5 drawbacks of using AI for your estate agency business

 

Artificial intelligence took the digital world by storm last year, with 80% of marketing professionals reckoned to be incorporating it into their working lives – and love it or hate it, it won’t be going anywhere soon.

AI has brought undoubted benefits to the way estate agents manage their marketing and communications – from hacks to help you sift and analyse data to chat bots available to respond to customers 24/7, ChatGPT to compose property listings when you’re feeling uninspired to the tools that speed up social media posting.

While AI has transformed our lives and got us working smarter, it does come with drawbacks – in an election year, the use of bots to channel fake news to targeted individuals has policy makers worrying about what exactly has been let out of the box.

For the rest of us, there are simpler, more everyday drawbacks too. From accuracy to a basic loss of the human touch, we look at five key questions you should be asking before you adopt AI tools for your estate agency.

1. Is it real?

We all know that content is king, and a schedule of high-quality blogs that respond to customer demand is at the core of any digital strategy. It might seem that tools like ChatGPT can take care of this job for you, without any of the blood, sweat and tears that come with crafting copy of your own.

One problem with using robots to write your blogs is the lack of a tone of voice.”

One problem with using robots to write your blogs is the lack of a tone of voice. The articles may be full of detail; they may be grammatical and answering all the questions you asked – they just won’t necessarily sound like a real person has written them.

As local estate agents, the connections you make with people when you sell our rent out their homes are at the heart of your brand and your content should reflect that by having a warm human tone that speaks to direct to customers.

2. Is it accurate?

Remember that written content produced by AI is scraped together from millions of individual websites across the globe. So, when you use it, you need to fact check everything, obsessively. Your blogs and other web content are about answering the questions potential vendors and landlords are asking. Do this well, and you’re instilling trust in your brand and leading them along a tried-and-tested customer journey. Give them the wrong information, and that chance is missed. You should be aware too that some free versions of the tools don’t draw on the most recent content when answering your prompts.

Some free versions of the tools don’t draw on the most recent content when answering your prompts.”

3. Can it optimise for search?

When you create content aimed at potential customers, properly optimising it for search is one of your most vital tasks. If you don’t get this right, your customers won’t see your content high up the search results pages, regardless of how well it has responded to their queries. There’s a lot that goes into SEO and, as Google’s algorithms change, it’s a moveable feast. One day AI tools may be able to manage this for you, but they aren’t quite there yet.

4. Are there privacy concerns?

AI’s ability to interrogate data for swift and accurate targeting brings privacy concerns. So, if you are going down that route, protecting sensitive client and property information is vital. As an estate agency you need robust security to safeguard data and address any concerns. Keep an eye out for changes in legislation in this area too, which are likely to be coming downstream.

5. What about the skills gap?

One of the big worries about the incredibly fast adoption of AI globally is the possibility that we will lose the skills we have. This is particularly true of written content. If all our words are churned out by robots, will it be difficult to go back to composing them from scratch in the future?

The articles that rise to the top will undoubtedly be the ones handcrafted by a human.”

As more and more content is produced by AI, the articles that rise to the top will undoubtedly be the ones handcrafted by a human with an authentic tone of a voice and a personal response to customer dilemmas. Just as an example, if you’d rather drink a barista-made coffee than a cup of instant, you can see what we’re getting at.

In summary, AI is here to stay and there’s no getting away from the fact that these tools have revolutionised the way we work. The trick is to use it to benefits your business without detracting from the things that make you a real, human-to-human concern – while keeping a critical eye to the future and the new AI solutions appearing all the time.

Got a question? Need help? Visit: www.artdivision.co.uk