3 Ways Artificial Intelligence (AI) is Impacting Real Estate

The artificial intelligence (AI) revolution is here, and it’s having disruptive effects on how things are done in pretty much every industry—including real estate.

At first glance, real estate might seem like it doesn’t have a lot to gain from AI. Real estate is, after all, strongly based around human-to-human interactions. While a lot of the process of finding, buying, and selling land and other types of property is increasingly done through digital interfaces, there are still always human minds at the core.

So what can robots bring to the table? As it turns out, quite a lot. Here are three ways that AI is already impacting the world of real estate land for sale for the better.

1. It’s providing stronger recommendations

One of AI’s strong suits is its ability to hone in on exactly what people are looking for to provide personalized, highly optimized listing recommendations. We’re seeing this a lot already in consumer facing retail, and now it’s making its way to real estate too, taking into account an individual’s search history, preferences, and needs in order to provide a pared down list of suitable properties. Instead of being presented with hundreds of options and having to sift through the details on their own, agents and their clients get just a handful of options, all of them already run through all relevant parameters.

Consider the Bot vs. Broker experiment, where in three out of three instances AI was able to provide better recommendations than brokers. This capability saves a lot of time, and helps make sure the right properties end up in front of the right people—a win for both buyers and sellers.

2. It’s speeding up transactions

Real estate agents work hard, but even they can’t be available 24/7. AI helps fill in communication gaps, in turn getting questions answered right away and speeding up the process of real estate transactions. This advantage is especially important during the early stages of a sale, when people may just be looking for general information on a property. Instead of having to set up a time to talk with a broker, leads can engage directly with AI chatbots and learn everything they need to know in order to decide if they want to proceed.

3. It’s generating more leads

Hustling for leads is one of the most time intensive parts of real estate, but what if it didn’t have to be? All agents know the frustration of having the perfect property but not the perfect pool of buyers for it, or alternately, having free time in the schedule and no sellers to fill it with. AI excels in lead generation, providing tools that automatically source, qualify, and nurture leads—sometimes all before they even have that first touchpoint with an agent. The result is a deeper lead pool, with less time wasted on leads who aren’t serious about closing the deal.

To accurately conceive of the role of artificial intelligence in real estate, it helps to think about what AI can’t do: namely, it can’t replace the agent role entirely. There will always be a need for human-facing interactions in real estate, but as we move forward, those interactions will be amplified and enhanced by robot-driven data and processing. That’s good news for clients, and for agents themselves.