Baird & Warner Launches AI Tool in Competitive Chicago

Dean Rouso dialed a phone number and a cheerful woman’s voice picked up on the other line. The words belonged to Remi, a new AI assistant Baird & Warner launched for its agents this week.

The custom AI assistant is one of many tools Chicago-area brokerages and agents are using to automate workflow, as AI takes a bigger role in the real estate market.

Rouso, senior vice president of strategic initiatives at Baird & Warner, said the brokerage’s new AI tool seeks to solve a bottleneck in its office operations: answering administrative questions that slow down dealmaking and clog up managing brokers’ time.

Managing brokers and staff in other departments are “limited to the hours that are not the most active hours in our industry, which are when the consumer wants us,” Rouso said.

The program, which is built on a software called Broker Bot, acts as a virtual assistant for agents’ questions. It is trained on Baird and Warner’s company data and federal, state and local regulations and policy, Rouso said. Baird & Warner claims the bot is the first in the industry to have that level of direct institutional knowledge about brokerage and local policy.

“There is nobody that I have heard of that has trained this kind of assistant to the level that we have,” he said.

Baird & Warner has exclusive rights to BrokerBot’s enterprise tier in Chicago for a year, Rouso said. He declined to share the cost of the contract, but the lower tier on BrokerBot for up to 250 agents is $2,000 monthly, and the tool will be available to Baird & Warner’s more than 2,000 agents.

In a quick live demo on Tuesday, Rouso asked Remi where to submit a request for listing photos in Baird & Warner’s platform, and the program directed him to log in at a specific internal company link. When prompted further, it gave him an overview of the cost of different photo packages. Some blind spots exist: He asked the bot to text him a link to the webpage, rather than read it out over the phone, and Remi said it wasn’t able to do that.

When the bot doesn’t know the answer to something, Rouso said his team gets notified, and they work on updating its functions and knowledge base.

The AI tool was shared with Baird & Warner’s managing brokers and some agents before the wide release Wednesday, and they were already finding good uses for it, Rouso said. One managing broker got a text from an agent on a Friday night while at the gym, asking where to find a specific commercial addendum to close a deal. Away from his computer, the managing broker was able to ask Remi where to find the contract and relay that back to the agent.

It can’t do everything yet. Remi answers questions, and can help draft some writing, but it can’t fill out a contract, make full marketing materials, send an email or access an agent’s calendar to give them a look at upcoming meetings. Some of those functionalities are coming soon, Rouso said.

His team is testing a function that allows the bot to send emails, read an agent’s calendar and set appointments. The firm is also working with a separate company on an AI tool that will help agents fill out contracts.

Chicago real estate embraces AI

Remi is launching into a real estate world filled with AI tools and competition between brokerages for the most cutting-edge tech. Compass, the national brokerage that has invested heavily in its tech platform, has touted its AI tools.

Rafael Murillo, a Chicago Compass agent, said he uses the company’s AI software every day and called it a “cheat code” for boosting productivity. AI can draft and send emails to clients, organize client information and keep on top of an agent’s calendar.

“I have it creating social media marketing, calendar, assisting with my emails,” he said. “I’m kind of using it for almost everything now.”

Compass also has a program called Likely to Sell, which uses predictive analytics to flag contacts in an agent’s database who might list their homes soon, a feature Murillo credits with handing him two to three extra deals a year.

Elsewhere, teams without brokerage specific tech are finding tools to automate their workflow. Tommy Choi, of the Weinberg Choi Residential team at Keller Williams, said his team uses a note-taking software to organize transcripts of client meetings and import information into their client relationship management system. They also use an app for social listening, which scours social media for posts that could deliver new leads.

The social listening system has improved his team’s retention by flagging when clients may be considering buying or selling, Choi said.

“The use cases are still very elementary, and I feel like, hopefully, we’re at a place where more innovators come into the space to create more tools utilizing AI,” Choi said.

Choi has seen the downsides of AI, too. He recalled a negotiation where another agent used ChatGPT to write details of an offer, accidentally offering the buyer a credit to cover potential issues if they came up during an inspection that the agent’s client hadn’t approved.

Choi also said he’s concerned about the potential for accidental bias in AI models as they become more common in the real estate industry. A model trained on existing housing data could inadvertently replicate fair housing problems, he said.

“If agents aren’t being careful and really looking into what data is going in before they hit send, my fear is that it could lead to fair housing issues down the line,” he said.

Coldwell Banker Realty recently had a sales rally focused on AI, said regional president Ayoub Rabah. The company has some AI functions in its Listing Concierge platform that create marketing content, and agents use other tools like ChatGPT and Copilot.

The brokerage is also focused on teaching agents how to write content that ranks highly in AI answers, Rabah said.

“When you take a look at how many consumers are shopping today, they’re going to ChatGPT or Copilot or Perplexity, and they’re saying, I’m shopping for a home in this community,” Rabah said. “And we want to make sure that our agents are trained and educated so they are the answer.”