Using Gen AI to Power Digital Marketing in Real Estate

Damian Ng is the Senior Vice President of Technology at Anywhere Real Estate Inc., overseeing enterprise architecture, software engineering, Operations and application reliability.  Previously, Damian served as the managing director of architecture for Evernorth, a division of Cigna, where he founded the open-source program and led all architecture functions. He has more than twenty-five years of global experience in e-commerce, payments, fintech, and healthcare. Damian holds an M.S. from the University of Waterloo and a B.S. from the University of Toronto. He lives in St. Louis and enjoys family time and outdoor activities in the Missouri area.

Through this article, Damian highlights that generative AI (Gen AI) is revolutionizing digital marketing by making personalized experiences more efficient and effective.

In today’s dynamic digital landscape, personalized marketing through digital channels at scale has traditionally been a complex, resource-intensive endeavor. However, recent advancements in generative AI (Gen AI) are revolutionizing the way we approach digital marketing, making it more efficient and effective to embed personalization in our digital channels than ever before.

Historically, creating tailored marketing experiences required significant effort and resources. Real estate marketers had to manually analyze data, segment audiences, and craft personalized messages. This process was not only time-consuming but also susceptible to errors and inefficiencies. However, much like a superhero discovering their powers, Gen AI is stepping in to rescue marketing teams by streamlining the entire process.

Examples of Gen AI in Action

Personalized Chatbots: Chatbots are not a new digital engagement tool. However, it has been a major business and technology effort to consume profiles, real-time action and data and then build rules and responses at speed to create a personalized and engaging conversation. Generative AI acts as an accelerator to build chatbots at scale. Engineers still need to provide profile and real-time action to the large language models (LLMs), but the rest of the interactions are handled through prompt engineering and retrieval-automated generation (RAG), which significantly accelerates the ability to launch chat bots that can deliver real-time, context-aware interactions that enhance user satisfaction.

Imagine a potential homebuyer visiting your website and interacting with a chatbot that can instantly provide property recommendations based on their preferences and browsing history.

 Real estate marketers no longer need to spend countless hours and dollars manually tailoring campaigns—AI does the heavy lifting.

Next Best Action: Gen AI is a great tool to help accelerate critical steps of Next Best Action—first by analyzing and summarizing verbal and written communication with the consumers to understand their intent, then predicting what’s the right course of action and finally generating engaging content, increasing the likelihood of conversion and customer retention. For instance, AI can identify when a lead is most likely to be ready to buy from interactions with agents and send them targeted listings or open house invitations.

Content Generation: Gen AI can generate personalized content tailored to individual consumer preferences. From writing personalized emails to crafting social media posts and property descriptions, AI-driven content generation ensures each message is custom-tailored to consumer preferences, keeping the story fresh and engaging. This can be particularly useful for real estate agents who need to create compelling listings and marketing materials at scale. Instead of spending time writing each piece of content, an agent will instead focus on reviewing and providing feedback to the AI to continue improving the content written.

Lowering Barriers to Personalized Digital Marketing

The barriers to leveraging Gen AI to implement personalized digital marketing strategies have significantly decreased in the last two years due to several key advancements in technology:

Pre-built Models: Leveraging pre-built, world-class models alleviates the need to build and tune custom models from scratch. This not only saves time but also ensures that real estate businesses are continuously using the most advanced AI models. To maximize option value, technology teams will switch to the most advanced, cost-efficient LLMs as they are released every month.

Cost Efficiency: The decreasing cost of LLMs means that even smaller real estate brokerages can get in on the action to embed Gen AI into their offerings. With costs coming down faster than a speeding bullet, businesses of all sizes can now use AI to enhance their marketing efforts. 

RAGs and Guardrails: Using RAG and implementing guardrails ensures that AI-generated content is accurate, relevant, and safe. This enhances the reliability and trustworthiness of AI-driven marketing efforts.

API Accessibility: AI models are becoming easier to integrate into existing workflows through application programming interfaces (APIs), making it easy for engineering teams to leverage Gen AI the same way they can any “headless” business capabilities. This seamless integration is democratizing access to AI for real estate businesses across the industry. 

Cloud and Open Source Technologies: Leveraging cloud infrastructure and open-source technologies like LangChain allows businesses to switch between different AI models seamlessly. This flexibility ensures that companies can always use the best tools for their specific needs. Availability of LLMs through cloud vendors also lowers the financial barrier and start-up cost to “host a model.”.

Whether you’re trying to get ahead in the competitive world of real estate marketing or seeking to bring more personalization to your campaigns, Gen AI is here to change the game. Real estate marketers no longer need to spend countless hours and dollars manually tailoring campaigns—AI does the heavy lifting. Like a trusted companion, this technology empowers us to predict user behavior, generate engaging content, and maintain seamless conversations through advanced chatbots.

The possibilities of Gen AI are endless, from cost savings through automation to embedding intelligence into current digital marketing channels to creating brand new digital capabilities. As we integrate AI into our workflows, we can be confident that we’re leveraging the best available tools while still retaining the human touch that makes our messaging relatable.

The future of real estate digital marketing will be powered by AI, but it’s still driven by the creativity, strategy, and insights of marketers themselves. Let’s embrace this technology and let it become the partner we need to enhance customer experiences and deliver successful results. Now more than ever, it’s time to leverage Gen AI—your marketing superhero—to keep up with the fast-moving, ever-evolving digital world.