Real Estate and Artificial Intelligence Podcast
Recently, podcast hosts Matt and Brendan sat down and discussed some of the most interesting parts of Joel Davis’ speech at the STAFFLINK Conference covering AI in Real Estate.
Joel was very excited about its game-changing potential but had a warning for those looking for a magic bullet (spoiler alert: it’s not).
This blog will explore some of the themes of Joel’s speech. You can listen to the full episode below.
“I think the disruption is coming from within this room”
Traditionally, industries often get disrupted from the outside. Think Uber or Netflix. It wasn’t the taxi drivers or VideoEzy who created amazing products that left the traditional industry big players behind.
It was some techy upstarts who didn’t necessarily know everything about the industry they were disrupting, in fact, they often saw this as their advantage.
But Real Estate is different, it is so much more complex than a lot of other industries due to the nature of legislation, and regulatory requirements that change frequently.
Although there are big players, it is still a cottage industry, with over 10,000 businesses across Australia.
Put simply, it is hard to disrupt.
There have been several attempts in recent years of ‘PropTech’ companies trying to wrestle into the market, often with the support of wealthy backers.
But so far these attempts have not succeeded.
They just didn’t have the Real Estate understanding and expertise.
There are many in Real Estate who have that expertise, but perhaps don’t have the tech skills to create disruptive products.
But AI is changing that.
Now the very people with expertise in Real Estate have been given the tools to disrupt it.
Some of them were probably in the room.
“It is really critical to make sure we don’t have silos of information.”
“Most of us have similar tech stacks but still have different components to them. And a serious problem is when you’ve got platforms that have critical data, about YOUR properties that live in THEIR platforms.”
Sometimes when Joel hears “someone should come along and just create a one-stop shop for all data” his response is “never going to happen.”
There are some great Real Estate platforms out there, but the opportunity to take advantage of AI relies on having good, clean, data that you have access to.
You can’t automate an inconsistent task, and you can’t automate processes based on data that you don’t have authority to access or control.
That’s why STAFFLINK has integrations with all the major tech platforms on the market right now.
The ultimate goal is to give back power to the individual businesses.
Because when you have “silos of information”, it becomes “significantly more difficult to take advantage of these opportunities that are presenting themselves [like AI]”
“It will never go back and we have the same expectations.”
During his speech, Joel didn’t shy away from the potentially transformative impact that AI will have.
But he insists it is the change that is needed in the Real Estate industry.
The rising expectations of clients have coincided with a trend of rising expectations in workers (both in terms of salary and flexibility) that have placed enormous pressure on businesses.
Decisions that improved life for workers often came at the expense of the business, and the rising expectations of clients often came at the expense of property managers’ health and well-being.
This is not a win-win situation, and something has to change dramatically to advance the interests of workers, clients, and the business collectively, not at the expense of the other.
That’s why Joel is excited by AI because it has the potential to be a game-changer in this space.
Who will be able to use AI?
Not everyone will be able to use AI
Obviously, it’s not too hard to log into ChatGPT and start messing around. But that’s not what we mean when we say deploy AI
We’re talking about using AI to radically reform the way they do business. To continue to elevate the role of property manager to focus on its ‘human’ elements.
To massively increase productivity and capacity. So who will be able to use it this way? We’ve actually written a blog about it, you can check it out here.
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