As all agents, brokers, and home buyers know, searching for a home is a deeply personal process, and one of the most difficult challenges for buyers is narrowing down what they want. When a prospective buyer walks through a home or searches for one online, they are making hundreds of value judgments, often without ever consciously realizing them or expressing them to the real estate professional they are working with.
Thankfully, artificial intelligence (AI) can now help bridge that gap and deliver a customized and personalized experience for consumers, without additional work by the agent or broker.
Here are a few exciting ways AI technology is making this possible:
1. Intelligent search filters
For years, it has been easy to search for homes based on basic criteria like square footage, but what if a client wants something a little more specific, such as hardwood floors in all of the bedrooms, or homes with granite counters and white kitchen cabinets?
That’s where AI comes in. Those kinds of variables, or combinations of them, are not often captured by a listing data feed, but they can be critical to personalizing the customer experience. AI makes it easy to get the right search results quickly for even the most particular clients.
2. Personalized recommendation engines
If you watch Netflix or use Amazon, you’re already familiar with AI technology that reacts to each individual consumer’s preferences. On those platforms, what you stop to review, or even the amount of time you spend reviewing, is used to define preferences without ever asking you a specific question. In real estate, AI-powered search platforms are starting to offer buyers similar interactions.
3. Searches based on client-provided images
Agents can now encourage consumers to find and upload images of what they’re looking for — types of home, the finishes, the features, the layout — and have tech tools handle the hard work of searching for similar properties on the market.
4. Augmented reality
Firms like Wayfair, Home Depot, and others are leveraging tools that allow consumers to visualize what a room or a home would look like with different paint colors, with their own furniture or even after a renovation. This allows buyers and sellers to maximize the interest in a transaction by seeing what their home will look like in the future.
5. Voice-based searches
Instead of typing something like, “New York, three-bedroom apartment,” prospects are now able to simply speak into their phone or computer microphone and say something like, “I need a three-bedroom apartment with a Central Park view in New York, facing east.” And before long, platforms will be able to reply to them verbally. With computer vision technology, that becomes a reality by utilizing plain-English descriptions of what is tagged in images and searching for them.
6. Better search placement for sellers
For sellers, search placement can be improved by using technology that automatically tags home features in listing photos. That means that agents can avoid writing all those tags and detailed image descriptions, but still have their sellers benefit from optimal search engine placement. At a time when the vast majority of home searches start online, that’s a big deal.
Put simply, developments like these are increasingly transforming the home search process and making it easy for real estate professionals to deliver an even more highly personalized service for their customers without adding more to their plates.
Red Bell Real Estate, LLC, a homegenius company, is at the forefront of these and other exciting technology developments that will make agents’ and brokers’ jobs easier and more lucrative. If you’re interested in learning more about how this tech could work for you or your agents, visit homegenius.com.
© 2021 Radian Group Inc. All Rights Reserved. Red Bell Real Estate, LLC, 7730 South Union Park Avenue, Suite 400, Midvale, UT 84047. Tel: 866-626-2381. Licensed in every State and the District of Columbia. This communication is provided for use by real estate professionals only and is not intended for distribution to consumers or other third parties. This does not constitute an advertisement as defined by Section 1026.2(a)(2) of Regulation Z.