ORLANDO, Fla. – One of the hot topics at the recent Florida Realtors® annual convention was artificial intelligence. The challenge for real estate agents today is that there is so much noise about AI with new announcements every day that it’s hard to know what tools agents can use to help them grow their businesses.
One session tackled that topic head-on: “Top AI Tools for Realtors.” The workshop featured Kevin Hawkins, a partner with WAV Group consulting firm and the editor and co-creator of REAL AI, the industry’s first weekly newsletter on artificial intelligence. About 200 people participated in his crash course on practical ways AI can help them today
Hawkins provided a comprehensive list of the best AI tools that are either free or low-cost and easy for agents to access.
AI tools for agents
The workshop covered five main categories where agents can leverage AI best:
1. Chatbots
2. Image generators
3. Marketing tools
4. Social content creators
5. AI assistants
Here is a quick recap of the best AI tools for each of these categories:
Chatbots
A chatbot is a computer program that can talk to people online, like in a chat or a message. It answers questions, makes calculations, has conversations, assists with translation, and helps with tasks. It’s like texting with a friend, but instead of a person, this robot or bot understands and responds to what you say.
“Today’s leading Chatbots that are best suited for agents,” Hawkins said, include ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Meta AI. Each does certain things, sometimes better than the others – and he noted that they can change over time as they constantly improve.
However, the top bot he says is best for all the things real estate agents do is ChatGPT 4o, which illustrates six things agents can do related to content creation. His top six included Brainstorming (i.e., a year’s worth of newsletter ideas or a month’s worth of social media post ideas), Better email subjects (to improve open rates), Headline creation (to get more people to read your content), Checklists (i.e., Moving Checklists complete with check boxes), Forms (from Open House Sign-in Forms to Buyer or Seller Checklists, all created in the correct format with columns and proper headings), and Writing a better agent bio (noting most agent bios on websites are either non-existent or poorly written).
The six things agents can do with ChatGPT 4o that’s not related to content include Math (i.e., expense report calculations or mortgage payment estimates or tax deduction totals), Contact organization (i.e., upload contacts from different file formats – Word, Excel, and CSV files – have them returned properly formatted in a downloadable Excel file, ready for mail merge), Surveys and Polls (writing the survey or poll questions and generating a summary of the findings).
Also, Summarization of extensive reports (upload the PDF), Sorting and Formatting (i.e., Have names and addresses that are in all caps and others that are all lower case and others that are formatted correctly? ChatGPT instantly can standardize your content in the proper format and order you need), and the ChatGPT app vs. Google Search (why type in a Google Search when you can talk to ChatGPT and find a complex answer faster).
Image generators
The top three tools for agents to create images are Midjourney (now offers free access), ChatGPT 4o, and Canva. The power of Canvas’ free AI Photo Enhancer to upscale an image – going from a fuzzy low-resolution file to a crystal clear high-resolution version was shown, along with more than a dozen real-life and dream-like images created royalty-free for blogs with all three.
The four things agents can do with image creators include creating free high-resolution images of sample houses and people for print and digital promotional brochures, photos and graphics for agent websites, powerful free images for blog content, and more advanced users can use them for virtual staging. Hawkins noted online virtual staging services like Box Brownie, Virtual Staging AI, or Styldod were better-paid options because of the time saved.
AI marketing tools
Today, AI marketing tools are embedded in your phone (iPhone and Android), in your MLS (i.e., FMLS in Georgia), in your broker platform (i.e., Delta Media), and standalone tools (Canva).
What are the four things agents can do with AI marketing tools? With their phones they can fix photos; inside the MLS, they create an entire listing description by uploading photos (Restb.ai video); inside their brokers’ marketing platform, like DeltaNET, machine learning will automatically adjust the content they send to clients; and with Canva Magic Studio – create AI images and use AI to edit photos.
Social content creators
The three top tools for social were Canva (all social media channels and content types), Jasper (primarily Blog creation), and Lumen5 (short video creator).
Three things you can do with these AI social content makers include combining images and graphics to boost engagement and brand recognition, creating the correct format size using templates for every social channel, and creating short videos with caption headlines that automatically match what you are saying when you are saying it.
AI assistants
Expect to see a lot more AI Assistants in 2025, according to Hawkins. Two AI Assistants stand out today, and videos demonstrate the AI power available from Ylopo and Productive.ai.
Ylopo uses digital assistant calls to perform initial lead qualification and is working on digital assistants for video calls at scale. A recorded webinar and demo of the Ylopo AI solutions are here.
Productive.ai is a NAR Reach member and winner of last year’s iOi Summit “Pitch Battle.” Featuring a telephone call monitoring system, it records, transcribes, and summarizes agent client calls and then uses AI to automate tasks mentioned during the call; then, it automatically creates calendar appointments and updates your CRM.
More advanced AI Assistants are the next step forward for real estate agents because they can accomplish specific tasks for agents. A video clip was shared from Apple highlighting the functions that will save agents time as it releases its Apple Intelligence solutions this fall and next year.
Warning: AI lies
At the end of the workshop, the audience was cautioned about the fact that AI hallucinates, meaning it does not tell the truth but makes things up if it does not have the needed information in an attempt to provide a complete answer.
The recommendation: “When you use AI, you must verify,” Hawkins said. He noted that this is one of the reasons he does not recommend apps based on ChatGPT, due to performance and potential security issues. Relying on well-established AI firms that are leaders in their categories is a much safer way for agents to rely on AI.
The future
To illustrate the future of AI and the fact that we are in the very early stages, a sample video was created with Sora (OpenAI’s experimental video platform). What is coming next in the next two years are more practical AI tools that will save them more time as they won’t have to do things they don’t like, leaving more time for client interaction.
Source: Techhelpline.com
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