Source: CoStar —
When Barbi Reuter, CEO and principal of Cushman & Wakefield | PICOR Commercial Real Estate Services in Tucson, Arizona, went to write an opening statement for an annual awards ceremony, she decided to open up the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT to perfect her tone.
“I prompted, ‘Write a compelling opening for the CEO at the 37th annual awards luncheon,’” Reuter told CoStar News. “I opened our banquet with it and then fessed up on the source. The team was pretty incredulous!”
Since OpenAI’s chatbot launched in November, real estate professionals across the country have experimented with it to help with tasks ranging from copy editing to tweaking the tone of an email to a disgruntled client. But while executives and brokers are still exploring AI’s many uses — ChatGPT still has bugs and accuracy issues it’s working out — there’s agreement it holds the potential to make some industry tasks easier.
Right now, AI’s biggest benefit is efficiency, according to commercial real estate professionals who joined in on a Twitter conversation about ChatGPT. Users said they asked it to do once-overs for grammar and tone in marketing materials, property descriptions, letters of intent and right of first refusal contracts, to name a few examples.
The technology can also help with lease reviews, comparing information against an agreed-upon letter of intent and avoiding bias in favor of the landlord or tenant, users said. Beyond that, it has basic coding capabilities and can perform data analysis to identify market patterns and risks.
Some industry professionals are projecting more significant capabilities in the future.
“In its current state, I think of it as a tool to assist in improving daily efficiency, but in the long term, I think AI will be transformative to the industry by eliminating repetitive and low-barrier-to-entry jobs,” Bronwyn Scrivens, an associate broker at Omada Commercial in Edmonton, Alberta, wrote in an email to CoStar News.
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