AI and Estate Agents
In 1589, Queen Elizabeth 1 refused a patent for a mechanical knitting machine, fearing the unemployment it could cause. Arguably, she thereby set back the industrial revolution by two centuries.
Since the end of the last century, our business and personal lives have been transformed by the internet. Now AI offers new benefits and challenges and there is no Elizabeth 1 to slow things down. Snooze, you lose.
So, how can an understanding of AI help estate agents?
There are two main types of AI, generative and argentic. Generative AI, as its name suggests, generates new material using algorithms to find, select and employ data, images, music and or written text. For estate agents, this could mean creating new property details or virtual property tours from existing models.
Argentic AI involves the capability for technology not only to generate material but also to work autonomously. This could involve autonomous planning, decision-making and then taking action all without human involvement. It can even adapt to changing objectives and feedback. How many people searching for a good local solicitor or a property now ask their chatbot of choice ‘Find me an estate agent/solicitor/surveyor in NE2’?
For estate agents, AI offers a wealth of opportunity. From chatbots that answer client enquiries and make appointments 24 hours a day, to profiling clients and autonomously sending details potentially of interest, AI can boost efficiency.
To ensure your estate agency has ‘AI visibility’, there are a number of tips.
- make sure your website contains plenty of facts for the bots to cite. These could include detailed buyer and seller information, apt for your target market, along with FAQs.
- Make sure your content matches the kind of prompts or questions your market would use in AI chat
- keep pages of information accessible by giving them headings, keeping paragraphs short with easy topic headings and information broken down into bullet points.
- As bots can cut straight to a property, bypassing your agency home page, ensure your property specs contain detailed descriptions. These could include references to lifestyle and, as above, use topic headings and bullet pointed lists.
- Make the most of your company’s online reviews (e.g. from Google, Trustpilot etc) and ensure any industry awards, contributions to publications and so on are prominent for the bots to find.
- Make sure your site meets key tech specs, for example, allowing crawler bots to access relevant, non-sensitive information and using HTML for your core detail.