Agents as avatars: AI has become industry’s hyperfocus

After hours of house hunting online, you've found a listing that feels like “the one” and inquire. You instantly receive a link: It's a confirmation of the tour you requested with the listing agent, calling you by name and highlighting your desired features.

But the actual tour guide ready to take you through the property is not a real person.

It's an artificial intelligence version of the agent, and that avatar, at the same time, is giving similar personalized tours to a dozen other potential buyers.

When you want to view the property, you're met with a lockbox and a trained chatbot to punch any real-time questions into. The agent is actually at their office, monitoring their tours and overflowing inbox, requesting AI to develop a month's worth of social media posts of their avatar showcasing properties or spitting out housing market data.

This scenario is not the reality for most buyers today, but AI tools geared toward real estate agents are increasingly trying to make it, or something similar, a reality in the near future.

For agents and much of the U.S. workforce, AI is touted as the technology that helps them do more with less. And although many agents today say their role in homebuying — typically the priciest purchase someone ever makes — will never change, the fast-growing usage of AI appears to pave the way for that to become reality.

It's not just a handy tool for real estate agents, but AI has come with a nearly fear-inducing message: Use it or be left behind.

“There's going to be a world of winners and losers in the world of AI,” Matt Britton, an AI entrepreneur and author, said to hundreds of real estate agents at the opening session of the National Association of Realtors’ annual conference, known as NAR NXT, where the AI topic took center stage.

“But we can do something about it. … There is so much promise right now," Britton said.

Agents are tapping AI more than ever to "power things from behind," according to Rebecca Thomson, vice president of learning at leading brokerage Coldwell Banker.

That's most commonly writing listing descriptions, virtually staging properties, handling client correspondence and planning out social media calendars. Some brokerages now offer a training sidekick, such as at Coldwell Banker, where agents can practice with AI to fine-tune their property tours or prepare answers to questions that might come their way from clients.

In the case of the avatar, for example, the machine-created virtual agents can also fill in for their human versions, providing virtual listing tours or creating AI-written transcripts for social posts that the virtual avatar reads. Such products are offered through firms like Pivo, Roomvu or HeyGen.

“If you don’t want to get out of bed and do it, your avatar can do it for you,” LaTraye Johnson, a spokesperson for Pivo, told Homes.com.

Johnson called the AI-powered auto-tracking tech a “whole marketing team all in one.”

Nearly half of the agent respondents in a September NAR survey this year stated they use AI sporadically, but the association says there has been a major uptick in adoption.

But that growth comes with risks and skepticism. Just 20% of surveyed agents reported using AI daily. Nailing down if agents found it helpful returned less significant results: 46% of AI-using agents said the tool had no noticeable impact.

At a recent AI-focused question and answer session at NAR NXT, one audience member lamented the tools for the headaches they caused, giving the example of an actual AI video she created that resulted in a version of her avatar wielding “a giant butcher knife.”

“There are a lot of agents that, dare I say, are afraid or nervous,” Sharon Love Bates, NAR's director of emerging technology, who the association hired last year to lead tech education, told Homes.com in an interview. “There’s a huge learning curve.”

The tools, experts say, are powerful but not yet plug-and-play and are on the cusp of changing the industry.

“Every major shift in human history had a defining moment. And this is ours,” said Scott Richard, an agent and chair of the Emerging Business & Technology Forum for the National Association of Realtors, during an NAR NXT session.

While AI has eliminated jobs provided by large corporations such as Amazon, UPS and Target, that has yet to hit the real estate sector, according to panelists speaking at NAR's event that wrapped up last week in Houston.

The promises of eliminating tasks and creating methods of interacting with clients without physically meeting them, however, raise the question of whether, down the road, a client-agent relationship could exist without in-person interaction.

But for now, AI is "not replacing the agent, but supercharging them," according to Thomson.

“I’m not blind to what AI can do to the economy with job loss, with nefarious actors or fraud,” Britton said. “No one’s coming to save us, but if we really want to be on the right side of this and open up incredible opportunities for our careers.”

Fear is healthy, though, said the Real Estate Technology Institute’s Craig Grant, who has been training agents in tech for 20 years. Grant told Homes.com that most agents' uses of the tool just “scratch the surface," such as using it to write listing descriptions or social media captions.

He has spoken at the conference for 10 years and estimates that his NAR NXT session on generative AI and ChatGPT had 600 attendees, bringing questions ranging from fear to "where do I start?" His biggest advice: Let AI do 90% of the work while you do the last 10% to ensure there's no violation of fair housing laws, or the system doesn't pull from unreliable, unethical sources.

AI-prompted listing descriptions could add mentions of a “family-friendly” area or speak on the school district, which violates the Fair Housing Act. Uploading a listing photo to virtually stage within ChatGPT's Dali could alter measurements, walls and windows, which could mislead the public. Or a social caption, blog post or newsletter could include false information, pulled from an incorrect source.

“It could literally destroy your business, destroy your life in a second if you don’t properly vet things,” said Grant.

There's palpable curiosity, but not all brokers are sold on what AI is selling, either.

“You plug it into a system and it spits out content for you. But guess what? If everyone’s doing that, nobody’s going to be consuming that. I can smell AI videos from a mile away. I can smell AI ChatGPT prompts,” said agent Armando Nava Jr., who has 1.4 million followers on Instagram and attributes his social media success to authenticity.

Nava says he’s “on a war against AI,” trying to keep it from being an “easy way out” for agents looking to turn followers into clients.

Love Bates has a more optimistic take, arguing that “AI is leveling the playing field."

“Someone who really vested themselves in learning and using these tools to its full capability, is unstoppable,” she said. “Larger companies or teams, they have assistants and people that are doing all of these things. As a single agent or smaller brokerage, you're using technology as your team.”

It has raised questions about the value of brokerages, too, especially at a time when consolidation seems to be the name of the game.

Typically, the brokerage value proposition to agents includes backend benefits: access to administrative tools and support, marketing help and access to the brand’s network. In exchange, agents typically pay a commission split, as well as other fees, to the brokerage.

Brokerages are adding proprietary internal AI tools, such as Douglas Elliman’s Elli AI assistant and Real Brokerage’s HeyLeo, both of which launched this fall. Douglas Elliman sees Elli AI as an all-in-one agent productivity tool for listing searches, pricing strategies and communicating with clients.

But what happens when agents can find those benefits in ChatGPT, CoPilot, or another AI resource? Love Bates says that larger brokerages will have to increase their offerings to attract agents.

“You are going to see a lot of single agents that say, ‘Well, hey, I can do this on my own,’” she said. “And they will. They'll go out, and they'll be very successful.”

During the opening session of NAR's annual event, a music video blasted from speakers accompanied by footage projected on four enormous screens in the vast hall. On screen, a montage of smiling homebuyers and sellers flashed, accompanied by an upbeat pop song. The hundreds of attending real estate professionals bobbed their heads along to the beat.

There was a catch, though. None of the people in the video were real; they were created by AI. In fact, the entire music video was the product of a machine.

It sent a clear message: AI isn’t coming, it’s already here.

“AI is just that topic,” Love Bates, said. “It's the hot topic everybody's talking about. You can't have a conference where you're not talking about it.”

Homes.com, part of CoStar Group, was a sponsor of the NAR show.