ChatGPT is great for simple tasks like writing property descriptions or marketing materials. The latest AI reasoning models are capable of taking on complex assignments that once would have required a human assistant.
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Real estate agents and brokerages have embraced AI — it’s now “nearly ubiquitous” at top brokerages — but many who have adopted it are using it mainly for relatively simple tasks like writing property descriptions or churning out marketing materials.
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The technology is evolving rapidly, and the latest AI reasoning models are capable of taking on complex assignments that once would have required a human assistant — or a team of assistants.
Whether it’s sifting through multiple listing service data to find listings and produce market reports, analyzing contracts and spreadsheets, or writing listing descriptions from photos, AI is now up to the task, executives with OpenAI and Sidekick said Wednesday at Inman Connect New York.
Michael Martin
“The universe of what is possible is really up to you,” Sidekick co-founder and co-CEO Michael Martin said. “With these tools, there’s no ceiling and there’s no wall, right? You’re only limited by how many questions you want to ask, and how far down you want to go.”
Sidekick is an AI assistant built on multiple application programming interfaces (APIs) and models to support real estate agents, boasting integrations with some of the biggest MLSs in the country.
That includes BeachesMLS and The MLS in Greater Los Angeles, where the company is now making Sidekick available for free to help clients who have been affected by wildfires.
“Agents who traditionally were really focused on the sales market are now becoming experts on the leasing market in Los Angeles,” Martin said. Using a simple prompt like “show me the 10 newest SFH [single family home] leases available in LA between $5,000 and $10,000 a month,” Sidekick generates answers in a list from the MLS.
As an “agentic” AI assistant, Sidekick will take even more complex instructions and spit out deliverables, Martin said.
An LA agent helping a client displaced by the fires could ask, “Do a rent-versus-buy analysis, assuming a 10-year interest-only [loan] at 4.5 percent interest, and send it to me in a spreadsheet,” Martin said. “And that entire analysis in a CSV file is delivered to me in a matter of seconds.”
Sidekick’s email and calendar integrations can make sending reports and other information to clients — and scheduling meetings — a snap.
“It’s not just about pulling data,” Martin said. “In fact, data is just a byproduct of the power of these types of models. It’s having a goal and knowing how to break that goal down into the right questions.”
Ashton Summers
That’s where the new reasoning models like OpenAI o1 stand out from generative AI tools like ChatGPT built on large language models, said Ashton Summers, an account director with OpenAI’s Enterprise Go-To-Market team.
While large language models are good at sifting through mountains of data and summarizing it, OpenAI touts reasoning models as being better at following a chain of thought to analyze complex problems and implement sophisticated strategies for tackling them.
Ask a reasoning model to improve a real estate website’s conversion rate, and it will “go down a bunch of rabbit holes” to come up with solutions to test and evaluate, Summers said.
“Reasoning models can actually think through problems step by step; they’re also really good at understanding when to take actions when you give it a task,” Summers said. “So if you plug it into things like email and spreadsheets and your calendar, it can actually act on some pretty complex asks.”
While many agents are using ChatGPT to write marketing materials, a recent Inman Intel survey found a smaller group of “AI power users” are seeing a “significant” bump in productivity by harnessing the latest technology for more complex tasks such as generating contracts, automating direct communications with clients and analyzing market data.
“The speed at which all this stuff is happening is really amazing,” Summers said of the evolution of AI models. “I think one of the key takeaways is that it’s really important to keep using the tools as they come up, and I force myself to do that on a daily basis as well.”
OpenAI has launched a new model, Sora, that can generate video from still images and text inputs. Drag a listing photo of a basketball court at a client’s home into Sora and ask it to create a video of somebody dribbling a basketball, and the static image comes to life.
“Imagine you’re an agent and you want to make your listings interactive and not just be static images,” Summers said. “Now you don’t have to hire an entire video team in order to create that incredible experience for your customers.”
Email Matt Carter
