The buzzword of the year could easily be “artificial intelligence” – or AI, for the acronym-minded. But while it seems that everyone is either talking about it or listening to others talk about it, how exactly is it being used in the real estate industry?
Kevin Hawkins, the editor and co-founder of Real AI, a newsletter focused on AI applications for the real estate industry, has written a new book detailing how the industry can benefit from this technology. “The Real AI Guide for Real Estate Agents” offers 16 user-friendly chapters with titles including “Train your bot like a pro,” “Top 5 AI Hacks,” and “Safe AI is smart AI.” Ideal for those new to AI usage and helpful for those familiar with the technology, the book offers a unique perspective for real estate agents eager to use AI to build their bottom line.
Hawkins, who was previously a director of public affairs at Fannie Mae, spoke with Weekly Real Estate News about “The Real AI Guide for Real Estate Agents.”
Q: What inspired you to write this new book?
Kevin Hawkins: I’ve always wanted to write a book. My grandmother wrote a book and was a poet and I always was impressed when I saw somebody writing.
I am often asked to speak or be on panels or be a moderator, which I love moderating, and I found that some people were chosen in the industry to be in that role because they had a book published. My business partner is the founding partner of WAV Group, Victor Lund, and he wrote a book. It was very easy for him to ask for a speaker’s fee because he’s a published author. And I thought, “Well, that’s not a heavy lift, is it to become a published author?”
I had another book I was working on, and I was thinking that I would get that published first. And then all of a sudden, I looked out and I went, who’s telling agents the truth about AI? I would go to these conferences. I would hear these speakers, and they would leave out the fact that you’ve got to be careful about what chatbot you use, what type of AI tool you’re testing if it’s free. They never said things like “don’t put any personal information” and “anonymize your data.” They would talk about their favorite chatbot, which was always ChatGPT, the paid version.
Because there’s so much bad information out there about AI, I thought I’ve got to write this book. My son and I have been writing a newsletter since August 2023, and I’ve written over 250 articles on AI, both in the newsletter and for other clients and ghost writing for major leaders in the industry about AI and AI strategy. I know so much about it in perspective from an agent’s point of view that I thought I can share this message with them.
Q: Does the real estate industry truly understand what AI is all about?
Kevin Hawkins: I think that the real estate industry has just put its toe in the water when it comes to AI. And the problem, of course, is that AI is just such a big umbrella term and most real estate agents think of AI as generative AI. They think of the chatbot that they use – whether it’s Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini or Copilot on their Microsoft products – and I think they’re really struggling with what AI really can do for their business in a practical way.
For real estate agents to adopt technology has been one of the biggest struggle brokerages have had over the last 20 years. It’s a struggle, and adoption rates are known in the industry as being successful when you hit 30%.
Granted, the pandemic really forced a lot of agents to move to digital tools where they had been resistant before, and things like Zoom and doing open houses virtually and getting in front of the camera made agents, typically, very uncomfortable. They did embrace it when those were the only ways they really could communicate to customers, and that accelerated the whole idea of technology.
But when, ChatGPT came on the scene, agents flocked to it because it was a quick, easy, practical solution for one of their biggest challenges, which is writer’s block. With listing descriptions, they just don’t know what to say a lot of the times. Some agents don’t have that problem – they’re great listing description writers and have been doing a long time and it comes naturally. But when you talk to individual agents in a group, that’s one of their biggest pain points, and ChatGPT solved that overnight.
Surveys that were done on the industry showed there was an adoption rate in most brokerages – over 80% of agents were using AI in the first year of it coming onto the scene, and that was generative AI. Now we’re coming up on the cusp of a new kind of AI that agents really want, but we’re in that phase of overpromising and underdelivering that every technology does. AI is in that circle right now with what’s called agent AI, and those are the things that are automated like summarizing our Gmail, summarizing our text, creating pre-programmed responses in our voice.
I just got back from NAR NXT in Houston, and I was absolutely stunned that every room that had an AI session was filled to the brim. And last year there were AI sessions which had about 30% people seated and 70% of the seats were open. This year, it was the hottest topic, by far.
Q: In your book, there is a chapter on the top AI tools most agents aren’t using yet, and one of the sections is titled “Write a song as easily as sending a text (with Suno).” If I’m a real estate agent, why am I writing a song?
Kevin Hawkins: It’s a great question. And the reason is because creativity is amazingly accelerated. What AI does for people is amplify their ability to show how smart they are. I think Steve Brown at Google Deep Mind coined the phrase “amplifying intelligence,” and I think he’s right.
Have you ever played with Suno? It’s free to try it, and I think it will blow your mind. The momentous occasion in somebody’s life is buying a house. I was a former loan officer for about eight years and I did a lot of closing gifts for my mortgage customers. When I discovered Suno, it was like, “This would be like the greatest shareable gift I could ever get – a song about my journey getting this home.” All you do is take to ChatGPT, give it the facts, and it can write the song for Suno. You copy and paste it into suno, and you can control whether you want a country western hip hop song, a rock song, all these different genres and all the different vocal intonations, whether male, female, high, low, whatever. And it creates, in seconds, this amazing ballad about things that are momentous milestones in people’s lives. And it lasts forever.
I’m not a songwriter, but I’ve made an incredible impression on different organizations by creating a song for them. I created a song for the National Association of Real Estate Editors conference, and it blew everybody away because it had the individual names of the organizers. People were just shaking their heads – it’s that wow factor that AI can create that is absolutely stunning.
Q: What kind of reaction have you gotten to the new book?
Kevin Hawkins: Now that it’s been out, it made number two on Amazon. One week, number five, number seven, number 25 yesterday, it was 43 and 45 for the Kindle version, and the regular version, it’s been bouncing around the top 50, a real estate sales book since the day it was released.
In 30 to 45 days, I’ve sold more books than most of my friends who’ve had a book out for a couple of years. And I’m not selling thousands, but I’m selling an enormous number for me that I never thought it would. And the biggest feedback has been, “This is so good, this is so practical.” I can’t believe it.
I just got an unsolicited email and I talked a guy who heads up a book club, and he said, “I can’t believe that somebody is finally telling agents to ignore the shiny nonsense. And he just sent me this really nice note. You’re not promising magic. You’re teaching real skills that agents can actually use.”
