Real estate agents aren’t going anywhere, but those who use technology that’s already available are set up to excel and win back more of their personal time.
That’s a takeaway from Kevin Hawkins, a long-time real estate and communications professional and an expert in applying artificial intelligence to real estate.
Hawkins, president of Wav Group Communications and editor of the newsletter REAL AI, recently published a book, that acts as a kind of step-by-step guide to some of the tools that real estate agents can use to power their businesses.
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Agentic AI — the type of technology that can automate more daily tasks like reading through and responding to texts and emails — is coming, and it will be welcome when it does.
“Do you know how much time that would save the average agent?” Hawkins said.
We haven’t reached that point yet, but there are a handful of ways agents already use AI, possibly without even knowing it, and more free or inexpensive tools they can use.
Inman spoke with Hawkins about his new book and the tools that he says agents should make a part of their daily lives.
The following has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Inman: Eighty-two percent of agents are already using AI to write listing descriptions, and about two-thirds are creating some form of content, whatever that might be. You mentioned that they’ve been using a number of tools without even knowing it.
Hawkins: AI has been around us and with us in real estate literally since Case-Shiller and the housing value estimates and predictive analytics and data analysis and we just called data mining and all this. Those are really pieces of AI.
What’s really been different is the generative AI that has really been accessible to everybody. If we can just talk about AI in terms of what it’s doing for us, I think it will be omnipresent, I think it will be everywhere.
You were kind of clear on why you wrote the book: because agents need to know the power of AI.
And the dangers. It’s like the early days of the Internet. The rewards are very high, but so are the risks. Too many people forget to talk about the safeguards. Safe AI is a practice. It really is, and it’s something you have to do every single time that you approach using AI.
For the amount of benefits you can get back — this is probably the cheapest thing you’ll ever spend in your life to get 100X benefits from — but [only] if you use it right. That’s the big message that agents aren’t getting today is you’ve got to be very careful.
You covered the example of how AI can generate a 150-word summary of why it’s great to list in the fall in the Pacific Northwest. It strikes me as a potential danger if you just say, ‘OK, I’m gonna 20x my content output and my newsletters and my blogs,’ and yet if whatever tool you’re using is pulling from bad sources of information, you could be putting out a whole lot of crap and misinformation.
They call it slop, and there’s a reason it’s called AI slop. The whole idea behind the book was to teach people the things that they could do to protect themselves, and that it’s just a tool.
It’s like QuickBooks. It’s like Excel. It has limitations, and it has capabilities. But if you’re not using it the right way, you’re going to make a big mistake.
It sounds like you’re not cutting out the fact-checker. AI can be a productivity tool, but it can’t do everything, and you need to be careful.
You’re right. I mean, is it taking us a little bit longer? It is, but is it still a lot less time than the three hours that we normally spent before? Oh, my goodness. Yes.
That’s why they call it prompt engineering. Until you get really good at asking the right questions, you’re not going to get as good of information.
If you just trust it or start to trust it and don’t still have that little bit of verification, that agent in the loop as we call it, then you’re gonna end up with this mistake that could literally be very, very bad for you and your business.
Give me some examples of helpful things agents could do that many aren’t.
Take your credit card receipts, copy them and see how much you’re spending this month on gas versus food versus other things for your tax breaks.
An agent friend of mine had no idea that he could take an inspection report and get a summary for his client. He did it in Claude and he went, ‘Oh, my god, that saved me five hours of dissecting that information and putting it into something a consumer could read.’
You mention that all of this is accelerating rapidly, and the AI tools themselves are very quickly doing things they couldn’t do previously.
Six months ago Claude could not do what it does today. [AI companies] are able to go to market with certain features that took months at other companies are being done in days.
We’re still in that phase of manual control, of deciding what chatbot can help you do whatever job you’re trying to do. But the chatbots themselves are getting such incredible features in such a short period of time, it’s almost numbing to try to keep up with it.
That might be intimidating to hear for an individual agent who is facing the market that they’re facing. They might already be like, ‘Yeah, I’m already on the way out, real estate is not working out for me, I’m looking for a new job.’ Why should they look at ChatGPT, potentially?
ChatGPT has always been the Swiss Army knife, and I think it will continue to be for most real estate agents. If they pay $50 a month for that business version, they get the protections. They get the kind of speed and capabilities that 90 percent of the stuff they’re gonna end up doing anyways is gonna be handled just fine as long as they make sure that they trust and verify any of the stuff that they’re doing.
Even though all these changes are going on, we don’t need to get into the weeds on this. Do they need to know about how the sausage is made? No, they don’t. Do they need to know that they can do some really cool stuff with the sausage? Yeah, they do.
You mentioned that agents can be afraid of AI. My takeaway from your book is that agents aren’t going anywhere. You don’t believe that the acceleration of where AI might be going is ever going to replace the person that’s involved in the transaction?
It cannot. And I think this is the most important point about technology.
The truth of the matter is that there’s a human element in the purchasing of the house, and I know it personally, I was a loan officer for eight and a half years. I worked at Fannie Mae before that, but I was down in the trenches with real estate agents. So I know how a real estate transaction really happens and what an agent is.
What is an agent?
An agent is not just a financial transaction person. They are the therapists. They are the problem solvers. They really are the quarterback of the transaction from an emotional standpoint, and this is the most emotionally charged decision that anybody makes in their life.
I still believe that our emotional component can never be replicated by anything, and that that’s what makes us as humans always different. And real estate is at the center of that, and it will not change.
So agents that fear that somehow AI is going to replace them are looking at it wrong. You don’t have to worry about AI replacing you. You have to worry about agents using AI replacing you.
AI is just a tool, and I think that’s the most important thing that people need to realize. It’s not something that’s going to change what you do or how you do it except for taking away a lot of stuff that you probably shouldn’t be doing.
The future is here — and it’s powered by AI. October is Artificial Intelligence Month at Inman. We’ll dive into how agents, brokerages and startups are harnessing AI to reimagine real estate, and we’ll honor the trailblazers leading the way with Inman AI Awards.
Email Taylor Anderson