Reviews and recommendations are unbiased and products are independently selected. Postmedia may earn an affiliate commission from purchases made through links on this page.
At a panel discussion hosted by Lanterra Developments earlier this year, a crowd of condo brokers gathered in Toronto’s Windsor Arms Hotel to hear how AI is changing their business.
After introducing speakers including Carrie Soave, an AI consultant to realtors and brokerages, and Adam Rodricks, national director of social growth and experience at KPMG Canada, Lanterra chairman Mark Mandelbaum set the stage by saying, “If you don’t get on the AI bandwagon, you are going to be flipping hamburgers in five years.”
It wouldn’t be overstating things to say that AI is transforming the way homes are bought and sold across the GTA. Having spent decades gathering data and imagery on residential property, Canada’s 69 real estate boards and associations are making those resources available to software developers that, in turn, are using them to fuel AI algorithms that can predict market trends, property values and even the likelihood of a home being sold at a particular price.
Take Wahi, a real-estate platform launched in 2021 that matches buyers with an agent, or pairs them with a remote agent and lets them keep part of the sales commission.
Using a proprietary AI algorithm co-developed by Toronto’s Vector Institute, Wahi’s system “quickly analyzes hundreds of real-estate agents across the province and matches top performers with the user’s search criteria,” as Wahi CEO Benjy Katchen explains.
If buyers would rather deal with an agent remotely, they can participate in Wahi’s Cashback Program, which allows them to hold onto 1 percent of a home’s sale price. In that case, a remote realtor offers advice, shares tactics and fields questions from clients via an online chat feature, but home showings and other in-person meetings are outsourced to industry partners. The reduced commission works, Katchen explains, because it saves the realtors time, effort and resources. (The rest of the commission on any sale is split between the realtor and Wahi.)
“We don’t believe realtors should be gatekeepers of real-estate information,” Katchen says. “Rather, we believe in giving customers agent-level insights,” he says, referring to information Wahi buyers can access, including property valuations and personalized listings. “The average realtor in Canada does two to three deals per year. If you’re using one of these realtors to buy or sell a home, how in-the-know can they be based on three deals a year? This is not to say that we don’t believe realtors have huge value in negotiating, but how skillful are they really when it comes to analyzing data?”
AI algorithms, on the other hand, can analyze large amounts of diverse property data quicker than a flesh-and-blood agent can. This includes historical data on property sales, neighbourhood pricing trends and local economic indicators, all of which can be used to forecast future price movements. Buyers and sellers can then use this information to identify emerging neighborhoods that offer better value for money, or to time their purchase or sell when prices are expected to dip or rise.
AI also excels at providing personalized property recommendations. Traditional real estate searches can be overwhelming, with buyers sifting through countless listings that may not meet their criteria. AI-powered platforms, however, can learn a buyer’s preferences in fine detail and curate a more tailored list of potential homes.
And on it goes: AI is helping to simplify and streamline the mortgage and financing process for homebuyers; is enabling round-the-clock customer support via AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants; is powering immersive property tours using virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technologies; and is enhancing security and fraud detection in real-estate transactions.
Since its launch in 2006, the real estate portal Zillow has become synonymous with using AI algorithms, like the “Neural Zestimate” to “help sellers understand the value of their homes by reacting more quickly to current market trends,” explains Claire Carroll, the Seattle-based company’s communications manager.
Zillow features like Natural Language Search and personalized home recommendations simplify the house-hunting process by allowing users to search listings based on very specific preferences, Carroll says. For instance, house hunters can now enter phrases like “$700K homes in Brampton with a backyard” or “open house near me with four bedrooms” directly into the Zillow search bar. The company’s AI-powered Showcase listings, meanwhile, use 3D virtual tours, room-by-room photos and interactive floor plans to boost sale prices by an average of 2 percent, and to make the sales 20 percent more likely to happen within 14 days or less, Carroll says.
Back at the Lanterra panel, AI consultant Soave said that realtors need to start thinking of AI as an easy-to-use tool that makes marketing and lead generation affordable at scale. Rodricks added that AI helps both realtors and brokers multitask more efficiently so that they can serve more clients simultaneously.
“This is not about the destruction of jobs brought about by AI. It is about the disruption of jobs brought about by AI,” he said. “I know so many agents who have to wear a thousand hats a day. How amazing would it be that instead of being a savant of search engine optimization, you have (AI tools) that can do this for you in real time?”