As AI tools play a more prominent role in the real estate industry, an expert has encouraged agents to use the technology effectively to boost efficiency and gain a competitive advantage.
Deloitte Australia chief edge officer at the Centre for the Edge, Pete Williams, said that despite AI usage increasing, a significant number of agencies had seen little to no direct impact on their businesses.
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Ahead of his keynote at the upcoming REB Innovation Summit on Thursday, 25 July, Williams said the most significant opportunity for agencies to advance their business through AI was to leverage it for text-based tasks.
He said that agents could utilise the tool to speed up administrative tasks by transcribing meetings, sending information, and constructing personalised communications tailored to each client.
“The reality is that anything where there’s a lot of paper or words, that is where AI is really outstanding,” Williams told REB.
While it could excel when handling text-heavy tasks, Williams said that users needed to provide a high level of clarity and specificity when prompting the AI to avoid producing “AI slop”.
“Lazy prompts get lazy responses,” Williams said.
“Don’t just use it as a question-and-answer machine. Put into it the situation or the context that you’re dealing with and what tasks you want it to do.”
If agents were struggling to achieve the desired result with their prompts, Williams said they could actually directly ask the AI engine what it needed to reach their goal.
He said that when one agent found an effective way to utilise AI, they should share it with the rest of the team to enhance efficiency, as the most successful agencies were those that employed the technology across their entire businesses.
“It’s about really embedding it into the way we do things and starting to say, ‘Let's stop doing these things one by one. Let's start to build tools and AI agents we all use.’”
“So it is moving from this idea of ‘let’s give everybody an individual productivity tool and hope they get value from it’ to ‘We know where the value is, where time is spent and how to make the most of it’.”
Additionally, Williams said there were many other ways agents could use AI to increase efficiency and free up more time to spend with clients.
“Like most software, people just scratch the surface of what it can do and don’t have a full understanding of it. That can be a pretty easy way of getting ahead of the pack,” Williams said.
While understanding how to leverage AI could strengthen a business, Williams said that misunderstanding it could stifle an agency’s potential growth.
“And that’s one of the things that we see a lot with AI across any industry, which is that people are using it for productivity purposes, but as a business they are not seeing the impact,” he said.
“We know that they provide value, but it isn’t quite showing up, so it becomes ‘Well, how do you get that value?”
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