AI In Real Estate: Where To Start

Last month, our CEO Marc Rutzen was accepted into Forbes Technology Council, an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs, and technology executives. His first contribution, titled AI In Real Estate: Where To Start, explores ways real estate professionals can begin using artificial intelligence.

The world of real estate is experiencing exciting advancements thanks to AI, machine learning and computer vision. These technologies offer new ways to improve efficiency and tackle issues like automated data capture and fraud detection. In this article, I want to share some ideas about how you can start using AI in real estate (without getting too technical).

Intelligent Document Processing And Workflow Automation

Handling documents in real estate can be time-consuming. Different formats and inconsistent templates make it challenging to extract and organize data. AI can help by automatically extracting relevant information from complex documents like leases, appraisals and loan documents.

With recent advancements in optical character recognition (OCR) technology, even poorly scanned or handwritten documents can be detected with high accuracy. This means important data like property values, loan terms and more can be easily identified with AI.

With some engineering, this data can be brought into existing workflows. For example, commercial mortgage lenders usually want to capture the values and cap rates in appraisals for underwriting and loan sizing. If AI is used to extract this data and something like Zapier is used to move it around, you could automatically extract data from appraisals uploaded to Box, SharePoint or something similar and push the data to Salesforce.

This would give everyone in the company access to valuable deal data with a simple search.

Generating Listing Descriptions

Writing listing descriptions is a tedious task for brokers, but it can be automated with AI. Although there are paid tools available, you can start for free using tools like ChatGPT. Simply create templates with property details and prompts and input them into ChatGPT, and you'll get a draft listing description in seconds.

However, it's important to double-check the generated descriptions for accuracy, as AI can sometimes make mistakes or make up information. Incorrect information in multiple listing service (MLS) listings can still lead to liability issues, even if an AI wrote it.

Continue reading at Forbes.com: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2023/06/20/ai-in-real-estate-where-to-start