Technology transforms how the stakeholders in the real estate ecosystem consume market information and connect. We have been relying on listing portals to serve us database-style content for decades. These portals are fixed to one purpose — finding homes — which requires a serious search effort by consumers. Instead, we want their search for the house of their dreams to be a fun and joyful experience. That’s where artificial intelligence (AI) steps in.
Automated, self-reliant AI-powered tools can be trained to learn the consumer’s preferences while enhancing the productivity of all stakeholders.
AI engines built for the real estate industry, when trained on meaningful dynamic data, can recognize patterns and trends unique to the sector and unlock new insights, streamline workflows and improve decision-making at every stage of the real estate journey. A real-time, industry-specific social network app can unlock these capabilities.
AI and productivity
With advanced machine learning algorithms and predictive analytics, AI can help agents to identify promising leads, personalize their outreach, connect with clients and optimize their sales strategies to close deals. For example, using AI-powered lead scoring systems, agents can quickly identify and prioritize hot leads, increasing their chances of closing more deals.
AI offers buyers and sellers a more seamless and personalized experience by analyzing vast amounts of data on everything from local market trends to individual preferences. These tools can help them streamline or broaden their search to identify the best properties or locations for their needs and navigate the complex process of buying or selling a home. AI improves the accuracy of pricing and valuation estimates. It can identify the best agents to close the deal based on their experience, success rate and areas of expertise. These capabilities can help buyers and sellers to make more informed decisions and find the right agent to represent them.
At the same time, AI can also give real estate owners and investors a competitive edge in the market by providing real-time insights into market conditions and identifying hot spots and potential investment opportunities. Additionally, AI can uncover potential risks and offer recommendations for mitigating those risks, ensuring a more profitable and sustainable investment strategy.
AI and proprietary dynamic data capabilities
Static data about real estate — property listings, transactions, mortgage ownership, school climates — is readily available in the market. When proptech portals or data analytic companies say they are analyzing real estate data to predict trends and help buyers or sellers in their decision-making, they are often using this kind of historical data.
We are taking a different approach. Building our own proprietary dynamic data set specific to the real estate industry, we are training our AI engine to recognize patterns and trends unique to the community. It primarily uses behavioral data gathered through our app, such as user reactions and engagements. Additional data collected to further meaningful and dynamic intelligence includes user-generated content (UGR), such as short-form videos and agents’ property assessments and recommendations; social map data that connects the dots between users and their followers; dynamic location data that analyzes users’ current or previous homes and their browsing history; and time relativities that explore users’ changing locations, jobs, price points and preferences and adds multiple dimensions to the data sets noted.
The result is a robust domain-specific AI training data set for the real estate industry.
AI and the social network
Social media functions like inbound marketing — people can choose to consume your content or not. It’s less intrusive than an email newsletter, which, if you send too frequently, you risk losing your subscribers. With social media, however, you can post your content and let the algorithm do its job to distribute to the right audience at the right time. It is an efficient and cost-effective way to market your services and build your brand.
While self-promotion on a social network is a more effective and modern way to reach out to clients and connections, Facebook and Instagram are not vertically integrated for specifically the real estate community.
A dedicated social messaging app for home buyers and sellers allows users access to the platform to engage with agents, brokers or other industry stakeholders. It lets agents show off their expertise, track record, properties they recommend and other content they want to share to engage their followers. They can entice their audiences with posts of short-form video moments of the properties they want to share, like the sunset view from the back porch or the inviting tree-lined street.
AI and communication
Real estate is a complex and competitive industry that requires clear and effective communication among all stakeholders. But communication between the different industry participants is traditionally fragmented, with each cohort operating within its own niche.
One of the benefits and innovations of an industry-specific chat app is that it can promote instant, real-time messaging, document sharing and integration with other real estate software within a secure and private communication channel.
The goal is to integrate the fragmented real estate industry businesses into one compatible platform using a social network platform, data and AI, providing an enhanced value proposition for stakeholders and companies.
Connectivity also fosters community between users. Everyone wants to see what their neighbor is up to! Buyers, homeowners and sellers can effortlessly keep up with the latest real estate news and developments in their community and share their real estate journey on the network.
Technology such as REAL’s chat platform has the potential to revolutionize the way the industry operates, making it more efficient, transparent and customer-centric. Leveraging AI, data and a social network, the platform redefines how the real estate industry consumes information and conducts transactions.
Thomas Ma is the co-founder of REAL.
