How AI is driving competitive advantage in an increasingly crowded real estate market

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a buzzword in many industry sectors, and real estate is no exception. But like many trendy new terms, it’s commonly misunderstood. Contrary to what many people feared, the rise of AI hasn’t led to a surge of jobs being replaced by computers, and neither is it likely to in the foreseeable future. Rather, AI emerged out of the need to derive greater value from increasingly enormous data sets, which have long since outgrown human abilities to make sense out of them. In a nutshell, it’s about boosting efficiency with automation of routine tasks and enabling smarter decision-making based on hard facts gathered across a multitude of digital activities.

Here are four ways AI is changing the world of real estate:

#1. Providing recommendations to customers

If you’ve ever shopped on Amazon, then you’ve seen how recommendation engines work, but the technology has a far greater reach than retail. Large estate agents with hundreds or even thousands of properties on offer can save their customers a huge amount of time by increasing the relevancy of their offers and fine-tuning their targeting. AI can create tailor-made listings of properties based on a client’s preferences and previous viewings. Even more impressively, it can use profiling techniques to provide first-time customers with relevant offers based on demographical attributes or things which worked well with similar previous clients. That’s a lot simpler than manually searching through constantly growing real estate databases.

#2. Performing marketing analyses

One of the most exciting applications of AI is predicting future outcomes, whether it’s global weather patterns or complex markets. This area in particular has the potential to change the world of business beyond measure. In a sector like real estate, where the stakes are so high, the ability to anticipate market fluctuations is something of a holy grail to investors. With the right combination of human expertise and data-based analyses and forecasting, AI can predict future rent and sale prices, identify the latest market trends, and even pinpoint new investment opportunities. Given how much the real estate market relies on good timing, these tools can help reduce risk and maximize ROI.

#3. Offering simplified customer care

No one likes picking up the phone and waiting in line for some unknowable length of time. Our hectic schedules have placed a substantial strain on customer care in just about every industry sector. For smaller real estate agents, maintaining a fully staffed call center isn’t economically viable or even desirable anyway. Fortunately, AI-powered chatbots can handle most customer care queries without a hitch. In some cases, such as when recommending property, they’re often even more effective than estate agents themselves. On top of that, recent advances in natural language processing and machine learning mean customers can interact with them in much the same way they’d interact with an agent.

#4. Enabling smart contracts

We at Venture Leap are very skeptical about blockchain and do not consider it a valid technology for the future. Still, the closely connected proliferation of smart contracts will empower a new era of more efficient data-driven transactions and enable businesses to grow faster than ever before. Real estate can benefit from using smart contracts to create immutable transactions from a range of inputs, thus eliminating human error and saving time. The execution of smart contracts is guaranteed with the help of predefined rules without needing human intervention. These rules can check the legitimacy of the transaction and check contracts against already-established standards to reduce the risk of fraud too. One day soon, we’ll be able to carry out real estate transactions as simply as making an online purchase.