Artificial intelligence (AI) has made huge waves this past year, thanks to the arrival of Chat GPT, Bard, and similar competing AI conversational chat platforms. And while concerns abound about the role and impact of AI on many industries, this post explores three ways the real estate industry might soon take advantage of this historic and powerful technology for the better.
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Customer Service
As an agency that does a lot of real estate marketing for communities of new condominiums, town homes, and family homes, we know that many customers buy months, even years, in advance of moving in. During the wait, customers tend to get impatient and almost always have a mounting list of questions, concerns, and deadlines in mind for the builder.
Fortunately for developers, a whole new generation of AI-powered chatbots can mimic humans expertly as they field common questions and concerns from buyers. AI chatbots can intercept and field questions from websites, of course, but they can also take phone calls, sounding just like a human being as they answer questions and recommend solutions.
Expect savvy developers to introduce AI-driven support solutions to support homebuyers on every step of their journey, including handling questions and concerns about PDIs, occupancy, you name it. In time, home ownership warrantee programs (like TARION, here in Ontario) will almost certainly take advantage of this same support technology to assist and manage buyers on their journey and report back to the government with actionable data.
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Visualization
Visualizations (AKA renderings) play a vital role in new real estate development marketing. With no existing structure to sell, developers rely on visualizations to show how their communities will look. In the past 25 years, real estate marketing has gone from mostly hand-drawn or watercolour renderings to fully digital, stunning photorealistic images often based on real CAD drawings.
Expect AI to enrich this visualization process, bringing the time to produce visualizations down while greatly increasing the creative possibilities, such as showing video visualizations instead of just static ones. Already, AI image generators using artificial neural networks generate stunning images that don’t look computer generated. As this technology rapidly improves, expect the image quality of the assets it produces to improve as well.
AI-powered visualization technology should also help developers cater to new home buyers better. For many builder developers, selling upgrades to homes is a major revenue source, but visualizing those upgrades in each home for each buyer is simply time prohibitive. Fast, high-quality AI-powered visualization will enable builders to show the visual impact of upgrades in real-time, making exploring upgrades a far richer experience.
Of course, no matter how far and how fast visualizations improve, artificial intelligence will never replace the vital role of human originality and judgement in the creative process. While almost anyone will be able to use AI-powered visualizations tools in the future, they will still need creative directors and designers to make sure those visualizations look their very best!
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Smart systems
Smart systems in the home that monitor activity and enable remote control are already popular. We expect this trend to continue with a whole new generation of AI-powered automation platforms that manage homes completely. In time, every new home will come with an AI-powered digital dashboard that monitors and optimizes the home’s systems (water, gas, electricity, air quality, etc.) as well as managing security, lighting, deliveries, and more—all in real time. These systems will connect with all smart appliances as well, to monitor performance and manage maintenance.
Importantly, this new generation of systems won’t just inform homeowners about what’s going on, but also implement data-driven changes automatically for homebuyers. That might mean that a system can order a new fridge water filter on Amazon automatically for a homebuyer or automatically contact the fire department in case of an emergency, such as the presence of significant carbon monoxide levels in the home. With the owners’ permission, such a system might even liaise directly with builder/developer systems to enable maintenance calls or to point out deficiencies/potential issues in the home’s performance.
Homebuyers will love these AI-powered systems because of the increased transparency, convenience, control, as well as reduced costs through smarter resource management. Because these systems will quantitatively enhance the homeownership experience, we expect builders to continue to embrace them and use them to differentiate their product as well.
AI promises a better tomorrow
Customer service, visualization, and smart systems are just three applications of AI we can see coming soon to the real estate marketing world. As our society quickly works to achieve the full potential of AI, we look forward to more exciting innovations that help real estate developers enrich the lives of their much-esteemed homebuyers.
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