‘Unfiltered’: Real estate’s ‘biggest opportunity’ in an AI future 

Editor's note: The Real Estate Insiders Unfiltered podcast explores the people and forces that shape the real estate industry. Check out our top takeaways and this episode from NextHome CEO James Dwiggins and Keith Robinson, NextHome's chief strategic officer.

The views, thoughts and opinions expressed in the Real Estate Insiders podcast belong solely to the podcast creators and guests.

On this episode of Real Estate Insiders Unfiltered, tech entrepreneurs and podcasters Rich Swier and Lee Dickson dive into some of the BIG questions surrounding AI — like, will it make humanity better … or be the cause of its demise? 

But they also bring the conversation back down to earth with a discussion of how AI is changing the real estate industry (and agents' jobs), and they share some forward-thinking ways agents and brokers can use AI to give their business an edge.

The path to … wait, what? Swier wasn't afraid to make bold proclamations about where AI is headed: "AI is not even a tech anymore. The future of it is pervasive and touching everything. But what it's going to free up humans to do is really going to change the dynamic of our culture. I do think it is the path to utopia."

Faith in free markets: The rapid growth of AI does bring some risk, Swier acknowledged, but "it's been primarily driven by the private sector. And the reason why I trust the private sector, where other people may not, is because you can always bet on why the private sector does things, and for the most part, it's for money." Free markets, he added, "balance out good and evil very well." 

So long, Facebook: Another bold proclamation? "This might be an aggressive, kind of unpopular statement, but I honestly think AI has a good chance of completely annihilating the way that we experience the internet today, including social media." So… post now while you still can.

'Not about replacing anybody': What does this all mean for agents? Real estate professionals "might be the most prepared" for an AI-driven future, Swier said, because they're in a uniquely human business. "This is not about replacing anybody," Swier said, it's about freeing up agents so they can have more human interactions.

"You're in the business of communicating to a human. Just think of AI as all the stuff you're doing in front of that computer screen — it's going to get easier and easier until it gets automated, and then you're going to have this perfect AI assistant that does all that for you." To get there, however, agents must be willing "to embrace AI and use it as a tool … if they don't, then they're going to be left behind." 

Real estate's 'biggest opportunity': Swier envisions a future where you can "talk" to an AI version of your home, and it will know everything from the details of your homeowners insurance policy to your appliances and paint colors — and the industry should be thinking about how to get in on the ground floor. "Honestly, one of the biggest opportunities right now that Realtors could think about doing is participating in licensing and training homes," Swier said. 

"The real estate industry needs to figure out how to take all this information that they potentially have ownership over, or add onto that as a Realtor, and license that as an AI training mechanism, because that's the future. Whatever you think is going to be in this database, that database, that MLS, this broker — forget about it. In five years, it's all going to be an AI model. And it's a question of who's going to really benefit from that."