ChatGPT: What It Is & 10 Ways Real Estate Agents Can Use It

Either you haven’t heard of ChatGPT or you can’t stop hearing about it. Regardless, it’s quickly made its way to the forefront of the conversation, and not just with techies.

So, what the heck is it? Why should you care? More importantly… how can you use it to your advantage? This article aims to answer those questions and more.

Before we dive in, let’s take a second to talk about consumer-facing AI and where it’s at today.

We’ve all heard of self-driving cars and voice assistants, but AI has made its way into more and more of the world today. Here are just a few examples, ranging from the incredibly useful to the ridiculously ridiculous:

• Canva text-to-image – Generates an image from any text you provide.
• Andi – The next-gen search – instead of just links, Andi gives you answers, like talking with a smart friend.
• Fliki – Create videos from scripts or blog posts using realistic voices in 2 minutes.
• Namelix – Generate a short, brandable business name.
• Looka – Automated logo designer.
• TutorAI – Learn about any topic.
• Boomy – Create songs in seconds.
• Palette – Colorize black and white photos.
• Profile Picture Ai – Create the perfect profile picture.
• Fy! Studio – Turn ideas into unique wall art.
• Creative Reality Studio – Turn your text into a realistic(ish) talking video avatar.
• Podcast.ai – Listen to AI-generated interviews, including a 19 minute podcast where Joe Rogan interviews Steve Jobs. 🤯

The list goes on and on, and this article (which isn’t AI-generated by the way) can only cover so much… so that’s why we’re just going to focus on ChatGPT and it’s applications for creating text-based content.

OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT) is a research company with a grand mission to “ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.” Elon Musk was initially a part of the team that created it, but has since focused on being an advisor and financial backer. It’s now worth somewhere in the neighbourhood of 30 billion dollars.

ChatGPT launched on Nov 30, 2022 and had over 1 million users in its first week. For comparison, it took Facebook almost a year to reach that and Twitter 2 years!

What is ChatGPT?

Let’s ask it.

You might be thinking “So what? Another chatbot. These have been around for a while now.”

Where ChatGPT differs is that it’s not using a rules-based bot like we’re all used to (and annoyed with).

ChatGPT is technically a chatbot, but it’s more than that. It’s a conversational AI, using a host of technologies used to enable computers to converse “intelligently” with us, including natural language processing, machine learning and intelligent analysis.

Imagine you have a really smart friend (that happens to know almost-everything ever posted on the entire internet) that you can text anytime and they respond instantly with eerily articulate and nuanced text.

That’s ChatGPT in a nutshell, and you can use it for free here: https://chat.openai.com/.

What ChatGPT Is Not (At Least Not Right Now)

It’s not an AGI (Artificial general intelligence) which would have to have the ability to understand or learn any intellectual task that a human being can.

Not to say that this isn’t the first domino headed in that direction… but that’s a topic for another day.

A Few Words of Caution and Things to Be Aware Of

1. Google’s guidelines currently say not to use AI-generated content for SEO purposes. In fact, expect the content (especially long-form copy) to be watermarked using advanced algorithms. Copy/pasting the outputted text won’t help either. The watermarking methods are not embedded in the code itself, but rather the sequence of words/letters in the output which create something like a “signature” that can be detected (and potentially penalized) by search engines.

A crude example (I just made up) to illustrate the point: The 1130th letter and the 436th word both end in E, followed by a noun.

2. ChatGPT’s training data cuts off after 2021, so don’t expect to know the current state of the market, current events or anything like that.

3. It can give you biased, or sometimes completely wrong responses.

4. The entire service goes offline all the time, since it’s exploded in popularity. I’m sure they’re working on it, but expect growing pains.

5. It doesn’t know about your real estate council’s rules, ethical guidelines, etc. So DO NOT rely on it for sensitive tasks.

6. It does not have MLS® data. Even if they change the timeframe of the training data, it still won’t have direct MLS® data access.

10 Ways Real Estate Agents Can Use ChatGPT Right Now

Now that you know what it is let’s dive into how you can actually apply it to your business right now, in its current state.

Pro tip: Be specific. Don’t give it general inputs unless you want general (or straight up wrong) outputs. The more detail you put into it the higher your chances of getting something valuable from it.

Another word of caution: do not copy the text it outputs if it’s going on your website. Use it for inspiration only, and make sure to change it up or Google may penalize you for it.

Listing Descriptions

Writing a listing description is never fun, especially if you’re trying to cram it within a character limit. It’s particularly difficult if English is not your first language. ChatGPT can help with that. It just needs you to provide it with a few key details.

You can even ask it to try again, change it’s tone, length, etc.

Try it right now. Grab one of your listing descriptions and ask it to rephrase it.

Emails

Since emails don’t end up as content on your website (and aren’t important to your SEO) then use it as you see fit. There are even AI email assistant tools that make this even easier for you.

Ask it to write a series of drip emails for a particular marketing campaign, and see what it comes up with.

Market Updates

As mentioned earlier, it doesn’t have any info past 2021. That includes real estate stats and data points, so you definitely don’t want to rely on the text it generates because it will be wildly out-of-date.

However, you can use it to help you write an outline for a market update, then fill in the blanks yourself.

Blog Posts

I should reiterate that it can help you write blog posts. Technically it can write blog posts for you, but since blog content is a huge part of SEO (and we just covered how AI-generated content can be bad for SEO) you should NOT be copy/pasting the content it writes right into your blog.

It’s great for brainstorming outlines, topics, adjusting your tone/sentiment, rephrasing, readability improvements, title suggestions, grammar, etc.

YouTube & Instagram Reel Video Outlines

You can even ask it to repurpose the same content for a different use-case. The cool thing about conversational AI (as apposed to rules-based) is that it’s taking the entire conversation into consideration, just like a person would ask follow up questions without repeating their initial message.

Page Meta Descriptions

The content on key pages of your website can be summarized with ChatGPT, and used (at least in part) for its META description. All you need to do is copy/paste the text in, and ask it nicely.

Ad Copy

Having the right copy in your ads can make or break your campaigns and waste money. You can ask ChatGPT to help with that.

Social Media Captions & Hashtags

Call Scripts

Text Translation

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This Will All Change

ChatGPT is still very new. In fact, the current version has roughly 175 billion parameters, and the next version (earmarked for late 2023) is estimated to have have 1 trillion, or even more.

Nobody really knows what kind of impact that will have on real estate, business or even life in general. It’s all too early to tell, and if there’s one thing we can be certain of is that it’s all going to change.

Even this article is going to be mostly irrelevant at some point sooner than we think, so it’s good to keep it all in perspective.

Is ChatGPT Somehow Going To Replace Real Estate Agents?

If your role as a real estate agent mostly consists of writing listing descriptions then yes, be worried. Obviously it does not, and you can’t minimize the value you provide clients. Ask any seasoned agent if they’re worried about ChatGPT and they’ll tell you no.

Maybe worry when it reaches the level of an Artificial General Intelligence, can wear the million hats agents put on every day AND gains the trust of humans. At that point we’ll all be either sipping Mai Tai’s on the beach while the robot servants work, or mining rare-earth metals while they watch. Either way… don’t worry about it. 🤷‍♂️

Anytime a new disruptive technology enters the scene our advice for agents is the same: focus all of your energy on delivering as much value for your clients as possible, and leverage technology to do exactly that. The methods and tools you use will evolve, but your fundamental role does not change.

At the end of the day you are in the business of relationships and that can’t be replaced.

What Does AI-Generated Content Mean for the Future of Humanity, Really?

I wish I could tell you. I’m actually going to do something I’ll regret… and that is to make a few predictions:

• We’ll see an increase of fake-but-real-sounding “experts”, and it will become harder to separate actual experts from ones that entered the right prompt in a chatbot. This will make real-life (or realtime) conversation more authoritative than online content.
• Original ideas will become more valuable. Your unique perspective, voice and life experiences can’t be replaced. Right? 😅
• Plagiarism will continue to be a game of cat-and-mouse. AI will get more lifelike, and detection algorithms will have to keep up.
• Creative jobs (and even programming) is being at least augmented by AI, and has the potential to be replaced one day. This may happen before the “blue collar jobs” do like we all predicted a few years ago.

Your thoughts?

What do you think about all this? I’d love to hear your own, genuine, human-generated thoughts in the comments below.

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