Every stage at every real estate conference right now has someone saying the same thing: agents who use AI will replace the agents who don’t.
I hear it constantly, repeated like it’s some kind of original insight.
My friend The Broke Agent pokes fun at agents pontificating on stage about AI replacing agents, and he’s right to. It’s become one of those lines people say to sound like a Harvard professor without actually explaining what it means in practice.
Here’s what that looks like day to day. I’m going to walk you through five specific ways AI helps me and my team get more done every day, so you’re spending your time on income-producing activities instead of busywork. We coach our agents on all five of these, and I use every one of them myself.
1. Use AI to Understand Home Inspection Reports
This one comes from my mentor John Collins, who runs one of our RE/MAX offices, and it’s one of the smartest uses of AI I’ve seen an agent pull off.
I can’t tell you how many times an inspection issue comes up and an agent gets completely jammed up over what to do. Their whole focus shifts from setting appointments and having conversations to negotiating one single home inspection reply, usually over something that would have worked itself out anyway if they understood it.
Pull three things from the inspection report:
- The photo of the defect
- The actual defect itself
- The summary or description language straight from the report
Copy and paste that into Claude, ChatGPT, or whatever AI tool you use, and ask it directly for a recommended course of action. I’ll type something close to this:
“Ask for the recommended course of action to fix the said defect and cite actual numbers for a cost estimate.”
It won’t be perfect, but it’s going to give you a starting point on exactly what to do, and it’ll save you hours you would have spent calling contractors and arranging estimates yourself.
While that’s working in the background, you’re free to have more conversations and set more appointments. Then you walk into the conversation with your client already informed instead of scrambling to find the answer after the fact.
2. Ask AI Questions Before Calling Your Broker
When a question comes up that you don’t know the answer to, the instinct is to call your manager, your team leader, or your broker.
Try AI first instead. Treat it like a frequently asked question tool:
- How much does a well inspection cost?
- What happens if this situation comes up?
- What do I do next?
It won’t be perfect, and you should always double-check anything important, especially if it has to do with local market laws. It will get you moving fast on questions like how much a septic inspection runs, or what a confusing clause in an agreement actually means.
I had a real example of this recently. A property had a sign on a dead-end road, and the people interested in it wanted the sign rotated to face perpendicular to traffic instead of facing the direction cars were coming from.
I had a hunch that wasn’t allowed under the local zoning code, so I took a picture of the sign and asked:
“Would this sign be able to be rotated 90 degrees so more people could see it?”
The answer came back that signs have to face the direction of the traffic they’re meant to govern. It was exactly right, straight out of the local township code, and it solved the question on the spot instead of me having to track down an answer somewhere else.
3. Let AI Help You Write Blogs and Emails
If you’re trying to produce content, whether that’s blog posts for your website or emails about current mortgage rates and other value-based education for your clients, AI can carry a lot of that writing for you.
Start with a tool like Prompt Cowboy to turn your rough idea into a stronger prompt. Instead of typing a lazy one-liner, you end up with a prompt that actually tells the AI what you want. Then take that into Claude, ChatGPT, or whatever bot you’re using and push it to get better. I’ll tell it something like:
“You can do better. I want the expert version. Make it shorter. Keep it under a certain amount of words.”
This back and forth turns the ideas in your head into finished content you can actually use to attract business. Blogs help you get found in search, and emails build a list of people who open them, which means you now have a reason to pick up the phone and call.
4. Use AI to Review Your Call Recordings
If scripting is a struggle for you, your CRM is probably already sitting on the answer. We use call recording inside Follow Up Boss, and Zillow Preferred also records calls.
Pull your five best calls and your five worst calls, the ones where things went sideways and you know it. Upload all ten to an AI tool and ask it to break down what worked and what didn’t. I’ll frame it something like this:
“Tell me what I can do better on the five that did not end in an appointment and what worked well on the five that did end in an appointment.”
What comes back is an honest, unbiased read on your skills, no ego involved. It sharpens your phone skills so those same conversations turn into more appointments.
5. Use AI to Soften a Firm Email
This last one is the hardest to get right. Clients and other agents send emails asking for things, and you need to be firm without coming across as harsh.
When I’m typing up a response like that, I run it through ChatGPT, Claude, or Grok and ask for a more empathetic and professional version. It keeps the firm point intact while smoothing out the language so it lands a lot better on the other end.
None of these five hacks require a computer science degree or a big budget. They’re simple, and my team and I use every one of them every single day.
They free you up to spend more time on the activities that generate income.
