Coldwell Banker agent Georgie Smigel in Cranberry Township, Pennsylvania, once spent hours sorting through spreadsheets and old inquiry lists to identify prospects for new listings, but now she asks her artificial intelligence software who is looking for a $250,000 house in a specific Pittsburgh neighborhood and it returns names and emails she can immediately invite to listings and open houses. A real estate coach initially advised her to start small with artificial intelligence for tasks like writing ads and cleaning up listing descriptions, yet with help from her two tech savvy sons she has expanded its use to power a large portion of her business, from mining prospects to drafting marketing materials and maintaining client contact. The payoff has been significant, as the team she leads is on track to hit the $100 million mark in sales this year, about $10 million more than in 2024, and she credits artificial intelligence for helping her reach that level.
Across the country, agents are integrating artificial intelligence into nearly every aspect of their jobs, using tools that automate marketing, analyze buyer behavior, generate ads and social media posts, and draft agreements that once needed an attorney. Some agents doing their own marketing say they can cut professional services, with Smigel noting that she no longer needs a graphic designer because she can submit an ad to artificial intelligence, request specific sizes and themes, and receive finished work. Large brokerages have leaned into this shift, with Howard Hanna Real Estate updating its website search function a year ago with enhanced artificial intelligence capabilities and preparing to roll out true automation for marketing, while smaller teams describe a “Wild West” landscape where brokerages, property managers and agents build or buy systems tailored to their own problems, with varying degrees of structure and consistency.
For property manager Dustin Nulf, owner of Nulf Management Services in Pittsburgh, artificial intelligence has enabled sweeping changes as he used ChatGPT to write sales agreements for acquiring two management firms instead of paying an attorney over $1,000 and waiting more than a month for documents. He now applies artificial intelligence across operations, from turning rough walk through notes into organized bullet points for renovation bids to using an artificial intelligence driven maintenance routing system that troubleshoots tenant issues via text before assigning tickets, and an artificial intelligence driven bookkeeping system that scans utility bills, reads them, makes payments and books charges more accurately over time as it learns. Brokerages are also investing in predictive tools that use algorithms to identify homeowners statistically more likely to move based on digital footprints, length of ownership, equity and likely interest rate so agents can approach them first, and to give buyer’s agents an advance sense of what houses and prices clients might want, enabling them to search before direct contact and “flatten” the process. Smigel’s team feeds every inquiry, price range, neighborhood preference and school district into a database that artificial intelligence can instantly match with new listings, and she even uses her tools to compose a birthday song she posts on Facebook for people she knows in real estate and her personal life.
