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Artificial intelligence is likely to play an increasingly larger role in agents’ marketing and communications strategy, Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman said during an appearance on Yahoo! Finance on Wednesday.
Kelman said generative text composition technology, like that built into the buzzy ChatGPT, is proving helpful for agents who struggle with crafting well-written sentences.
“Not all the people who go into real estate are William Shakespeare, and so they struggle with just composing an email that’s grammatically correct,” Kelman said. “And if you give ChatGPT just a few facts about what’s going on with this customer, you get a nice email on the other side.”
ChatGPT, a text-generating app powered by generative artificial intelligence, was recently made available for public use. Users enter simple prompts including the style of writing they would like and all relevant information, and the program spits out a piece of text for them.
The spread of the program has sparked conversations about its potential for online marketing, as well as raised ethical questions for its potential use by students for completing assignments.
Kelman predicted AI products will continue to infiltrate all aspects of online text-based marketing, and should prove particularly useful for those who struggle with writing.
“More people are going to use it to create content when they’re not good writers themselves,” he said. “They’re just like my fifth grader who’s trying to figure out how to get a term paper done.”
Kelman also used his appearance on the program to talk about the housing market, which he said provided reasons for optimism during January as mortgage rates receded from their highs and buyers gradually returned to the market.
As rates have fallen from 7 percent in November to roughly 6 percent now, purchase applications, tour requests, and offers have all increased, and agents are starting to report offer deadlines and bidding wars on well-priced homes for the first time in months, and regular homebuyers are taking advantage of investors bowing out of the higher-rate market, Kelman said.
“Investors used to bid for those properties and blow out our customers,” he said. “The investors are mostly on the sideline right now. So people are starting to creep back into the market. There are a few places where we’ve seen 10, 20 offers on a home, which was absolutely out of the question in the fourth quarter.”
Kelman said he expects conditions to keep improving, as long as mortgage rates don’t increase again.
“There are a few reasons for optimism,” Kelman said. “We’re not out of the woods yet. But the market significantly improved in January. It was a very weak market in Q4. It’s significantly better now in January. Time will tell if rates are going to stay down.”
