AI Use Case Series: AI in Real Estate [AI Today Podcast]

The AI Today podcast, powered by PMI, cuts through the hype and noise to identify what is really happening now in the world of artificial intelligence. Learn about emerging AI trends, best practices, and use cases on making AI work for you today, with PMI hosts and expert guests. Hello, and welcome to the AI Today podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Walch. And I'm your host, Ron Schmelzer. For the last bunch of episodes of the AI Today podcast, we've been really focused on applications of AI and use cases of AI in many different industries. And as I've been saying in the past few episodes, the reason why we're doing this is one, because there's a lot of ways in which AI is being put to good use in these industries. And especially if you're in the industry, it'd be good to know what your peers are doing, what others are doing. Everything we talk about in this podcast is real world happening today with real organizations getting real value from those applications. But if you're in another industry that may be related or different, you might also see a lot of things that might be useful to you. You might be hearing things that you could apply for your industry and your business. There's a lot of recurring themes and recurring trends when we talk about AI applications in the industries. So you may hear them and you may say, oh, okay, this may be relevant to me and my industry. And the other reason why we're doing this is that we did this series a while ago where we talked about AI use cases in industries. And well, it's been many years, so it's time for us to revisit those applications. Things do change. But also because we want to showcase that even after all these years, people are still asking the question, what is AI good for? And we want to show you that people are really gaining day-to-day good level of value from AI in, I would say, a very mundane way. So let's get all the talk about the things that maybe may not be making the press, may not be getting the most attention, but are really driving the real value for organizations today. Exactly. So in this podcast, we want to talk about how AI is impacting real estate. So it is impacting it in a number of different ways from improving decision-making or streamlining processes, enhancing customer experiences, also being able to just help with evaluating your home, what should it even be listed for? So when it comes to real estate, we have the buying and selling. So we need to make sure that we have listed our home for an appropriate price and that people are going to be buying it. But it's not always easy to figure out, you know, there's a number of different factors that go in to figuring out what your price, the price of your home should be. And so we're now seeing AI being used to help with property valuation and also price prediction. So AI models are really good at, you know, using that past or current data, maybe including historical sale prices, especially, you know, from your area, different market trends and also features on your home as well to accurately predict property values. So we're seeing a bunch of different online platforms that are using these AI-driven tools to help with automated valuation models or, you know, helping with determining the price that they think that your home is worth and what you're going to be able to get for it, which is pretty cool so that you can make, you know, it empowers the homeowner too to say, hey, do I think that I want to sell right now? Do I think that I'm going to get what I want if you have the luxury of that flexibility? Then we're also seeing predictive analytics for investment opportunities, right? So sometimes you buy it as your primary home, real estate, but sometimes you buy it as an investment opportunity. So now we're seeing AI being used to help people determine whether or not they should, you know, purchase different properties if they want rental income or if they want different investment opportunities, you know, what are the prime locations, what are a number of different factors that come into play and AI is really being used as that augmented intelligence tool to help people with that. Also when it comes to being able to buy, maybe you're not sure exactly where you want to buy. This could be if it's an investment property or maybe you're moving to a new region and you really don't know much about that region. Now we're seeing AI being used to help with personalized property recommendations. So it's able to look at a number of different data points and different factors and really match buyers and renters or match you to potential homes that you're interested in based on a number of needs and preferences that you set up. So it's really cool and, you know, these technologies, maybe you don't always feel like they're AI driven, but they are. And so it's just nice to be able to use these tools. And so maybe you're using AI and not even realizing it. We're also seeing with, you know, being able to tour homes, especially when you don't live in that region can be quite difficult. So AI is now helping to create these immersive walkthroughs. A lot of times now these platforms have these 3D walkthroughs, and so it's allowing potential buyers to explore these properties remotely, which is really cool. Maybe you want to explore it remotely before you go there in person to say, hey, this works for me or hey, this doesn't work for me. So that's another really great application. Yeah. And so there's more to real estate, of course, than just the selling and buying a real estate, although that's the part that most people have experience with. And of course, there's more than just residential real estate. We have commercial real estate and all its forms, but a lot of it follows into the same general pattern. It's just bigger budgets and bigger and different kinds of buildings, right, and different kinds of properties. So if we think about the management part of it, you're trying to, you know, once you own this property or once you're responsible for a property, you have to make sure that the property is delivering value and providing what the various people in the real estate are expecting. And so property management, for those who would do it, that's, you know, helping with all the maintenance and the improvements and just to continue to upkeep of any sort of property. AI is definitely helping in that, it's helping with, of course, aspects of collection of rents and, you know, different fees that are due, but also in terms of scheduling maintenance and managing communications with tenants. And we're seeing a lot of app-powered platforms that are really automating many of these processes. Of course, you don't need AI for automation. You can use regular web apps and automation tools. However, AI, as you can imagine, is helping, especially when people have to type in their problems. You can do NLP analysis. You can have chatbots. You can have document analysis where people can upload photos and say, hey, I'm having a problem here. Let me point out this hole in the wall, you know, or this leaky faucet or something like that. This is great use of AI, recognition pattern of AI, the conversational pattern of AI. It really helps reduce the workload for property managers, almost makes it even kind of a fun thing to do. I shouldn't say that, but it is probably true. So there's that aspect of managing property, but there's also the aspect of managing the risks and possibly even fraud that may happen in real estate. So, you know, there may be risks and frauds in the transaction part of the real estate, but there's also all sorts of stuff with suspicious activities that may be happening at the real estate locations, different activities that may be happening with the transactions. And you know, we see AI being used here to help spot that, you know, we've seen AI being used in this case to spot when properties may be used for Airbnb and, you know, vacation rentals when that may not be allowed. I know it's strange to say that, but we're starting to see that sort of analytics happen. Enforcement either by the property owner or by cities and local governments who may spot trends that may not reflect what the property should be used for, various different zoning enforcements and other activities as well. And then we're even seeing AI being used to help make these properties more efficient and more effective in terms of energy efficiency, you know, helping, you know, monitor things like lighting, heating, cooling, security. There's many AI driven platforms that can like analyze patterns in energy usage and use that to help improve the costs and manage the energies. Perhaps it's a commercial building and you have heating and cooling and lighting that when people are not there, which is a big issue, especially now we have a lot of remote and work from home. When, when working patterns are not the same as they used to be, it might have been the lights go on at eight o'clock, they turn off at five PM, the heating turns on the cooling turns off. But like if you have 10%, you know, utilization in your office, that may not make sense. Maybe people are working odd hours now when the lights are off. So these are things that AI systems are really able to help to improve just in general the experience for those who are tenants of those real estate properties. Yeah. So it is pretty exciting. And then, you know, when it comes to pretty much any industry, especially where there's you know, a business involved, you're just going to have these back office operations and you're also going to have to deal with customer service. You may have to deal with contracts. And so we're seeing AI really being used to help with all of these different business operations as well. And the reason that we bring this up, you may notice that this is a theme among different podcasts is because this really is impacting many different industries. So these are specific to the, you know, real estate industry, but how is it applied to your industry? One of them is we're seeing customer service being enhanced with the use of AI enabled chatbots. So now no longer do you need humans answering phones or humans behind the scenes actually answering these questions that come in. We're seeing AI powered chatbots and large language models respond to a number of different inquiries. We can assist with property searches, scheduling viewings, maybe, you know, some other tasks that you really don't need the human in the loop for when it comes to some of these customer service tasks, handling routine questions and also being available 24/7. So you're no longer bound by the hours that you're working, which is really nice. And then also when it comes to real estate, we have contracts, right? And so sometimes people may have questions with these contracts. You can help with, you know, AI powered chatbots are being used to help with that. And we're also seeing AI just being used throughout the entire process to help make these documents and the whole process more efficient, more effective. We tied a big podcast on AI and legal use cases for AI and legal and I'll link to that in the show notes. And we also talked about how AI is being used with digitization in other podcasts. And so again, that, you know, how do we take some of these contracts, put them online so that they're searchable, depending on what the contracts are. So there's lots of different ways that AI is being used in real estate. It's exciting to hear how it's being used in every single industry. So if you haven't done so, I encourage you to go back and check out some of our previous use case series. I'll link to them in the show notes as well and definitely stay subscribed to AI today so you can get notified of all of our upcoming episodes. Like this episode and want to hear more. With hundreds of episodes and over 3 million downloads, check out more AI Today podcasts at aiToday.live. Make sure to subscribe to AI Today if you haven't already on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Google, Amazon, or your favorite podcast platform. Want to dive deeper and get resources to drive your AI efforts further? We've put together a carefully curated collection of resources and tools, handcrafted for you, our listeners, to expand your knowledge, dive deeper into the world of AI, and provide you with the essential resources you need. Check it out at aiToday.live/list, music by Matsu Grabus. As always, thanks for listening to AI Today, and we'll catch you at the next podcast.