BL: So artificial intelligence, otherwise known as, AI, has been a business buzzword for several years now. And with options like self-driving cars and chat GPT, conversations around AI have become more common. AI is a growing field with so many different applications for different industries. Can you touch on some big ways that AI has impacted the real estate industry?

BR: The main tool I use and will be discussing is ChatGPT. I use version 4 and have a workspace – meaning my chats are not used to train the model. ChatGPT is a language model. It’s studied millions of pages of the English language that were used to train it. It’s a large language model and it’s been trained by everybody at OpenAI who’s been inputting as well as the millions of queries put into it. It’s growing in power, breadth of language and is a fantastic tool.

If you’re specific in what you’re asking and write a good prompt – you’re going to get a good output. I’ve noticed that many people in our industry are already very good writers since we must be detailed in thorough in all our communication. When creating a prompt in ChatGPT – specificity is your friend. In commercial real estate it helps us take large reports and documents and analyze these big reports. As independent brokers, I think part of our selling feature is that we deliver things quickly and give a real hands-on personal approach. For example, if I get a counteroffer on a purchase and sale agreement, I can upload that into my ChatGPT workspace. I can also upload the last offer we made and have it compare the documents head to head. I can then email the results to my client and say hey, I haven’t combed through this line by line yet, but right off the bat this is what changed – the purchase price changed, they want a different title company, they want a higher deposit. The big ideas get translated to the client and they can start thinking about a response in advance of me providing a detailed summary of the changes. I’m moving things more quickly, which I think is certainly a benefit of this technology.

And then you obviously trust that. So, let’s talk about the trust factor because you’re assuming they got it? They’re looking at your terms, appreciate the differences and can highlight and aren’t missing anything. So how does that trust factor happen? I guess it just evolves as you get more familiar with this but tell us about that.

At first ChatGPT was a public forum, and everyone’s inputs were being used to train the model and make it smarter. Now, I have a separate, paid workspace that’s not a part of that. There’s trust with that – when I upload a document they’re not saving it or keeping it or doing things with it. It’s my own data. Also, I have seen improvements in this tool as time has gone by. About a year ago, I had a situation where we were breaking up a big multi-tenant office building into condo style units that we were selling to owner users. It had a load factor, or common areas, and I put the measurements into ChatGPT and asked it to help me calculate a load factor and I was getting the most bizarre responses. I’d then ask it to show the math, show me the steps, but it just couldn’t get it. Today, I could but the same query into ChatGPT and get something very accurate. Nowadays I trust it a lot more, but it’s always the same with any technology – trust and verify.

I’m comfortable with the margin of error because that trade-off is how quickly that I can get something done. Sometimes for things like marketing tasks, done is better than perfect, right? Maybe it used a word that I don’t like, like nestled or unparalleled, and it repeats these words. And as much as I try to get those out of my marketing because they sound like a robot, it still puts them into it.

Got it. So we talked about efficiency. It’s pretty clear that that makes a lot of sense. I see that. It’s almost like a partner to you in a way that kind of keeps those flows flowing.

It is. It’s truly like an assistant. You have got to talk to this thing like it is your trusted assistant, like it is somebody you’re bouncing ideas off of. And that’s really how it works the best – when you talk to it like you would a human being.

I was actually just using this before our call. Somebody’s buying a building from us, and I helped put some of the things in place to be able to sell these units and this property. They’re asking me a lot of questions about CCNRs and our attorney responded with a pointed response. And I thought, ooh, I don’t know if I want to send this to the buyer – let’s make it a little more considerate. So I copied the attorney’s response and I asked ChatGPT to make it a little more polite and considerate. And it did. It copied the meat of what he was saying, but it just kind of cushioned it at the top and the bottom with a little more politeness. And it was exactly what the guy said, but it just sounded a little bit better, something that a buyer and the buyer’s attorney would want to read more than, why do they want to know this? Can’t they read the CCNRs, right? We don’t want to say that.

I have ChatGPT open, so we’re just going to kind of cut straight to it. I’m going to open a new window and here we go. I use version 4.0 for complex tasks, but they have several different versions you can use. I’m building a project here, it’s three medical/office buildings, ground up construction. If I wanted to create a marketing piece, I can take my civil plans and my architectural drawings and upload them to ChatGPT. This is a pdf and quite a large file, maybe 20, 30 megabytes. I upload the documents from my computer and give it the prompt “Please review the attached architectural and civil plan for a medical and professional office project I’m developing and extract details about the project I can use in my marketing materials.” I may have to prompt it further, but let’s see what it says.

This is enough to give me a pretty good start. It’s hard to describe new construction; you need to have visual aids. I can turn this information over to the marketing team so that they can put the property highlights in the brochure. I think it’s brilliant at bridging the gap between civil, architectural and those disciplines to marketing. It can be really hard to communicate those topics, and ChatGPT does this brilliantly.

Yes, this tool can definitely help with any due diligence materials. You could upload it and say “Can you review this environmental report and list out the risks in from highest to lowest found in that report in a bulleted list” and then have it tell you which one it thinks is the worst possible thing in the report and give you that. So it’s just a helpful little assistant. Even though you could read the report, find out all those things, at least this tool should point you to the most, the items that carry the most risk as part of your due diligence.

That’s my first step. Usually when I get an offer on a property, I’ll upload it straight to ChatGPT and tell it to analyze this document and give me a bulleted list of all these deal points. That way, I can send over a bulleted list instead of sending a long LOI over to my client, and they can start thinking about the next steps they would like to take. There are definitely lots of different uses for this in real estate and development, for sure.

Just with the math, like I was talking about earlier with the load factor, I think you have got to double check the math. Another big thing to be aware of is that you should always personalize the text when you generate original content. You have got to make sure that the writing is in your style before you make it public because you don’t want your public image to be that you sound like a robot. No one is going to want to read that. You’ll look lazy for simply cutting and pasting it from ChatGPT and people want to see that you have an attention to detail, especially in our industry.

The other thing I want to mention is that there are really no rules. ChatGPT is a tool, and this tool is simply an extension of your own sort of moral compass. So, it’s your spirit that is driving this, right? There’s no rules for it. Even if you have something really complicated, a complicated negotiation or something like that, take the problem straight to chat GPT. Don’t make any assumptions about what it can and cannot do. Try it and see what happens. I think that fearlessness is what everybody needs to get ahold of because you can’t psych yourself out before you even tried, thinking this is too big of a task for chat GPT, it won’t be able to handle this, or it’s not that kind of a tool. It’s an everything tool. It’s a universal tool.

ChatGPT is $50 a month for the private workspace, the fully professional version. You can use it on your desktop as well as on your phone using the ChatGPT app. I recommend it because it can search the web for you. In another exercise I do, I have it analyze market reports. I can tell it to find the market reports for Las Vegas say, find the market reports for, you know, industrial in Las Vegas. It’ll pull market reports that the brokerages put out. I can then ask it to analyze those documents, give me a market report update that I can post to LinkedIn with the sources cited, and it’ll do it.