Bruce Hiatt, owner of Luxury Realty Group, would prefer robots help sell homes instead of people.
The Las Vegas broker hopes that artificial intelligence will take his real estate firm to the next level — and require fewer real estate agents in North America, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported.
Hiatt has tested an AI avatar that chats with would-be homebuyers and learns from those interactions. In a partnership with India-based chatbot builder Kore.ai, he aims to roll out the technology in June across 22 U.S. cities and three in Canada, in addition to hiring two dozen agents for each city.
The company received $150 million in a new funding round, including an investment from chipmaker Nvidia.
The idea behind using AI is to aid in the home buying search, employing software that can learn potential homebuyers’ names, along with preferences of what they are looking for in a home.
Enter Luxora, a blonde stand-in for a human agent, with almond-shaped eyes, luminescent skin and dangling silver earrings.
“Unlike ChatGPT, our AI website will have a fully conversational AI avatar. The avatar’s name is Luxora and she will engage conversationally with you as you ask questions about Las Vegas real estate,” Hiatt told the Review-Journal.
Ask her a question about homes in Summerlin, for example, and she could point to houses in the Summerlin Ridges with four bedrooms, an office, 3.5 bathrooms, a four-car garage, a kitchen with a Wolf stove and a 25-foot ceiling in the living room.
Hiatt acknowledged “obvious pushback” from employees regarding the integration of AI — with many who fear the technology could rob them of their jobs.
“People assume all AI is like that,” Hiatt told the Review-Journal. “And we may not be able to speak for how it will affect other industries. But as far as real estate agents go, the AI is more of an advisor. It will never be a licensed agent. There’s always that legal need for a licensed agent. … There’s still a certain need for humans to do the work too, maybe just in a different way.”
The Review-Journal didn’t interview any local agents concerned about their jobs. But it did speak with Jonathan Catalano, a real estate agent with ERA Brokers Consolidated in Las Vegas, who said he’s not worried about AI replacing the need for agents.
Catalano said he uses AI to help him write marketing materials and descriptions of homes he’s listing.
“I look at it from the standpoint that this technology is here and as a Realtor I need to embrace it and use it to my benefit,” Catalano told the newspaper. “So I didn’t shy away from it when I think a lot of people get afraid of it.
“I mean, it’s so complex and powerful and generally people don’t like change, so they’ll kind of steer clear of AI. But I’ve been using it every day in my business.”
Aya Shata, an assistant professor of journalism and media studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, has studied AI’s integration into the overall workforce. She said “it can’t replace jobs, but it is definitely going to change how we do our jobs.”
Shata acknowledged that some tech and online firms have publicly said they’ve cut jobs and replaced those positions with AI.
“It is true that AI may take a few jobs, but not all of the jobs or most of the jobs,” Shata told the Review-Journal. “There are certainly jobs it can actually replace, but the point is that it will also offer a lot of new jobs as well.”
Hiatt, who launched Luxury Real Estate in 2004 and sells condos in Toronto as a broker for Harvey Kalles, previously worked for Luxury Realty in Palm Springs, according to his LinkedIn page. The former global IT manager for Mobil oil also founded Talega Systems, a creator of real estate website software.
— Dana Bartholomew
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