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From a strict Xs and Os perspective, predicting how the real estate market shakes out in 2025 is no easy feat.
Sales numbers could stay exactly where they are as of this writing or change dramatically for the better. On the other hand, the state of proptech in the coming year is easier to make assumptions about.
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For example, there’s little chance real estate can escape the gravity of artificial intelligence in 2025. It’s only swirling itself into something bigger, pulling into its grip long-held practices brokers, their brands and the agents under them have forever relied upon to do business.
If 2024 was the reconnaissance period artificial intelligence needed to prove it can change the real estate industry, then 2025 is going to be the year we get assimilated.
The end of the traditional interface?
ChatGPT did more than introduce the world to the reach and capabilities of artificial intelligence; it cultivated the idea that all we need is the right prompt to get something done.
At the end of 2023, a 400-agent independent brokerage in California, Avenue 8, developed an in-house LLM called Sidekick to help its agents find out things faster, a lot like ChatGPT. But once trained, it was capable of much more than sharing mortgage rates — so much so that the company shuttered its brokerage business to take Sidekick national.
“It is critical that agents demonstrate value across two vectors: specific knowledge and speed,” Avenue 8 co-founder Michael Martin said in an email to Inman. “Many have the former, but the latter is a constraint.
“Even if you’ve been working in the industry 20 to 30 years, the ability to quickly generate, analyze and assemble information across a variety of modalities is incredibly challenging. It’s not about having a personality or a face or a name — it’s about functionality and speed.”
The intent of such experiences is to create a prompt-driven command center, minus any sort of software front-end experience. There is a deliberate absence of buttons, menus, sliders, tabs, colors and other principles of software design.
The Real Brokerage is headed in the same direction with Leo, its rapidly growing in-house entity. Chief Technology Officer Pritesh Damani indicated in a media call during Real’s annual RISE conference that such an experience is “right there,” but eliminating logins and interfaces now would be too sudden an evolution given its focus on agent growth and national footprint.
SERHANT. just landed $45 million in equity funding to advance its S.MPLE platform under SERHANT. Technologies. Demonstrated to Inman twice, the application blends AI with human guardrails in the carrying out of just any marketing or contract-related need of its agents. And it can be voice-driven, too.
An AI’s ability to discern user intent and thus complete tasks with prescience makes software use much faster, in turn shrinking workflows and quite literally manufacturing time. The interface as you know it will cease to be universal but contextual, presenting only the deals, dollars and direction an individual user needs to accomplish that day’s goal.
Will you still be interacting with menus and logins and graphical front-end displays by the end of 2025? Very likely. There just won’t be as many of them as there were this time last year.
TCPA and the leads game
Agents may finally start getting better leads in 2025 thanks to a law passed in 1991.
On Jan. 27, 2025, the Telephone Consumer Privacy Act, which gave rise to the Do Not Call list, will become a very popular topic in real estate, and it’ll affect the software you use. On that date, an overwhelming number of agent databases will become obsolete, at least until the work is done to make them compliant with updated TCPA rules.
Those rules require solicitors (real estate agents) to have express written consent to contact a consumer if using what is deemed a “regulated technology,” such as a power dialer, or Automatic Telephone Dialing System (ATDS), or mass texting systems. Wrapped in its tentacles too are voicemail drops and AI voice calls.
Consent must be between a single seller and an individual, a one-to-one relationship. Thus, brokers better hope two agents don’t call the same lead. One repeat call could spell trouble, and what’s worse, it can affect the entire brokerage, not only the agent making the unregulated call.
Do you allow your mortgage and title partners to contact your leads? Might want to end that practice, too. Your “preferred partners” will need to obtain their own consent for each person.
Any sort of bulk lead list will need to be thoroughly vetted to determine if each record on it signed up to be contacted and ensure they’re not on the Do Not Call registry. If they are, and you call them, you’re on the hook for what could be a significant penalty per violation and law firms advertising ways to collect are planning their ad budgets.
The good news is that these new laws will demand that you maintain an active business relationship with an individual you are actively contacting. It forces you to create a better relationship.
Secondly, all of those shitty lead sources that like to sell agents pages from the phone book (Remember phone books?) or cast-off leads from other providers will likely struggle to stay afloat, given that their model is dependent on the industry not paying attention to who it contacts for potential business.
Jan. 27 will especially impact any broker who supplies leads to their agents, meaning they’ll need to take extra steps to ensure consent is granted. When it is, it’s good for 18 months provided the one-to-one relationship remains active.
Agents will want to comb their CRMs to find DNC registrants. You can email them to request consent but remember, if they have no interest in buying or selling for a while, you’ll be better off removing them from all outreach.
This is something that affects every agent and broker in the country who uses software to stay in touch or who has ever paid for leads. Any technology vendor that offers an ATDS or mass-texting capability needs to be asked how they’re handling the pending changes. If you use ISAs or virtual assistants, they need to be educated. Interns? New agents learning the ropes? Them, too.
CallAction, a text and call marketing solution, is all-in on ensuring compliance and has taken a number of steps to make sure it’s ready for the end of January.
Its founder, Jesse Beaudoin, said that collaboration will be key to making sure brokerages and vendors work in unison to ensure compliance. And he exudes positivity, believing changes will push agents in the right direction.
“The consumers’ awareness of the NAR settlement and the enforcement of the TCPA’s one-to-one express written consent will usher in a new era of professionalism in the industry,” Beaudoin told Inman.
Lofty, a popular CRM and marketing software provider, said it’s working on compliance measures too, according to an email sent to Inman.
“We will be implementing product changes that allow for express written consent to be tracked effectively in the Lofty platform,” Lofty said in an email to Inman. “This level of consent is required for the use of features such as pre-recorded voice messages, three-line dialer, ringless voicemail integrations, and AI texting. Numerous other TCPA service provider obligations are under review with a TCPA lawyer for potential implementation.”
In January 2023, Keller Williams agreed to pay $40 million to settle a class action lawsuit alleging the major real estate franchisor’s agents made unsolicited, pre-recorded calls to consumers without their consent, including calls to consumers on the National Do Not Call Registry.
There’s a good chance we’ll see a number of lawsuits and instances of penalties being assigned as the industry scrambles to become compliant through the year. It’s going to be easier for big brands, but independents and small-town shops may not be blessed with the time, tech and lawyers to ensure they’re up to speed.
The updated laws can definitely be viewed as one more hurdle to success in real estate, as cold calling and prospecting is a time-honored tactic for unearthing new business. But if the age of mobile phones and contact automation has taught us anything, it’s that most of us like to be left alone.
Talk to your broker, and don’t wait until Jan. 28 to do it.
Renting as a lifestyle
Among others, an Avalon Bay executive sat with a luxury rental services provider on a panel at Blueprint Vegas in September. The annual proptech show, now under the Inman banner, discusses all things “built world,” and this panel was about the overlap between residential and hotels.
As conference panels often go, the discussion became a little focused, and the landlord got to chatting about its goal to implement more hotel-derived amenities and levels of service for its residents. The word “resident journey” was mentioned a few times. That’s when it hit me: people like renting. And these guys know it.
Orange Charger, a company that appears to install and manage electric vehicle chargers in multifamily properties, told Inman what it actually does is “provide energy for transportation.”
But what can the success of an EV charging software company tell us about the future state of home sales? You might be surprised.
“Most of the companies we compete with have tried to take the gas station model and copy it into the EV industry, and it has predominantly failed,” Johnson said. “We decided to go into multifamily because we believe it was under-served sector that has a really high utilization factor. People want to charge their cars overnight at home.”
Orange has determined that overnight charging has less impact on the grid and at the same time, with renting becoming more common for longer, it offers lifestyle benefits.
“I have friends who make millions that pay way too much for rent but when you ask them why they go, ‘Because I want the amenities, the laundry and a place to park my car. I show up for work at 8:00 a.m. and leave at 10:00 p.m. and the last thing I want to do is fix my house on a Saturday.”
Johnson’s company has installations at Avalon Bay properties. And his company, along with the rapidly growing list of software providers for multifamily, believe that renting is the future of American occupancy.
Part of Johnson’s argument is that, as the nation’s adoration for EVs increases, as PWC says it will, more consumers will make housing decisions around how they commute. Isn’t this why we invented suburbs?
Institutional landlords are looking to create “resident journeys” and are using software to create them. Rent payment apps, maintenance requests, remote offices and even location-flexible leases, are all part of the equation.
The Center for Real Estate Technology and Innovation reported that one of the year’s largest VC rounds, $50 million, went to LeaseAI, which uses “predictive leasing analytics, to help property owners optimize tenant placement and retention. Its advanced algorithms provide actionable insights into market trends and tenant preferences.”
But it wasn’t the biggest. In 2024, EliseAI, another AI property management system, became a “unicorn” after a $75 million Series D round.
Knightvest Capital, a multifamily financier, surveyed 2,500 renters, finding that 48 percent choose to rent versus feeling they have to, and 59 percent said they rent because it offers fewer maintenance responsibilities.
Said David Moore, Knightvest founder and CEO, in a Nov. 24 statement, “These findings have important implications for the multifamily industry going into 2025: as people stay in apartments longer, investments in quality, service, and location are increasingly important.”
The next year should firmly entrench apartments as equal living options to single-family residential. The slow pace of construction, interest rates, costs and the growth of lifestyle-based relocation decisions only augment the issue.
Moreover, the very state of the residential industry itself, from NAR’s self-inflicted kneecapping and its overt negligence of the consumer experience to the state of chaos that is now Clear Cooperation, isn’t exactly offering a balm for the festering wounds suffered in 2024.
Evolving priorities for AI
There isn’t a lot to predict or wax prescient about when it comes to the impact of artificial intelligence on real estate. It’s going to become part of just about everything you do, across multiple sectors.
Where the industry should point AI is what matters in 2025, and it should be squarely directed at construction and the consumer experience.
There are enough software companies helping agents and brokerages move faster and reduce transaction friction. What the country needs is more housing, and that relies on a lot of things that can be made better through algorithms, such as plan reviews, documentation flows, regulation summaries, municipal permitting, change orders, material cost forecasting and inspections — for starters.
Agent-led home search is antiquated. A number of entrepreneurs, as well the increasing reach (and ad budgets) of the big three portals is making it futile for agents to stay ahead of emotional buyers who refresh their apps and tap push notifications until their fingers cramp. There’s also the added complexity of buyer representation. Has anyone really figured it out?
The coming year should give the industry the big shove needed toward agent consultancy. Expect some brokerages to either launch new teams or levels of service that reflect this, or a cadre of independents to emerge marketing such a model.
It’s going to take some branding, the right AI and marketing savvy, but the opportunity for retainer-based buyer advisory is emerging and necessary. Consumers need to be given a much longer leash in search, as well as an improved level of transparency, and agents need to provide value beyond knowing the lockbox code.
It’s not hyperbole to say that the industry hasn’t had to fix this level of disrepair in some time. The Great Recession was blamed on Wall Street, COVID on China and now lawyers are being fingered for the NAR mess.
This time, the homebuyer doesn’t seem to care who is responsible, they just want the market fixed, and they’ll give money to whoever is carrying the toolbox, whether it’s an app, portal or person.
Maybe in 2025 the industry finally gets the message.
