Privacy and seclusion while still "a short walk from" top local schools and stores. A "move-in ready" layout and an interior that gives potential owners the chance to "craft a new story" in an "up-and-coming" neighborhood.
Given their formulaic nature and difficulty to describe features common to many houses in a unique, most real estate descriptions on sites like Zillow (ZG) and Trulia already sound like they're written by a robot. Some of the phrases used in the descriptions are worn-out enough to inspire entire satires about how one will call even the most beaten-down property as "full of potential."
But we also live at a time when artificial intelligence is eliminating much of the work that could previously only be done by humans. Short for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer, ChatGPT is an AI program that writes extensive responses to various types of complex problems.
While launched only a few months ago out of San Francisco, the language model quickly captured national discussion due to just how human-like responses sound in comparison to earlier models of such software -- a South Carolina professor recently caught a student using it to write a 500-word essay on the 18th century philosopher David Hume.
This Is What ChatGPT Can Do For Real Estate
In the world of real estate, ChatGPT is also causing waves for its ability to write certain types of content. In a video he posted to Twitter, Iowa Realtor JJ Johannes explains how he uses the program to write descriptions for the homes he sells.
"I put in a prompt to ChatGPT to ask it to write a listing description on a property based on a feature and you can see what it has put together here," Johannes says in front of a background listing for a three-bedroom, two-bathroom house in Cedar Rapids. "Now I can ask it to regenerate it, I could add more features."
Phrases like "ample space for relaxation" are no different from many of the human-written descriptions found online -- and so, many agents have enthusiastically embraced using the free platform to shorten this part of their job.
"I fine-tune all kinds of drafts with ChatGPT," Andres Asion, another local broker with Miami Real Estate Group, told CNN. "Sometimes I'll tell tell it to make it shorter or funnier, and it gives you so many samples to pick and edit from."
Is ChatGPT Going To Be The End Of Everything?
Johannes' video has also caught a fair bit of flak from agents skeptical on the software's capabilities as well as the potential hazards of using it for too much.
"Just teach it to describe cramped shacks as 'cozy' and heaps of rotting lumber as 'fixer uppers' and you're good to go," one user wrote sarcastically underneath the post only to be hit with retorts about this was already a core criticism of human-written descriptions.
The discussion fizzled out into the habitual push-and-pull between those who trust technology and artificial intelligence's ability to simplify certain tasks and those who fear its impact on human jobs and interactions. But at least for now, real estate seems to be embracing the software far more enthusiastically than fields like academia and finance.
Zillow spokesperson Matt Kreamer told CNN that the real estate platform is "not promoting or wary of ChatGPT but are interested in how it’s being used and watching it."
