‘Fight fire with fire’, AI-complaint-hit agents told
Glentree's Trevor Abrahmsohn tells fellow agents to feed AI-written complaints back through AI and return a lengthy rebuttal.
A well-known estate agent has issued a blunt fix for the flood of AI-generated complaints landing in agency inboxes.
Trevor Abrahmsohn, founder of Glentree International, cast himself as the industry’s “agony uncle” this week in response to the growing problem.
He told The Neg: “Take the complaint in its entirety, put it through AI and ask it for a long and detailed rebuffal, which you should send to your clients in response.
“Fight fire with fire”.
His intervention follows a Propertymark report of a marked rise in complaints drafted by AI.
Rise in AI complaints
Greg Tsuman, Past President of ARLA Propertymark, says he has seen a rise such complex complaints that can be quickly drafted by AI.
“AI tends to be very much user-biased,” he said. “It can tell you what you want to hear.”
Tsuman insists that he uses AI to summarise incoming correspondence, but not to write replies.
“We don’t use AI to respond to complaints, but we use it to do the heavy lifting so that we can see the wood from the trees,” he says. “We then rely on human expertise to make a response.”
AI disclosure
He is calling on The Property Ombudsman to consider making disclosure of AI use mandatory, to deter scattergun complaints built on inaccurate detail.
ARLA Propertymark President Kim Lidbury warned agents are being pulled away from selling and letting homes to fact-check complaints.
“AI has the capacity to transform our lives in so many ways for the better, but regarding this circumstance, it is being used to construct well-meaning and, in many cases, inaccurate complaints to agents,” she says.
“This is causing them to direct a lot of their attention towards examining whether these complaints are legitimate or not instead of helping people with their property ambitions.”
