This report is available exclusively to subscribers of Inman Intel, a data and research arm of Inman offering deep insights and market intelligence on the business of residential real estate and proptech. Subscribe today.
Real Estate Webmasters (REW) will soon release an artificial intelligence marketing and business support tool built on Open AI’s now popular ChatGPT bot, Inman has learned.
The tool, named “REWpert” — a play on the company’s acronym — will allow customers to do more than merely find inspiration for listing descriptions. The company said REWpert will exercise more of what Open AI intended its tool to do.
In an email to Inman, REW CEO Morgan Carey said internal use and testing is underway as a “phase one” integration.
“REWPert is already being use by staff, specifically our customer success and onboarding teams, as well as our search engine marketing and SEO teams for all sorts of things from keyword research, to creating blog layouts, to researching content and even production of content in some instances,” Carey said. “It’s a concept we refer to as human assisted AI.“
He also said the company is using it for language translations to better serve international clients and will later link it to Google Lighthouse apps for enhance website functionality.
Phase Two will involve a mid-March beta test of the REWpert interface for customers and non-customers alike in an attempt to demonstrate its capabilities to the industry at large.
“By the end of March, users will be able to use REWpert for many of the same things they use ChatGPT for today,” Carey said.
REW created a public forum for discussions, brainstorming and feedback on AI tools, a sort of collection point for what current and potential customers want to see from the rapidly emerging technology.
In a February 24 post to that forum, Carey acknowledged what few other industry leaders have: that risks exist to blindly using AI, ChatGPT specifically, in real estate marketing.
“The idea is there are inherent challenges with AI in terms of how it is applied within the context of real estate marketing, and it can create serious issues related to content accuracy and compliance,” Carey posted. “Companies like REW need to custom-build applications so that we can leverage this technology, but also fine-tune it specific to real estate and build special applications and services on top of this powerful platform.”
Inman contributor Bernice Ross highlighted some of the issues, citing an article from The Verge reporting that it’s common for large language models — the AI model beneath tools like ChatGPT — to simply make things up.
“In the case of ChatGPT, it was trained on billions of datasets, but there are trillions and trillions of combinations of language. New words constantly come into the language, words often change meaning or become archaic, and individual speakers’ use of language differs from person to person,” Ross explained.
Phase Three of the REWpert roll-out will fully integrate its bot into its CRM and CMS (content management system) solutions for use in developing content for email marketing, custom client responses and individual text messages and blog post creation, among other use cases.
