ChatGPT, a powerful language model developed by artificial intelligence company OpenAI, has taken the world by storm since its launch on November 30, 2022. With its ability to understand and respond to natural language, ChatGPT can be used to automate many tasks currently performed by humans. 

Though it is still in its infancy, ChatGPT has impressive potential applications across numerous industries, including the real estate industry. In today’s post, we will take a close look at some of the main ways in which it can be used in our industry. 

We’re so confident in ChatGPT’s abilities, in fact, that I enlisted its help to write this blog post (which I then refined and edited into its completed form). 

How Can ChatGPT Be Trained? 

One of the most useful things about tools such as ChatGPT is that they can be trained, making them more and more accurate and efficient over time. The original language model was trained using an enormous collection of written text from various sources. The transformer was then exposed to this text and learned to recognize patterns and relationships between words and phrases. As a result, ChatGPT became adept at generating coherent, humanlike responses to a wide range of prompts and questions.

ChatGPT can also be personalized to a certain extent to a specific use case or domain. This involves training the language model on a smaller and more specific data set that is related to your use case, and then fine-tuning by adjusting the parameters—such as the learning rate and number of training epochs—to optimize the model’s performance. Once the tool has been fine-tuned, it can be integrated into your website or customer-facing application. 

It’s important to note that training and fine-tuning ChatGPT requires some expertise in machine learning and natural language processing, so you may want to consider working with a data scientist or AI expert on this process. 

Following are some common tasks that can be simplified by using ChatGPT. 

Answering Customer Queries 

One of the main potential use cases for ChatGPT in the real estate industry is in assisting real estate agents and commercial real estate landlords with answering customer queries. When prospective buyers and tenants have questions about properties, ChatGPT can be used to quickly and accurately provide answers. 

Landlords can train ChatGPT to understand the specific details of a property and respond to common questions such as those about rental rates, parking facilities, and amenities. This can save agents and landlords significant time and allow them to focus on those tasks that require a human touch. 

Yardi, one of the leading providers of real estate management software, uses an AI-powered chatbot known as Chat IQ. This system allows clients to offer an improved customer experience through immediate, 24/7 responses via chat, text, and email. The tool makes it easier to engage with prospective buyers and tenants and, ultimately, to convert more prospects into customers. AI language models like ChatGPT enable this kind of possibility for all real estate businesses. 

Creating and Updating Property Listings 

Another fantastic use case for ChatGPT in the real estate industry is in helping to create and update property listings. 

ChatGPT can be trained to remember the details of a property or unit, such as its size, number of bedrooms, and amenities, and then use this information to create compelling listing descriptions. This can help to attract more buyers or renters to a property and increase sales and rentals, leading to greater revenue for the agent, owner, or landlord. 

Virtual Tours 

In addition to creating and maintaining property listings, ChatGPT can also enhance virtual tours of properties. The AI model enables virtual tours to be more interactive, providing users with information and answering their queries in real time in a human-sounding way.

The tool can answer questions during the tour, provide additional information about the property, and assist prospective buyers or tenants as they move from room to room. It can even be trained to recognize different types of buyers and their preferences, allowing for a more personalized tour experience. 

Assisting with Lease Negotiation 

ChatGPT’s potential in the real estate industry goes beyond the simple tasks of answering customer queries and creating property listings. It can also help commercial real estate landlords by assisting with lease negotiation. 

Thanks to its sophisticated learning capabilities, ChatGPT can be trained to understand the legal language and terminology used in lease agreements, and it can help landlords create more favorable terms for themselves. This may include, for example, setting higher rental rates, securing longer lease terms, and obtaining more favorable clauses in the lease agreements. 

Additionally, ChatGPT can assist landlords in monitoring lease compliance by notifying them of upcoming lease expirations and any potential breaches of lease agreements, which can help landlords address these issues before they become more significant problems. 

Creating Marketing Materials 

ChatGPT can also be used in the real estate industry to help create marketing materials, such as brochures and flyers, as well as digital materials such as promotional emails, blog posts (like this one!), and social media content.

By understanding the details of a property, ChatGPT can produce marketing materials that highlight the property’s best features and help to generate interest from potential buyers or tenants. 

Supporting Your Human Workers, Not Replacing Them 

ChatGPT is a fantastic tool with extensive potential in our industry. Contrary to fears some may have, though, it is not designed to be a replacement for human team members. 

ChatGPT can perform many tasks on its own, such as answering tenant inquiries and creating marketing materials. However, it still requires some human supervision and training to ensure that the responses and materials it generates are accurate and appropriate. Additionally, in order to be used to its full potential, it would need to be integrated with other systems, such as property management software and lease agreements. 

While ChatGPT can help to reduce staff head count and increase efficiency by automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks, it cannot replace the need for human expertise and decision-making in certain areas. Lease negotiation, for example, requires knowledge of legal language and current market conditions. Human supervision would also be required to continually monitor the performance of the AI system, to ensure that it is providing accurate and appropriate responses.

Commercial real estate landlords and agents, along with others in the real estate industry, should view ChatGPT as a tool that can automate certain tasks and make their work more efficient, but not as something that can replace the need for human staff. Instead, it can augment the capabilities of your human team members, helping them make better decisions, save time on repetitive tasks, and work more efficiently.

A Caveat About ChatGPT

Although ChatGPT is an amazing tool, it is not infallible and can occasionally give wrong answers. Unless the reader is a subject area expert, they may struggle to identify such discrepancies. Therefore, the output provided from ChatGPT should always be double-checked. 

Tech reviewer and commentator Marques Brownlee goes into more detail on this subject in this video. 

Contact REdirect Consulting 

If you have any questions about the content in this post, about how we use ChatGPT to support our clients, or about any of our services, we would love to hear from you. Please feel free to contact us at any time.