be used is you can't really use it to specifically read through all the strata documents, but if you have a specific question like when, when were the boilers replaced, you can have ChatGPT 4.0 read through the strata documents and determine when the boilers were replaced. So for us, that's amazing. That is such a game changer, time saver, it's amazing. It's so cool and I you know a lot of us love it and those I would say I bet you less than 20% of realtors are utilizing ChatGPT this way, but it's a big time saver and those I would say I bet you less than 20% of realtors are utilizing chat GPT this way, but it's it's a big time saver and obviously the more time saved, the more you can do other stuff. But when it comes to the public, it's not really. That's not really where you guys are going to see the use of AI in real estate, but I'll tell you where you are going to see it.

Speaker 1: 7:22

If you're flipping through listings and you see a photograph of an empty room and then you click the next photograph and all of a sudden there's furniture in that room, chances are it has been virtually staged. When I started in real estate, you were not allowed to change, edit the photos in any way you could. I mean, you could make them brighter or whatever, but you weren't allowed to add things like furniture or take out hydro lines or add blue sky or any of that sort of thing. So we were basically stuck with exactly you know what the place looked like and I think that's kind of great because then that's super authentic. That said, virtual staging is a very useful tool to give people looking at the pictures the idea of what furniture would look like in the space.

Speaker 1: 8:09

So if you got, if you know if, if I have a vacant unit and I want to have it look better than it does I'm, I might use virtual staging. I also might use, you know, actual physical staging, or I might use a combination of the two. Right it, ai is used, artificial intelligence is used to determine how furniture would be placed in a room, and you know the virtual staging apps are pretty cool. You can tell it. You know what your color scheme is and how you want it to look. This is kind of a cool thing for you as a consumer is, if you have the pictures of the empty rooms and you want to know what your type of furniture looks like in there, you could probably stage it yourself and get an idea. That's kind of a neat application for AI in real estate acquisition.

Speaker 1: 9:03

Getting back to the marketing side, though, this is really where I use a lot of AI, and I know that people who attended the conference this week, they were like, if you split the room in quarters, there would be one quarter who, like me, have a pretty good understanding of particularly chat, gpt, and then I have the paid version, and then you'd have people who listen to that speech and the tops of their heads blew off and their brains everywhere, and then you'd have people who kind of get it and then you have people who really, really, really really get it. I'm definitely not at the top of the I totally get it and utilize it in every way possible list, but I'm definitely getting more and more used to using the chat, chat GPT and other other AI tools, mostly one of the things I like to do and I don't even think of it as cheating, although it feels a little bit like cheating. I can get ChatGPT to read through all of the stats from our board. Stats are boring to look at. If they're written out, they look good in the graph. So I can say to the chat GPT hey, read this article I just got from my board. Tell me you know how many single family homes were listed in North Vancouver in September and how many single family homes have sold in North Vancouver in September, and then plot that on a graph for me, and then I can spit that graph out and show you guys how things are going. So I'm going to try to do that in the article that I'm going to put on the website this week and see if it works. I haven't used it that way. Mostly I use it for writing search engine optimized articles for my website and making landing pages, which I will be doing a whole lot more of in the near future. But the thing with AI is it's almost indiscernible now from you know, if I write an article and I upload that article to chat GPT and I tell the chat this is how I write, this is the sort of vibe that I have, this is the voice I write in it's. You know, when I use the word authentic, I bet you people are going to laugh because I'm teaching artificial intelligence to authentically sound like me. But I want my you know, anything that comes from my website to sound authentic. And so I'm going to say to chat GPT right in my voice Then I'm going to grab a whole bunch of information from a bunch of different sites and I'm going to get chat GPT to write me an article or write me markdown language first of all, which.

Speaker 1: 11:44

That just means there's a title and a paragraph title, paragraph, subtitle, title, subtitle, paragraph, that sort of thing that's markdown down, and I'm going to ask it to link to proof and then I'm going to ask it to write this article in a conversational tone. I'm going to tell it how long I want the article to be and then it's going to spit out an article in seconds. That would take me all day or well, I don't know, an hour, whatever, but it's. It's a remarkable tool because it provides me with the opportunity to give really great information that is fully accurate and vetted and researched, and it gives you the opportunity to read an article that is a summary of all of the research. So it's way less boring for you, it's way less work for me and it allows me to do other things, like a podcast and this new big project that I keep hinting about that is being soft launched this week.

Speaker 1: 12:46

A lot of the conversation at the conference was about, you know, oh, is AI going to take over? Is it? You know? And obviously there's never going to be a substitute for a human person standing in front of you showing the attributes of a home. Ai is a computer, so it can't show emotion and it can't feel your emotion, and I have always, always said that real estate is part business, part emotional, and I think you know, when we're looking for places for our families to grow up, we really want to feel good about where we live, and I think you know when we're looking for places for our families to grow up, we really want to feel good about where we live, and the AI has no idea how to do that. We could tell it how to, but it's never going to get the nuance of human emotion. Or I mean, maybe one day it will, I don't know. I don't know when the monsters take over, but I think anybody kind of grumbling about it and dragging their feet is really super naive. Because it's here. It's getting better every day. The chat GPT we had four months ago is ridiculously bad, useless, compared to what we have today. And two or three months from now it's going to be better, and six months from now it's going to be even better.

Speaker 1: 13:58

And if you're thinking that you don't want to have AI tell you what's happening in the market, you need to think again, because humans make more mistakes, right. Computers make fewer mistakes, obviously. That's why and I'm going to digress here, because I've been doing a lot of research on AI over the last six months due to doctor error when writing prescriptions or diagnosing patients Now this is the largest application for AI to date. They are saving lives like crazy now because when they put the symptoms into the computer, the AI computer, that system can scrub records from all over the world and determine a more accurate diagnosis. And then, you know, a doctor writes a script and they get a letter wrong and it's, you know, cyclobenzadrine instead of cyclobenzaprine. I don't know if those are real drugs, but I'm just giving you an example. And the one works and the other one does harm Well, the computer. They don't think, you know, they don't think there's any relationship between those two words in any way. They think that those are two completely different things, which of course they are. But humans make mistakes. Computers make fewer mistakes.

Speaker 1: 15:29

I think it's fascinating that that particular application in the healthcare field is going to save hundreds and thousands of lives, which is awesome. Now, obviously, it's not nearly so dire when it comes to real estate, but we are definitely going to see more and more use of AI as time goes on in the real estate industry. And I, for one, I'm here for it. I love all this stuff. I'm, you know, I'm an early adapter, early adopter. I do everything I can to keep on top of the tech. I think you know people in my office call me for advice on tech stuff and social media and all the marketing stuff. So I definitely feel like I have a responsibility to both my colleagues and my clients to keep up and all this stuff. And if you want to know more about it, I'm more than happy to sit down and have a coffee and talk to you about it.

Speaker 1: 16:21

I think the main point and the main reason why we should all be embracing AI for real estate is because and I have said this from the beginning of my career is because and I have said this from the beginning of my career the numbers don't lie. Stats can be manipulated to say one thing over another by leaving things out, but if you're asking the computer to collate a whole bunch of statistics on, let's say, single family homes in North Vancouver in the last six weeks, it's going to give you an accurate number. It's not going to lie. It's not going to leave out single family homes that have only one kitchen or you know, unless you prompt it that way. But it I just really feel that there is an authenticity that's going to come from using artificial intelligence to scrub through the data and come out with fully accurate predictions and numbers, and I'm I'm excited about that, particularly for my own business, which is based on, you know, definitely a data-driven agent. It's also I'm really into that whole authenticity thing. I just not very good at lying and I really like that. I have this new tool in my toolbox that is fantastic for both accuracy and for marketing, so I love it. I'd be super interested, as always, to hear what you think about the use of AI in both marketing and in statistical analysis.

Speaker 1: 17:55

Also, I'm not talking about, you know, creating images of things that don't exist. You know, when we talk about virtual staging, it's mostly just to give you an idea of how furniture would look in the space. It's not to, you know, trick you into thinking that this particular place is furnished. I mean, almost everybody I know that uploads virtual staging photos has the empty room first and the virtual stage photo next. We're allowed to have 40 photos on our listing. So I mean, 20 photos is enough to describe a place. So if you use 20 without the virtual staging and 20 with, then people will certainly get an idea of what the place looks like. I mean, unless you have a 40 room mansion, which is definitely not my market. In fact, if you have a 40 room mansion, you can ask me to refer you to somebody, but I cannot sell your house. That's just too much for me. I cannot sell your house. That's just too much for me. I am more the kind of you know, single family homes downsizing to a cool condo that's my vibe. Or new, new, first time home buyers that's my vibe too. I'm not a giant mansion kind of agent, but I have friends who will do that.

Speaker 1: 19:10

I hope you learned something from today. I bet you a lot of you didn't know some of the stuff that AI is being used for in real estate. I hope I was able to enlighten you on some of the cool stuff that we're doing. I'm, again, always happy to have a conversation about it and definitely connect with me through the website or just give me a call. Text whatever I don't know, I don't care how. I'm easy to get in touch with DM. Slide into my DMs. That's what the cool kids say, apparently.

Speaker 1: 19:40

As always, thanks so much for listening to Keeping it Real. I really love doing the podcast. I don't know how much longer I'm going to be doing it, because I have something very big coming up at the end of October, as I've been hinting at, and there will be a different podcast that goes with that. But if you want to keep hearing Keeping it Real, let me know. I'm happy to. Maybe we'll bring it back to once every two weeks. We'll have to see.

Speaker 1: 20:05

You can get Keeping it Real anywhere. You get your podcasts, including Spotify and Apple Podcasts and at northvanhomesalescom slash podcasts. I'd also like to remind you that if you are even thinking about buying or selling real estate anytime in the next little while, or even like in the next three years, give me a call, because there are some prep stuff that we can do that you might not even know about yet. So I'm always happy to go over it with you and I'm looking for referrals for buyers and sellers here on the North Shore, happy to help any of your friends and family. Obviously, you will look like such a rock star if you refer me. All joking aside, nobody's going to work harder for your friends and family and for you than I am. So send me your referrals. Let's go. The market is changing very quickly. That's all for me. Have a wonderful weekend and I will see you guys right back here next week. Thank you.