Even if you aren’t aware of it, you are using Artificial Intelligence (AI) every day both for work and in social interactions.
The internet in its infancy post Google encouraged us to ‘surf the ‘net’, thereby delivering information to advertisers and marketers while the arrival of the smartphone in 2007 propelled us into new levels of AI.
Meta algorithms, the voice commands you give to your laptop, smartphone or home device using Siri, Alexa or Hey Google, the recommendations on Netflix, the channels you see on YouTube or an editing app you use to check your emails – all of these are powered by AI.
And in the property world, MarTech (marketing technologies) and PropTech (property technologies) are already enhancing their products and services using AI.
What is AI?
Simply put, AI comprises tasks performed by machines that might otherwise require human intelligence. Although many software programs can help us, the AI difference is that it learns as it goes. Take YouTube for example: when you’re signed in to your Google account, the content you see is refined every time you make a choice. If you’ve watched shows about home renovation and subscribed to one of those channels, YouTube will show you other similar channels. And the Spell Checker you use daily in Microsoft Word – that’s basic AI in action.
While I was aware of AI and using it for my business, the penny dropped for me as to its many solutions when my then four-year-old daughter asked her iPad to find monster games. She couldn’t type the words into a search bar, but she was smart and used her voice!
How Hoole uses AI in real estate brand marketing
If you’re one of our clients, you have AI helping with your brand marketing already. As AI tools grow more sophisticated, we can ramp up their use.
First, we test new or improved versions of AI products on the Hoole website and communications. This allows us to work through any potential problems and identify what works best for our clients and their customers.
Then we take the best-of-breed AI tools and embed them into everything we do so that we can continually deliver high-quality real estate marketing content and advertising solutions.
AI content tools we use at Hoole
To produce content like agent profiles (and to start some articles), we use tools such as Jasper.ai, Otter.ai, and Grammarly.com.
- Jasper is good for suggesting copy points so we never start with a blank page. We also find it useful for generating a variety of terms for agent and agency profiles. From a writer’s perspective, Jasper is fine to give us a head start but we can’t rely solely on the software. We find that Jasper content without human intervention tends to be repetitive so you need a professional marketer to finish the job.
- Grammarly is great for checking grammar and spelling. It’s also useful for picking up if you have a double space between words or no space, or you’ve missed a question mark. It’s a useful tool for checking emails before you hit the Send button. However, in our experience, the suggestions are not always 100% right so you still need a professional editor.
- Otter is a great tool for dictation and generating transcripts from video interviews. Again, it isn’t 100% accurate so although it does the heavy lifting the results still need to be checked by a human.
AI advertising campaign tools we use at Hoole
When running advertising campaigns we use ManyChat.com and Meta.
- ManyChat we use as a Messenger bot that can act as you, the real estate agent, and ask people for information, one question at a time.
- Meta and other social media platforms have AI embedded into their algorithms. They watch our behaviour, what we like to click on, whether we are happy to fill in forms or engage with Messenger ads and will serve us up content and ads that we will like and want to engage with.
- Google Machine learning, a subset of AI, enables computers to ‘learn’ and predict results based on the information and datasets that are entered into them. The more ‘experiences’, the more accurate the results will be.
What you need to know about AI
AI is great for processing large amounts of data that would otherwise be useless to an organisation. You can find many AI tools and frameworks, most too technical to go into in detail (and more of interest to web developers than our readers). However, you need to understand how open-source tools get used in daily business. Below are some examples:
- Google AI solutions: machine learning to improve analytics, chatbots and more.
- Meta (Facebook, Instagram) AI solutions: help you as an advertiser, using the Facebook pixel, understand what actions readers are taking, thus enabling you to understand how effective your advertising is. Meta AI is also used in research; for example, generating maps of COVID-19 cases.
- Microsoft (that owns LinkedIn) AI solutions: uses AI in everything from Microsoft Dynamics 365 (that takes customer data and insights, LinkedIn integration, machine learning and predictive analytics to improve your business processes) to the ‘people you may know’ recommendations on LinkedIn and more.
- Amazon machine learning: enables faster digital transformation and deeper business insights.
Real estate AI tools
You are probably aware of the most popular Australian and overseas real estate tech tools in use. You might even be using them yourselves.
- RiTA by Aire: Having heard of RiTA and spoken to a few agents who use ‘her’, I’m convinced that the software does everything but call your pre-qualified prospects. Machine learning over time identifies the most likely prospects to call that will become actual leads. Of course, as with any automated system, RiTA is only as good as the people who use it.
- REX Homes: In the US, the favoured lead-generating software is REX (real estate exchange and not related to Rex CRM). REX uses large datasets and machine learning to match buyers and sellers faster.
- Compass studio: Is working to digitise real estate ‒ as well as providing a Video Generator that enables agents to generate professional listing videos and virtual tours in seconds. These proptech tools save time and enable agents to focus on selling by streamlining what used to be time-consuming processes.
Will AI replace us completely in our lifetime?
In my view, the answer to this question is a firm ‘no’, although there may be exceptions in the near future. ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer), a chatbot launched by OpenAI in November 2022, is garnering positive reviews. More about ChatGPT later.
AI and machine learning are only as accurate as what’s entered. You know the old saying of ‘rubbish in, rubbish out’. You still need professional help to generate the input so the output makes sense and is useful.
We like to think of ourselves as the puppet masters – skilled editors and marketers who can write clear briefs based on important keyword parameters for the AI helper.
ChatGPT
“But what about ChatGPT?”, I hear some of you ask. For anyone who takes an interest in new and improved AI, this app is a highly trained content creator.
I’ve read many glowing reviews – and also some damning ones – from marketers and others who’ve tried this app. A marketer can enter parameters, like “Write a blog post on AI using my style and explain how it works, step by step” and ChatGPT will spit out a post that they might barely know they hadn’t written themselves.
But here’s the thing: the marketers who have recommended ChatGPT have hundreds or thousands of blogs that ChatGPT can search to get the information it needs to ‘sound’ like them. Most businesses haven’t anywhere near that number of posts so the results would be disappointing. Even those marketers who hail ChatGPT as extraordinary need to edit the finished product.
AI can’t be trained to be original
While we at Hoole.co focus on content creation and customer management, AI is used in many other fields such as architecture. However, while you could train AI to design a building in the style of Harry Seidler or Gaudi, you won’t yet get an original design. And the same goes for blog posts.
At present, no AI tool can fully replace human skills. That said, AI is here to stay and users can take advantage of AI to complete additional projects more quickly.
Engage expert real estate marketers
If you’d like a team of experienced real estate branding professionals to formulate a marketing strategy, allocate your budget and help you grow your business, book a free one-hour consultation with me, Melanie Hoole. It’s always a pleasure for me to get to know you!