The Complete Guide for Agents

Artificial intelligence (AI) blasted into our daily lives in a flash, and the real estate industry is feeling the aftershocks. But as jarring as it is, ChatGPT is also emerging as a powerful tool, offering real estate agents the opportunity to harness technology for increased efficiency and success.

New to the idea of ChatGPT in real estate? Have no fear! As a newly certified Florida Realtors faculty member who’s just passed her audition to teach classes on artificial intelligence, I’m going to break it down for you. I’ll explain what it is and how to use it, teach you all about the prompts, and help you get some of your time back to focus on the tasks that will scale your real estate business.

What Is ChatGPT?

At every real estate conference I’ve attended in the past year, ChatGPT has emerged as the most popular topic on agents’ minds, along with concerns about the future of real estate. In the simplest terms, ChatGPT is an AI assistant. It’s akin to a super-smart chatbot that can understand and generate human-like prose. It’s been trained on text from the internet, making it a conversational tool that you can chat with, ask questions, or give a task to complete. It responds just like a human would. The big difference is the speed at which it can respond and perform tasks. It’s like having a personal assistant who’s knowledgeable about real estate right at your fingertips.

How to Get Started With ChatGPT

Using this tool is the key to understanding and perfecting its performance. So let’s take it for a test run! You’ll need to go to openai.com and set up a free account so you can save a record of your searches. Start your session by telling Chat (that’s what I call it) all about who you are, what you do, and your style of conversation. Chat will deliver responses appropriate for your persona, style, and tone. When you ask for something to use in your business, whether it’s an email, a social media post, or a text message, it will sound more authentically like you. 

It looks like this:

The more ChatGPT gets to know you, your personality, your tone, and your target audience, the better it can assist you with tasks. 

12 Clever Ways to Use ChatGPT in Your Real Estate Business

As I just mentioned, leveraging ChatGPT works best once it gets to know who you are. The fewer prompts you need to enter, the faster ChatGPT can deliver on the tasks you need completed. There are so many ways ChatGPT can help you in your real estate business and give you back time you thought you’d never see again. Here are a handful of ways to get started.

1. Property Descriptions

Honestly, you should have already thought of this one. “I love writing property descriptions!” said no agent ever. It takes time, mental energy, and effort that I, for one, don’t want to spend. So, it’s the perfect task to assign to your new AI assistant, ChatGPT. Try copying the prompt below and see what ChatGPT delivers for you!

Here’s what this one looked like for me:

2. Client Follow-up

When you need to touch base with a client to keep a transaction moving, ChatGPT can jump in and help you knock out this task quickly. Whether it’s a text message or an email, you can have ChatGPT write it for you. Instruct Chat to make it sound like it came from you, include emojis (if that’s your normal style), and snag the attention of your clients. You can ask Chat to draft several emails and text messages that you can have on-the-ready in your customer relationship manager (CRM) for when you need them. Then just copy and paste.

3. Community Insights

This is a fun one! Do you work a specific farm area? Ask Chat to give you some community insights for your farm area that you can then put together in an infographic, newsletter, or social media campaign. Just share the area with Chat and it will dig up info for you. 

Keep in mind that you might have to tweak the results a bit. The information in the free version of ChatGPT cuts off in September 2021. So, anything current won’t be available unless you use the ChatGPT-4 version through Bing. That version can access current internet info. 

Ask Chat to compile a list of the best schools, restaurants, attractions, or large companies for your community. Then, use those to build a community guide for your clients who are new to the area. 

Back when I created a community guide for my military movers, I didn’t have the luxury of ChatGPT to do the legwork, so it took me a while longer to get the information. I would have loved to have had this tool back then.

Play around with some of the alternative platforms like Google Bard, which is also connected to the internet, to see which platform works for you. You can access more current information on the chat platforms that access the internet. Some reports list Bard as being inferior to the original OpenAI version, but that’s a pretty big (and subjective) statement to make. Ultimately, you should choose whichever chat platform works best for you.

4. Text Messages

I mentioned text messages in the follow-up section, but there’s so much you can do outside of that with text. You can create an entire series of nurturing text messages for all of your prospects, clients, past clients, and even your sphere of influence. Just tell Chat what the text messages are for and ask for a certain number of texts that you can copy and paste.

5. Content Creation

Content is a huge driver in your online visibility. And I don’t know about you, but when I’m working as a real estate agent, helping my clients is top priority. Who has time to write blog posts? This is definitely a great task to assign to your AI assistant. 

Ask Chat to help you with outlines and even drafts. Just make sure to double-check your projects before you post them. Chat is good, but it’s not perfect. There may be mistakes, or something sounds a little too formal, and even some fair housing violations can slip through. So, make sure you proofread anything you publish.

One thing ChatGPT is great for is creating a content calendar. It can give you plenty of ideas, a schedule, and even some prompts to help you write. That’s a huge time-saver.

6. Email Drip Campaigns

This one is amazing! If you use a CRM in your real estate business, then you may have access to some email drip campaigns through it. But if you don’t (or you’ve already used the prebuilt campaigns in your outreach and want to try something new), ChatGPT can help.

Ask Chat to create a series of emails to send out, not unlike the text message campaigns I already mentioned. You can copy and paste the emails Chat writes and schedule them to go out at different intervals depending on the type of campaign. Chat can even give you ideas on how often to reach out.

7. Social Media Posts

This is one of the best time-savers I’m going to share with you. Simply ask Chat to create a series of social media posts. Ask for a month’s worth or more. I recently asked it to create 50 posts for me that I can use on social media related to real estate social media marketing. It can be about anything—homebuying tips, selling tips, inspirational quotes, transaction strategies, personal branding—that you want to create consistency around. 

Chat will create a list that you can actually copy and paste into a spreadsheet and export as a CSV file. Once you have your CSV, go into Canva, choose a template you like for your social media of choice (Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, etc.), and design your overall look for your posts. Then, use the bulk create feature in Canva to pull your entire CSV into the platform and fill in your posts. Brilliant, right? Check out this video where Lori Ballen shows you how to do it step by step.

8. Hashtags

Simply ask Chat to create a list (or lists) of hashtags for your social media posts. Or even better, you can ask Chat to add them in for you when it creates the posts.

When I asked Chat about setting up a list of hashtags, it told me to create a list including branding, industry-specific, local, niche, trending, and engagement hashtags. So I asked for a list of hashtags, and it spit out 40 to choose from. How cool is that?

9. Email Newsletters

You can ask Chat to create an outline of newsletter content that would be interesting to your target audience. It will break down several topics to include, along with some tips on how to make the most of each section. Then, if you need help with individual pieces of content, it can help you there too. Ask Chat to write drafts of sections or the entire newsletter. Just make sure you go back in and customize it so it sounds more authentic and doesn’t contain any errors.

10. Blog Posts

Writing is not everyone’s favorite thing to do, and it takes a lot of time and effort to come up with topics, sit down and think about the writing, and then execute. ChatGPT can write an entire blog post in seconds.

Or better yet, have Chat write a month’s worth of blog posts that you schedule to go out in advance. Having some help from ChatGPT, even if it’s just a list of ideas to write about or an outline for your blog posts, saves loads of time that could be better spent on other tasks.

11. Lead Magnets

Many real estate professionals use lead magnets to fill their CRMs with prospects’ contact information. But just as many struggle to come up with good lead magnets to attract their ideal clients. Let’s ask Chat for some assistance. It can help formulate ideas around lead magnets and can even write a draft for you. Take the information from Chat and use it to create a stunning PDF download in Canva Pro or Adobe Photoshop.

12. Video Scripts

Ready to be more present in videos but now sure how to get started? ChatGPT can create a script to help you. Tell Chat about your video topic, and let it draft a script. Be sure to let it know how long you want the script to be. If you tell it that you want to do a TikTok in under one minute, it can accommodate that request. You can also do longer-form videos and it will write to whatever length you want. Once you get your completed script, you can customize it to fit your personality and style.

5 Bonus ChatGPT Prompts for Realtors 

The best way to learn is to start using ChatGPT for yourself. Here are a few prompts to get you started:

Feel free to tweak them for your own needs, or just copy and paste them directly into the prompt box. Need more prompt inspo to use in your real estate business? You’re in luck! We’ve put together a list of 117 prompts you can use to get the ball rolling. You can customize them to work for your specific needs.

How to Write a ChatGPT Prompt

The best thing about ChatGPT prompts is that you can write them the way you would ask someone to do something for you. Imagine you’re talking to your personal assistant and asking that person to complete a task. You can write your prompts exactly the same way. 

If you ask ChatGPT for something and it’s not quite what you want, you can use the “Regenerate” button on the right side of the screen. Chat will spit out a whole new version of your request in seconds. But you won’t lose the original set—it stays right on the screen, so you can scroll back up to it. Feel free to mix and match all of the results!

You can always ask Chat to tweak the results afterward too. Type in what you specifically want to change and it will give you a different response. If you don’t know what you don’t like, you can also tap the “Regenerate” button instead to get a different version of your original request. Just because you don’t get exactly what you want initially, don’t give up. It takes a bit for Chat to get to know you, but it will learn how to deliver over time and with continued use.

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Caveats & Alternatives to ChatGPT

For all the amazing things ChatGPT can do, it’s not perfect by any means. First of all, in the free version, ChatGPT-3, the information is only as current as September 2021. So, there may be some lapses in the intel. But for evergreen content that doesn’t rely on current trends, data, or events, this shouldn’t be a problem. 

But what about Bing, you ask? I personally found using the ChatGPT integration on Bing cumbersome and not at all user friendly. But take it for a test drive yourself and see what you think. I don’t want to switch everything I have on my Google Chrome to Bing just to have access to ChatGPT when what OpenAI provides is enough for me. However, if you want more current information from ChatGPT, Bing might be worth the extra effort. 

There are additional ways to get more current information from ChatGPT. One way is to pay the monthly subscription fee to get the upgraded ChatGPT-4, which uses the internet to gather current information. You can also use alternatives such as:

• Porchlyte’s Lumi AI 
• Google Bard
• Jasper AI
• Chatsonic
• Copy.ai
• YouChat
• Listingcopy.ai
• Saleswise

And there are so many other platforms that have integrated ChatGPT into their platforms, including many CRMs and even Canva. Not all offer free access, but several on this list do (or are less expensive than the ChatGPT-4 subscription, which, as of this writing, is $20 per month). Also, I just wrote a round-up of AI tools for real estate agents, and many of those tools have integrated ChatGPT into their platforms. They’re definitely worth checking out.

I haven’t had much interaction with Google Bard yet, but it looks promising. It’s connected to the internet so the information is current, as opposed to ChatGPT-3. And it’s free to use. They’re currently working on new iterations, but so far it looks more user friendly than my experience with ChatGPT on Bing. I’ll update you with my experiences on Google Bard in upcoming articles. But any way you look at it, it’s great to have so many options with this fun tech tool.

If you want to cut your ChatGPT learning curve in half, you might want to check out Porchlyte Lumi AI, which was designed specifically for real estate agents. Powered by ChatGPT-4, it includes prewritten prompts in a drop-down menu, making it super-easy to choose what you need without having to learn how to write the prompts. You get a powerful AI tool with practically zero learning curve.

Get the Power of ChatGPT With Lumi AI by Porchlyte

What ChatGPT Is Not

I’ve talked a lot about what ChatGPT is, but let me be clear: It is not a replacement for you or your authentically human persona. Like many other tech tools that have disrupted the real estate world, ChatGPT is simply a tool to free up time to do more things that we enjoy doing, like chatting with our clients over a cup of coffee or catching up with friends and family. ChatGPT is not here to take your job unless you let it. It’s a tool designed to take some of the tasks that eat up so much of our time off of our plates. 

Another thing that ChatGPT isn’t is boilerplate. ChatGPT delivers unique answers to each person. So, what Chat delivers to you with a specific request will be different from another person with a similar request. Don’t worry about getting the same answers as your coworkers or competitors, because technically, that should not happen. It doesn’t even deliver the same answers to you when you ask the same question another time.

However, this is a great time to point out that you should always check Chat’s work. Check the information for flaws, and don’t just copy and paste. Take the time to customize the copy to make sure it’s in line with what you would actually say. You lose your authenticity when you let Chat do all of the work.  

Evolution Is Constant

Think about it: 20 years ago, few of us were concerned with establishing our online presence, crafting social media posts, creating videos to build up our YouTube channels, or constantly writing content for our blogs. But today, these chores are ubiquitous. And they take up so much of our time that we’re resorting to hiring people to help us get it all done. If you’re trying to do it all yourself, you really don’t have time for much else in your business or your life. 

I recently heard someone compare this new technology to the invention of boxed cake mixes. It used to be if you wanted to bake a cake at home, you had to have all the ingredients—flour, salt, baking powder, eggs, vegetable oil, and yeast—on hand along with the proper equipment to make it. After boxed cake mixes were created, people had the ability to bake their own cakes at home without being top-level chefs or running out for fresh ingredients. ChatGPT is our modern boxed cake mix, making tasks easier for individuals to accomplish.

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Embrace the Change & Your Role

But similar to when the internet gave us access to the world outside our ZIP codes, ChatGPT is another tool that will weave its way into our daily lives, assisting us with tasks to give us back our time and freedom. It’s a beautiful thing and I’m here for it. 

So, continue to show up for your clients, your past clients, and your sphere. Your job is not threatened by ChatGPT because it’s not human. It is simply a tool to help you be more human with other humans. Let the bots do the boring, time-consuming tasks that keep us from spending our lives with those we care about most.

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Your Take

ChatGPT is such a new technology to permeate the real estate industry that we’re all still learning. Have you tried using it yet? What has your experience been? Share what you’ve learned so far in the comment section!