The New Front End For ~Real Estate
Discussing AI replacing jobs in the future used to be in the context of decades. Some industries are now talking months, and if not–years. I’ve always been a proponent for embracing new technologies and finding ways to incorporate one domain’s successful use of technology into others. This year I’ve recognized an influx of news, scholarly articles, software, and overall chatter about this topic.
Some careers, and entire businesses, are on the verge of being disrupted bigly — I saw a piece of software aimed at The Real Estate Industry that got me thinking.
Modern businesses are run on software, and soon softwares are going to be run by AI. So, will AI’s be running businesses?
I don’t think that’s too far a stretch. A great example to showcase the impending ubiquity of software AI is the fact that AI tech is at the core of Google’s latest initiatives [1]. It’s literally in every google product you’ve interacted with over the past few months, and making them better by the minute. This impact has been spreading across the tech scene as amazing tools (dialogflow), toys (deepart.io), and frameworks (tensorflow) to let more and more software developers leverage the latest in computer science.
sidebar: This post is not going to get into a deep discussion about the nuances of AI, it’s good and bad prognoses, or even if it’s going to take over the world. If that’s your fancy, I recommend the book, “Life 3.0” by Max Tegmark.
The leap from a smart and helpful computer program, to replacing a real-life human job is often a convoluted series of hypothetical circumstances. It’s nearly impossible to imagine a job that someone works today, and it being replaced with any technology that we can pick up and use already. It’s just a stretch — and for most of us who aren’t proselytizing AI, it’s not something we’re thinking about enough to see that reality. But, what I hear lots of people saying in regards to jobs being replaced is that, “We need that human factor.” But, do we? And what exactly is that?
The Human Factor
Many jobs that are on the horizon of automation are on the front-lines of human interaction. Customer service, low-touch sales, human resource management, investing & banking, etc. All of these rely on a human interface to get things done. You as the customer express your needs, and the human on the other end interprets those and offers a solution if they have it. They provide a friendly face (or voice) to ensure you’re being understood and reassure you that you’re special and being looked after. Throughout the sales process they’ll also re-tune things according to changing requirements, or even your mood. That’s the human factor.
Let’s take a popular example of a job that’s already been partially replaced: The automatic checkouts at the grocery store. There are some obvious pros and cons to this; A perceived positive is that you can checkout quicker because there’s less back and forth in the transaction. You can checkout at your own pace. A possible negative is that sometimes the machine sucks, and it doesn’t work as expected and then things take longer. This is more an example of automation replacing a job, rather than AI but I just wanted to illustrate that this is already happening. What AI will enable, are these such replacements while maintaining our expectation of that human factor and things working better.
AI Working Its Way Into Real Estate
So what spurred this post? Chatbots are a recent craze when it comes to implementing AI into software to interact with users and try and maintain that human-ness we were talking about. Many websites and services use chat to interact with users to collect information, solve problems, and understand their needs. What’s possible with the latest AI is to automate most, or all, of those interactions.
I came across a new chatbot called Cribz. It claims to be: “Your personal property assistant. Helping you navigate through the real estate market, to find your next home”.
Cribz seems to be local to Australia right now, but they have plans to expand to other areas around the world over the coming months. It’s basically a Facebook Messenger Chat Bot that talks to you like a human and ultimately presents ideal properties for you. The power of software and the availability of public real estate data will enable this. They’re targeting millennials, which makes sense and that demographic will increasingly be looking for places to live over the coming years and decades, and chatting on Facebook messenger is where many of these users already are.
Cribz takes things into account only the best and most attentive real estate agents consider when curating properties for their clients. They have their whole process (outlined here) that considers pricing data, neighborhood walkability and other metrics, demographics, and even Internet connection quality [1]. I bet their data-points will continue to increase in number and the recommendation algorithm will only improve as time goes on and they take advantage of scale and AI pattern matching techniques.
Will Cribz be taking over Real Estate? Maybe not. But, I’m near certain solutions like Cribz will be on the front-end of real estate transactions over the coming months and years to make finding and selling properties more efficient and scalable.
Check out Cribz for a peek into the sort of tech that’s coming — and let me know if you’ve seen anything similar lurking in the shadows ready to disrupt a major industry.
