Real estate and property management in the “Golden Age of AI”
Seemingly out of nowhere ChatGPT is all over the news. Being in the property technology “PropTech” sector within the real estate industry, it would be good to understand what role something like ChatGPT may play in our shared industry; after all, some tech pundits have declared that we’ve entered the “Golden Age of Artificial Intelligence.”
If you use RentCafé Chat IQ, you may already be feeling the impact of AI in customer experience. Can AI affect other areas of your business? Beyond chatbots, it’s embedded in financial systems to detect fraud; and all signals indicate that AI’s presence in our interactions will only increase from where it is today. For simplicity, we’ll look specifically at ChatGPT and how our industry peers are leveraging this tool today.
What is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is a tool that processes English based conversation via text and responds to questions or prompts. It’s powered by artificial intelligence technology that was developed by a company called OpenAI. “Chat” is easy enough to understand, but if you’re wondering what the “GPT” part is, it’s “generative pre-trained transformer.” What is that?
“A Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (GPT) is a language model relying on deep learning that can generate human-like texts based on a given text-based input. A user “feeds” the model with a sentence, and the transformer creates coherent paragraph-based information extracted from publicly available datasets. The technology can process any type of text, including guitar tabs or computer code.” (Source L’Atelier BNP Paribas)
How are real estate and property management companies already using it today?
- Write Listings.
We all have days when the words don’t quite flow. If you need an assist, a tool like ChatGPT can help you get started. Once you have text to work with, you can edit and infuse more of your brand’s voice into it. - Write Responses to Frequently Asked Questions.
ChatGPT can generate conversational replies to incoming requests or questions from residents–as a chatbot, like RentCafe Chat IQ, or as an automated email reply. - Write a SQL Script.
If you want to enhance your understanding of SQL, you can start with asking ChatGPT to explain it in as granular a detail that you need. Or you can plainly ask something like “I want to merge two tables, what command should I use in SQL?” as explained in this article on Medium “Using ChatGPT to learn SQL.”
ChatGPT can be useful for tasks that are repetitive and handy for getting you started on a creative piece, so you can edit what it gives you as a starting point. For a host of reasons, it’s not advisable for sensitive or legal communications. For better or worse, this article was not written using ChatGPT.
Update: On March 14, 2023, ChatGPT’s creator, OpenAI, announced GPT-4 which is a new version of the underlying tech. One especially notable feature that was not available in ChatGPT is the ability to serve as your “eyes” with its ability to process and describe an image. Could it view photos of an apartment and write a description? That would be scratching only the surface of possible use cases in real estate and property management.
