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March 20, 2024
Street Blog

Is AI smart enough to think like an estate agent?

Sales Team Lead

Back in the fifties when Alan Turing posed the question: ‘Can machines think?’, no one could’ve predicted that the answer would become our reality…‍

While the first variation of machine-human conversation with ELIZA in the 1960s feels like a distant memory, functionality like this has paved the way for the AI developments that we see today, allowing artificial intelligence to settle in almost every industry imaginable.

In the last year particularly, AI has become fully-fledged within the world of estate agency with a host of different tools now available, all geared towards streamlining agent productivity. 

Our sister company, Spectre, was one of the first PropTech suppliers to introduce AI technology into its prospecting platform with the Propensity to Sell Model. The predictive model allows agents to instantly optimise a campaign by targeting specific properties in the area that are most likely to instruct - increasing ROI from direct mail by 240%

But it isn’t just predictive models that have taken the industry by storm… Language Learning Models are helping agents everywhere to trim their to-do list, writing content at lightning speed.

Street AI, for example, is the only LLM built specifically with UK estate agents in mind, preprogrammed with industry-based knowledge, context and terminology that allows agents to write property descriptions and email responses in just seconds.

By simply inputting key property features, Street AI can instantly create compelling and comprehensive property descriptions that enable you to list a property in no time at all. And, our Email Generator efficiently creates customised communication based on a simple prompt, automating the time-consuming busywork of manually responding to enquiries and updating clients. 

The impact of automating these ‘small’ tasks is huge. In total, Street AI has already been used over 65,000 times which has eliminated 14,087 hours (the equivalent of 1 year, 7 months) in admin. In an impressively brief time, almost all property descriptions and around 50% of email correspondence in Street.co.uk have been auto-generated using this technology. 

But as with any AI development, the first version of Street AI was not our ceiling… Turing questioned whether machines could think, which caused us to wonder, ‘can they think like your agency?

And the answer is yes.

Although the quality of Street AI’s output is exceptionally high, we realised that the content it was generating was similar, regardless of which agent was using it. Previously, that meant those agents who’d spent years perfecting their brand’s tone of voice were faced with a choice of sacrificing their brand’s character in exchange for efficiency.

That’s not a compromise we were happy with. So, last month, we launched an industry-first AI innovation, designed to custom-create content for your specific agency. Custom AI Writing Styles is an incredibly powerful tool that analyses and learns how your agency speaks, thinks, and writes to produce bespoke content that’s reflective of your brand.

In just 10 minutes, Street AI will train itself how to write and communicate in your agency’s own unique voice, mimicking your style, tone and structure with both emails and property descriptions. That means, you’ll get all the benefits of AI in terms of rocket-fuelled efficiency, and maintain your brand’s identity at the same time, using the language that makes your agency unique.

In the last 70 years, the advancement of technology has evolved beyond any of our expectations. We’ve progressed from asking machines to think, to deciding how we want them to think, and this is only the start. Who knows what the next 70 years will bring, but until then, watch this space…

If you’d like to see Custom AI Writing Styles in action, as well as catch up with some of our latest feature innovations, watch our Showcase Event on demand now, or click here for a personal tour of Street.co.uk.