Jacqueline Kyo Thomas
Have you heard of ChatGPT? If not, allow me to introduce you to one of the most remarkable tools of the 21st century. That may sound like an exaggeration or a gimmick, but it’s not. This tool can singlehandedly revolutionize your real estate business and allow you to expand at an accelerated rate. With ChatGPT, you can do in seconds what may have taken hours, days, or maybe even weeks to do before. It will enhance your productivity and extend your reach—and it’s free.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s start at the beginning and discuss what ChatGPT is, how it works, and the real ways you can use this tool to grow your real estate business.
What is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is a chat program that you can use to answer questions and generate quick content. It’s accessible on chat.openai.com. Before you can use ChatGPT, you’ll need to sign up for an account, but basic membership is free and you can have unlimited sessions with the basic form of ChatGPT.
Here’s a little history on ChatGPT. This system was first developed by the folks at the artificial intelligence research laboratory OpenAI. After years of development, it was subsequently released to the public on November 30, 2022. Since then, it has grown massively and has gained over astounding 100 million users. The website itself receives over one billion users each month, so if you ever get a “ChatGPT is at capacity” message, you now know why.
ChatGPT stands for “Generative Pre-trained Transformer.” This means ChatGPT was pre-trained using a mind-boggling amount of text data that covers history books, blog posts, magazines, scientific journals, news articles, and much more.
While the basic, free version of ChatGPT doesn’t contain awareness of everything written by humans, it’s only a matter of time before it does. The latest version of this AI is known as ChatGPT-4. The dataset used to train ChatGPT-4 is five times larger than what was used to train ChatGPT-3. You can gain access to ChatGPT-4 when you sign up for a paid membership. Free members get access to the older (but still impressive) version, ChatGPT-3.
ChatGPT uses natural language processing (NLP). NLP makes it possible for computers to understand human language. By using NLP, ChatGPT can understand your questions and respond to you in a way that actually sounds pretty human. You almost feel like you need to say “please” and “thank you.”
ChatGPT is like having a virtual assistant who can understand what you’re asking and respond in milliseconds.
ChatGPT—A Real Estate Agent’s Secret Weapon?
Now that you know the basics of ChatGPT, the next question is how can ChatGPT be useful to real estate agents?
We’re just scratching the surface of what ChatGPT can do. The technology is so new to the public that we don’t yet know all of the possibilities. However, we do know that ChatGPT can be used to save time.
In fact, you can use ChatGPT in various ways to free up your time. For example, it can be used to craft content calendars or develop outlines for blog posts. Instead of devoting hours to coming up with the perfect plan, you can hand it off to ChatGPT to do it in seconds.
A Word of Warning - It’s not advisable to use ChatGPT for direct client communications, such as through chat. While ChatGPT is a chatbot and is capable of real-time, human-like conversations, it may not provide the appropriate responses to client queries.
ChatGPT can get you into legal hot water, especially because it may not be trained on and sensitive to Fair Housing Laws. Real estate is a heavily regulated industry and you cannot rely on ChatGPT to provide accurate and usable information. Ultimately, the legal responsibility rests on you. It’s your job to provide your clients with correct information in accordance with the Fair Housing Act.
One emerging concern around ChatGPT is the phenomenon of hallucination. Hallucination is a fancy way of saying “inaccurate responses.” Sometimes, AI models such as ChatGPT can provide inaccurate information because there may be conflicting information in the datasets used to train the program. Also, keep in mind that language is complex. It can be difficult for AI to understand what we are trying to say and, in turn, for the AI to provide an inaccurate response.
Another major reason for hallucinations is a lack of context. ChatGPT may hallucinate an answer if it doesn’t have enough context to understand the meaning of the prompt.
Top ways real estate agents use ChatGPT to grow their business
ChatGPT definitely offers more pros than cons, but what are some actual ways you can use this tool to grow your real estate business? Let’s discuss now:
Think Up Post Ideas - Did you know that ChatGPT can be used to generate blog or social media post ideas for you?
Ask ChatGPT to give you a list of 10-15 post ideas for a particular topic, such as home-buying basics. You can also ask ChatGPT to give you engaging questions for each of those topics and use those questions as your social media posts.
Get Help Replying to Social Media Comments - Do you ever get writer’s block when trying to come up with a response to a comment on your social media page?
When someone replies to a post you’ve made on social media, you can ask ChatGPT to come up with a response. Of course, you’ll need to read through the answer and make sure that it’s appropriate and in accordance with the Fair Housing Law (i.e. non-discriminatory).
For example, you can tell ChatGPT: Write a thoughtful, friendly response to [person name] who wrote a comment saying [insert comment here] on my [platform here].
Remember that you can always tweak the prompt and/or the comment to make it fit your needs.
Draft Personalized Emails - With ChatGPT, you can draft personalized emails to people who might be interested in buying or selling a property. These emails can have information about different properties, including tips, virtual tours, and other useful information. You can then use your email marketing tool (like ConvertKit or MailChimp) to track how interested people are in the emails.
Create Scripts - ChatGPT can help create virtual tours of properties. You can use ChatGPT to create a script that you can read when creating a virtual property tour. Input all of the property information and any other descriptors you’d like to include in the script into ChatGPT and ask the program to provide you with a 300-word script. You’ll likely need to tweak the response, but it can be a great start that can cut down your writing time significantly.
Grab Property Information in a Flash - At the time of this writing, the makers of ChatGPT now allow the tool to search the web. And thanks to a plethora of plugins, ChatGPT is able to access up-to-date information from many websites. Remember that we’re just in the beginning stages of ChatGPT, so it’s not a perfect system yet.
Match buyers with their ideal homes using AI - A new AI real estate platform known as LandOnEarth has successfully integrated ChatGPT into their HomeMatch Technology. This tool will help you match buyers with a home that best fits their needs, wants, budget, and lifestyle. The tool can analyze over 100 different matchpoints to choose the best options, which can save you time and headaches. Learn more about this first-of-its-kind tool here.
Best practices to keep in mind when using ChatGPT as a real estate agent
If you decide to use ChatGPT in your real estate business, here are a few best practices to follow:
Practice Prompt Engineering - Prompt engineering is the process of designing and refining the text prompts you use when interacting with ChatGPT. You’ll need to fine-tune your questions, provide as much context as possible, and give specific instructions on what type of answers you’re looking for. The goal behind prompt engineering is to optimize ChatGPT’s performance by providing it with clear and relevant input to work with.
ChatGPT works best when you provide as much context as possible. Don’t be afraid to get into the weeds and add a ton of relevant real estate details when engineering your prompts. You’ll need to experiment quite a bit to discover which prompts work best for you.
Remember to use ChatGPT to enhance your own work.
Monitor ChatGPT’s Responses - It’s still a new system. It’s important that you monitor the model’s responses to make sure that they’re accurate and appropriate. Remember that it’s your responsibility to research everything that you post or publish under your name, or else you could find yourself in a legal nightmare.
Final Thoughts
ChatGPT is an amazing tool that can be used to generate human-like responses. As a real estate agent, you can use this tool to rapidly expand your business and improve your productivity. Consider implementing the above techniques to take full advantage of ChatGPT.
This is only an introduction to ChatGPT. Because ChatGPT is such an exciting and rapidly expanding tool, we plan to follow it with a series of in-depth guides. Stay tuned to this series, and let us know if you have any special requests about what you’d like to learn to do with ChatGPT.