How to put AI to work to make more money in your real estate business

This is the last of a three-part series running this week in Inman.

When it comes to practical advice about how to make money with the latest real estate tools and strategies, Jeff Lobb, the founder and CEO of Sparktank Media, is always an incredible resource. Today Lobb weighs in with concrete advice about how to put ChatGPT to work to be more profitable in your business. 

Lobb agrees with Kendall Bonner’s statement about ChatGPT and AI in general: “Input determines output.” Avoid asking general questions, since the more specific your prompts are,  the better the AI’s output will be. 

Email

How do you create specific input for ChatGPT that will give you the best responses? Lobb cited the following examples when you’re writing an email. 

• Begin by telling ChatGPT how you want it to act: “Emma is a real estate professional.” This tells ChatGPT to write something in the third party rather than in your voice and to make the tone professional.
• Write five subject lines that make the email recipient more likely to open my email. 
• Put together an email for each month of the year. 
• Send them to my past clients who already like and trust me.
• If you wanted to change the tone, you could switch from being “professional” to being “funny.” 

Here’s another example:

• Act as a real estate professional who is generating leads from Zillow.
• Create email responses to Zillow leads that are looking for a home that will convert them into an appointment. 

This prompt tells the AI to write the email from the perspective of a real estate agent speaking to a potential lead. 

When you review the responses, Lobb says there maybe eight or nine will be awesome, but you should always tweak it to make it your own language. Never copy and paste what the AI tells you. You must always edit it for accuracy.  

In terms of assessing how effective your email communications are, always track the level of engagement with each email. If the engagement level was low, change the words and ask the chatbot for five to ten more responses. There’s no need to waste hours of time trying to figure something out — simply ask. As Lobb explains:

Give me the ideas, give me the foundation, and then I can tweak it and test it. That’s how I look at it.

Text messaging

I took Lobb’s suggestion about asking ChatGPT (and I also asked Jasper which missed the mark entirely) about a post for Valentine’s Day. Here’s the prompt I used: 

Write a text for Valentine’s Day for my past real estate clients that know and like me. Give me 10 responses to this sentence: “Love is in the air and real estate is …”

ChatGPT came back with great content for both an email and a text message. 

In terms of the “10 responses” for a text message, ChatGPT came up with not only responses for the text message I requested, but additional content that could be used for a great print or digital marketing campaign: 

Creating a community report or e-book

Lobb suggested using ChatGPT to create a community or area report. NARRPR’s (Realtor Property Resource) already allows you to create great real estate content about your local market and it’s free. Along with your CMA, this makes a great marketing piece and lead converter.

Now imagine combining it with content from ChatGPT. In my January article on using ChatGPT to create content specific to your market area, I suggested creating Top 10 lists using the questions most searched on Google for your local area, asking about the pros and cons about living in your area, what are the most popular local recreational activities, and what are the most haunted places in your area. 

Lobb’s ideas included asking all the fun things to do in my town, all the creative things you can do on weekends, and what are the best restaurants including the reviews.  

Creating a Call to Action (CTA) that converts leads

Creating effective CTAs is something very few agents do well. In fact, a huge proportion of agents don’t even bother. Others have no idea about what works and what doesn’t work because they don’t track how well various marketing pieces perform. 

Lobb explains that the strength of your CTA is what determines whether someone will provide their contact data. While offering a free CMA to find out your home’s value certainly works, Lobb advises that real estate professionals must start thinking more like consumers.  

If you want listings, and you want to capture them before they get ready to interview realtors, what are the top three things they (the consumer) are thinking about, what are they doing, and what are they searching? 

You can then ask ChatGPT to “Act as a real estate agent and give me advice about the top three things we need to do to prepare our home for sale.” 

Lobb’s prompts to ChatGPT included, “How do I get my house ready for sale?” “What are some upgrades I need to do?” “What is the value of my home?” 

Lobb suggested telling ChatGPT to create its response in an e-book format. Before you get nervous about creating an e-book, Lobb had this to say:

I know the term e-book gets people intimidated. An e-book is just a PDF document and can be any length you want to make it. You will need a landing page on your site where you can get the user’s name and information, with or without a QR code. It then delivers what somebody wants immediately because people want immediacy. 

Here’s how ChatGPT responded to the prompts Lobb provided:

What’s surprised me, however, was that by asking for this in an e-book format as Lobb suggested, ChatGPT gave me the following response: 

ChatGPT not only explains how to create the e-book but also provides you with ideas for marketing as well as creating additional prompts to expand the content for your e-book. For example:

• Create a detailed list of 10 steps to take to declutter my home and prepare it for sale. 
• What 10 steps do I need to take to depersonalize my home to prepare it for sale? 
• What are five home repairs sellers should always make to prepare their home for sale?
• What are the pros and cons of replacing the carpet in my house before I put it on the market? 
• What are the pros and cons updating the appliances before putting my house on the market? 
• What are the top 15 things I can do to stage my home for sale? 
• How can I tell if I should hire a professional stager to stage my home for sale or do-it-myself? Give me the pros and cons for each option. 

If you’re using ChatGpt’s Dall-E (ChatGPT’s image generator), you can ask it to create pictures of before and after staging. 

To make your e-book prettier, use Canva. Canva is a popular application for creating charts and templates for both your business and personal use. Canva Pro allows you tell it what you’re looking for and it will find usable photos and graphics for your e-book or any other purpose for which you may using it. 

Capitalize on the consumer’s fear of missing out (FOMO)

According to Lobb, consumers are always motivated by FOMO, especially when it comes to get the most money for their homes. Consequently, they’re highly likely to click on a link that says, “10 Ways to Get the Most Money for Your Home.” The question is how do you quickly identify other key words and phrases which will generate the most traffic on Google? Lobb recommends a site called AnswerThePublic.com. 

To use AnswerThePublic.com, type in some key words such as “real estate marketing” or “declining home values.” The site generates various key word phrases and ranks them as “highly searched,” “average searched, and “lowest searched.”

Lobb recommends using the highly searched terms from AnswerThePublic.com in your prompts to ChatGPT or any other AI you may using. Remember, the more specific your inquiry is, the better ChatGPT’s response it will be. 

Social media

Lobb and I both agree that when you post on the social media, the best way to build your business is not by using canned, automated responses but by making your communications personal.  

Nevertheless, you can use ChatGPT for ideas about the types of video content to shoot for your marketing. Examples include “Give me 31 ideas for creating a video each day in March to use market to people who don’t know me or like me, and convert them into leads.” or “What are five fun ideas for videos I can make about Halloween in my town that I can use for print and digital marketing?” 

An even better way to use ChatGPT for the social media is to generate content about your client’s specific interests such as fund raising for a specific cause, collectibles, travel, or sports. Your goal is to share content based upon what matters most to them. 

Video

The major video sites such as Instagram, Tik Tok, and YouTube have robust tools for working with video. Lobb recommended two other AI sites: Synthesia.io and Vidyo.ai. 

• Synthesia allows you to take written content and create a video using one of its human avatars. Each avatar has its own unique voice, accent, and style. If you would like, you can even clone your own voice.

Use Synthesia to provide market reports, promote your upcoming open house, or read a testimonial in the same way you would use an actor hired to do these jobs. Since the avatar and the lip synch don’t always match, always edit the videos Synthesia creates to make sure they meet your standards for what you want to share with your clients.

• Vidyo.ai allows you to take long form videos and to quickly make short videos for Instagram, YouTube Reels, and TikTok. It also provides closed captioning, video resizing, and social media templates. 

Put it all together in HighNote

While you can’t be available 24-7, you can set up an auto-reply on your landing pages or from QR codes on your signs, print marketing, and other digital marketing. Lobb recommends using a HighNote.io which was founded by veteran real estate professionals. According to HighNote’s  LinkedIn profile: 

HighNote is a platform built to help agents collect and deliver all your resources in the on trackable link. 

To put this approach on steroids, include your CMA data, RPR’s Real Property Reports, plus any videos, photos, staging suggestions, or other useful information to the person who is making the inquiry. This is a powerful way to ace out any other agent the buyer or seller may be contacting and get the face-to-face appointment. 

To wrap up this three-part series, Lobb advised avoid getting caught up in all the shiny objects with their bells and whistles. Instead, stay focused on selling real estate, use these tools to achieve better results, and always edit all AI responses for accuracy.