For an industry that regularly gets accused of being slow to move, Australian real estate jumped into AI with both feet.
NAB found that 69 per cent of property services businesses now use AI, the highest rate of any small-business sector in the country.
Yet if your Tuesday afternoon still feels as frantic as it did two years ago, you aren’t imagining it.
Every major study this year shows the same gap.
CPA Australia found 88 per cent of Australian businesses use AI and 10 per cent have it deeply embedded.
Salesforce found 9 per cent of Australian desk workers say it is part of their day-to-day workflow.
And in Deloitte’s global outlook, published last week, 92 per cent of commercial real estate leaders were still piloting or researching, and 8 per cent had integrated AI into the business.
Look at what agents use it for and the gap makes sense.
AI arrived without an instruction manual, so everyone reached for the quick wins first.
In a survey of US agents, the top three uses were listing descriptions (68 per cent), social posts (59 per cent) and emails (53 per cent).
There is nothing wrong with starting there. A solid draft at 6pm on a Thursday helps.
But out-of-the-box prompts only get you so far before buyers spot the formula.
One thread on an Australian property forum is titled, simply, “What prompt in ChatGPT was used to write this?”
Over two years of testing AI inside our own small team at Elite Agent, and watching hundreds of agents and property managers work with it, I’ve seen four ways of working emerge:
- Freelancer. One-off prompts when you need a hand. With a few strong prompts up your sleeve, there is plenty you can do here.
- Collaborator. Back and forth on a problem: a price conversation, a campaign angle, a sensitive email.
- Delegate. Hand over a defined, repeatable job, step away, and check the result.
- Operating system. Built into how the whole team runs every day.
Stage one never loses its place. I still use one-off prompts every day.
The turning point comes when you land on a prompt that works brilliantly.
You want it again next Tuesday without starting from scratch, and you want your team getting the same result without tapping you on the shoulder.
That is where the other stages come in, and where most of the industry stalls.
What we learnt in our own business is that the tools are the easy part. Turning a one-off win into a habit for you and your team is the work.
The tech race matters less than you’d think.
One release tracker counted 11 new models in the first fortnight of November alone, yet ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini sit so close together at the top that choosing one is like arguing Holden versus Ford.
The main paid plans are about US$20 a month, and one of them, with training on your data switched off, is plenty.
What has changed since last November is what you can do with them on a normal workday:
- Talk to your own data, not a blank box. A year ago every chat started with copy and paste. Now connectors let a paid assistant read your email, calendar and documents and, since October, live property management data in plain English.
- Build your own tools. Fixing a clunky office process used to mean a support ticket or a developer. Working agents are now building their own dashboards and landlord portals, and the leading models can operate a computer screen the way a person does.
- Show up inside the answer. A year ago buyers still clicked through ten blue links. Now realestate.com.au listings sit inside ChatGPT, and AI summaries answer the question before anyone clicks.
NAB also found that businesses using AI grew 2.8 times faster than those that don’t.
Three shifts make this a good moment to close the gap.
1. Your client now turns up with a second opinion
More than 3.2 billion people used a generative AI tool last month, according to the Digital 2027 report.
Google’s AI Overviews reach more than 2.5 billion people a month, and when one appears, the top-ranked page gets 58 per cent fewer clicks.
realestate.com.au’s for-sale listings have been inside ChatGPT since February.
Long before a buyer, seller or tenant rings your mobile, there is a good chance they have run their situation past a machine:
- Before the offer. A Perth first-home buyer described using ChatGPT to plan the timing and size of his bids. Others are running the contract of sale through AI before the conveyancer sees it, not to replace the professional but to walk in with sharper questions.
- Before the appraisal. On TikTok, Australian agents, buyers agents and mortgage brokers are posting about clients who arrive with ChatGPT’s opinion on price or suburb. The views are modest. The behaviour is the news.
- Before the application. Renters are asking each other how to make an application sound good to an AI, on the assumption a machine reads it first.
- Instead of an agent. The most-shared property story of the year was a Florida homeowner who used ChatGPT in place of an agent. People reported the home sold in five days for US$100,000 more than agents had suggested. Less shared was the follow-up. The buyer did have an agent, and her broker told Realtor.com the home was better than the area average it was priced against, and that the seller left between US$75,000 and US$225,000 on the table. The AI could see the data. It could not see the deal.
The Australian numbers are encouraging for agents.
Only 40 per cent of Australian homebuyers would accept an AI-driven valuation, against 62 per cent in Canada, 52 per cent in the US and 46 per cent in the UK, Cotality found.
Forty-two per cent have zero tolerance for errors in listing data.
And in Great Southern Bank research, 69 per cent of people who took AI advice and also saw a broker or adviser valued the human more.
The automated estimate is free and everywhere. The interpretation is what people will pay for.
Three adjustments that help now:
- Write listings for sentences, not filter boxes. Portals and chat assistants are likely to read your copy before a buyer does. REA’s AI search trends report gives three instructions: open with the lifestyle rather than the bed and bath count, name the architectural style if the home has one, and tick every feature field. Let AI check the features. Write the opening line yourself.
- Answer the 11pm question. Most sellers aren’t typing “best agent in my suburb” into ChatGPT. Right now, they are more likely awake late asking something anxious and specific: how do I sell and buy at the same time without paying two mortgages or ending up between homes? If a plain-English answer exists online under your name, you can be the one surfaced.
- Save your hours for blue spoon moments. In Unreasonable Hospitality, restaurateur Will Guidara, who gave one of the best AREC talks I have seen, tells of insisting on beautiful, expensive blue spoons for a simple gelato cart, then watching guests stop to admire them. Marketer Amanda Natividad, who writes The Menu, uses it as shorthand for her question: “What are you doing that’s worth linking to?” Let AI do the heavy lifting backstage so you have the headspace for a proper coffee cart at the open home, or a history of the street instead of a flyer. Be the answer online. Be worth talking about offline.
2. Work is shifting from chatting to delegating
For two years, using AI mostly meant typing into an empty box and editing what came back.
The shift now is delegation: handing over a repeatable job, connecting AI to the context of your business, and keeping a human check at the finish line.
Two things are opening this up inside ordinary agencies.
Your software is being asked to open the door
An assistant is only as useful as what it can reach.
Until recently it couldn’t answer “who do I need to follow up today?” because agency software sat behind closed walls.
The plumbing that changes this is called MCP, the Model Context Protocol: a standard plug that lets ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini connect to business software.
On 8 October PropertyMe made the biggest local move so far.
Agencies on its Advanced tiers and above can let Claude or ChatGPT query live portfolio data in plain English.
It is read-only for now, which keeps trust accounting out of reach.
Forms Live has a connector too, and Cotality has one for property data.
(Disclosure: PropertyMe has sponsored Transform.)
Most of the rest are building inside their own walls.
Reapit, which owns Agentbox, announced its own copilot and agent marketplace in April.
Rex has built two AI tools into its CRM, with two more on the way.
In a demo for Elite Agent this month, Rex’s Hamish Edwards said the company has an MCP server but does not open it to customers, for commercial and security reasons. Outside tools can use Rex’s open API.
REA Group has put its listings inside ChatGPT for buyers, but we found no connector that lets an agency’s own AI reach its REA data.
Neither approach is wrong.
Vendors have fair reasons for caution: trust accounting, privacy, and who is liable when someone acts on bad data.
But how long can the closed position last?
Is this an Uber moment? In one way, I would say yes.
Uber never asked the taxi industry for permission.
Passengers found something easier and would not go back.
An agent who has asked their rent roll a question in plain English, and had the answer in seconds, won’t go back either.
In another way, no.
Uber replaced the taxi, and nobody is about to swap their CRM or trust accounting system for a chatbot.
The closer comparison is open banking.
Banks used to treat your transaction history as theirs.
Customers and regulators decided it was yours, and the banks had to let you share it safely with other providers you chose.
The banks are still here. What they lost was the lock on your data.
Four pressures are going to make the closed position hard to hold:
- A competitor has said yes. PropertyMe put the feature in front of 6,500 agencies. Every other provider now gets asked why not.
- The walls leak. AI can now operate a screen the way a person does. If the front door is shut, it will use the same login you do, with none of the vendor’s controls.
- There is precedent. In 2025 Salesforce tightened the rules on outside AI tools reading Slack data, then shipped its own connector with permissions and logging. Vendors don’t stay closed. They open on their own terms.
- Agents are building around them. More on that below.
My read: expect permissioned, logged, read-first connectors to be a standard line in software contracts within 12 to 18 months, possibly on a more expensive tier.
At your next renewal, ask two questions.
Can my AI read my own data? And what does that cost?
Agents are building their own fixes
The most interesting thing we saw this year happened in our own program.
In the final of Transform XIV on 5 November, ten agents and property managers each had five minutes to show an app they had built themselves to fix a bottleneck on their own desk:
- Danielle Brown, K&D Properties, Queensland, won with One Daily Desk: one screen that pulls together her tasks, calls, new buyer enquiries and afternoon appointment prep, so she can stop jumping between Rex, Outlook, Slack and spreadsheets.
- Claire Weggery, Get Smart Property, New Zealand, built Property Passport: one link per property that walks a new landlord through everything the law requires and files it in the right place.
- Erin Marr, Belle Property Orange, built PM University, which turns her office’s procedures and training videos into modules with a quiz at the end.
For twenty years, when an agent wanted a feature, they asked their software provider and waited.
Now they can build it and lay it over the top of the systems they already pay for.
In sales, the sharpest results come before the agent knocks on the door: property and area research, likely buyer personas and draft ads done before the appraisal, and the hard objections rehearsed with AI playing the vendor.
In the lounge room, ask: “Would you mind if I take an audio note of this conversation and share the transcript with you?”
Your follow-up then covers what the owner cared about, and “just touching base” becomes “there were three things I didn’t cover”.
The rise of the AI chief of staff
You can see the shift in what people watch.
When we searched YouTube for the most-watched AI videos of the past three months, prompt tips were nowhere near the top. The top results were tutorials on running a team of personal agents.
Handing over more work has a human catch: your attention becomes the bottleneck.
A Boston Consulting Group study of 1,488 US workers, published in Harvard Business Review, named it “AI brain fry”: the mental fatigue of overseeing more AI than you can track.
A write-up of the study reports that affected workers make 39 per cent more major errors, and that problems start at about three agents running at once.
It feels a lot like hiring three keen juniors on the same Monday.
The people furthest ahead have landed on the same fix: one AI chief of staff at the front door.
In the US, Ryan Serhant’s brokerage upgraded its platform in September with an assistant called Dot, which it describes as an AI chief of staff.
The Real Brokerage followed in October with Leo Pro.
eXp Realty took the open route with “MCP First, AI of Choice”, so agents connect their own Claude or ChatGPT to their business data.
Builders in a Lenny’s Newsletter community thread last week gave the same advice.
Without comparing notes with New York, I built the same structure on the Gold Coast.
My chief of staff is an AI called Leo too, after Leo McGarry in The West Wing.
I don’t remember fifty prompts or manage five tabs. I talk to Leo.
He knows what is on my plate, briefs the specialist tools behind him, and brings me only the decisions that need a person.
‘He’ doesn’t always get it right but today is the worst he will ever be.
You also don’t need a complex set-up to borrow the habit.
One paid assistant that knows your context, your weekly priorities and your tone of voice will do.
Let it decide anything cheap and easy to undo. Tell it what done looks like. Save your own head for the calls that matter.
And in property management, keep the old rule: if a difficult issue has gone two emails, pick up the phone.
3. What’s ready, what’s hype, and three checks before 10 December
Why 10 December? That is the day a new privacy rule starts.
From then, organisations covered by the Privacy Act must say in their privacy policy when a computer program makes, or substantially helps make, decisions that significantly affect people, the OAIC says.
For an agency, software that scores or ranks tenancy applications is the obvious example. The three checks are at the end of this section.
When every tech company is promising the world, half the job is knowing what is useful today and what will quietly damage your name.
These ratings are my own view, as at November 2026.
| Use | Where it sits | Watch for |
|---|---|---|
| Audio notes and meeting summaries | Ready now | Ask first, and check your state’s recording rules |
| Pre-listing research and first drafts | Ready now | Check the facts, and write the opening line yourself |
| After-hours AI reception | Ready with guardrails | It should say it is an AI. A machine that says so beats a missed call |
| Mass outbound AI calling | Not ready for your clients | Trust, Do Not Call rules and consumer law |
| Lifestyle video and virtual staging | Ready with disclosure | Sell the feeling, never alter the property. NSW rules start in 2027 |
| Video | Ready with taste | Note it’s still expensive to create good video |
Where outbound voice comes unstuck.
In June the ABC’s Ellen Fanning and several of her Brisbane listeners were cold-called by “Daniel”, an AI voice selling apartments in a Gold Coast tower.
Daniel did not say he was an AI until asked directly.
The number was disconnected after the story aired.
Australia has no law that makes an AI announce itself.
Europe does: since 2 August the EU’s AI Act has required it.
But Treasury reviewed AI and the consumer law last year and found the existing rules already reach the conduct.
Letting an AI pass as a person risks breaching the ban on misleading or deceptive conduct in section 18 of the Australian Consumer Law, intent or not.
The Do Not Call Register applies whoever places the call, and ACMA penalties run to A$250,000.
Besides, iPhones and Pixels can now answer an unknown caller with an AI of their own.
When someone’s AI dialler rang me recently, my AI answering service picked up. Neither booked an appraisal.
So if someone offers you a system that dials 50 people at once: Sam says no.
Where AI touches the customer, it says what it is.
Where the line sits on images and video.
For a listing opposite a golf course, I made a short AI clip of a ball chipped from the green, flying over the suburb and landing on the front doorstep.
It sells the lifestyle and makes no claim about the house.
From 2027, New South Wales will require disclosure of digitally altered or AI-generated images in rental ads, with fines of up to $22,000, the Guardian reports.
Victoria’s existing rules already ban misleading photographs, and Queensland’s Office of Fair Trading issued a best-practice guide in June.
The oldest rule still works best: if a buyer or tenant would feel let down when they walk through the gate, leave it out.
Three checks before 10 December:
- Your privacy policy. From 10 December, organisations covered by the Privacy Act must say in their privacy policy when a computer program makes, or substantially helps make, decisions that significantly affect people, the OAIC says. A human in the loop does not automatically exempt you. Software that scores or ranks tenancy applications is the obvious case. Check whether your agency is covered and what your tools do.
- Client data in free accounts. The day after PropertyMe’s launch, a post on Reddit’s r/shitrentals warned that agencies could now connect tenant details to AI tools. PropertyMe’s answer is that the risk sits in the account you connect. “Your data is your data,” its head of product Luis Sanchez told us. On a free plan, he said, you are probably training the model. That makes it a policy problem, and it is yours to solve. Write a one-page office AI policy that names the approved paid accounts. Our free AI Policy Generator drafts one as an editable Word document, tailored to your state, in a few minutes.
- A written scam warning. Payment redirection scams cost Australians $166.8 million in 2025, and CommBank warned in September that property settlements are a rising target. A cloned voice asking for a deposit to go to a new account sounds like the agent. Tell every buyer, seller and landlord in writing that your bank details never change by phone or email.
Where to start before the year wraps up
When I asked our latest training group what they wanted from AI, nobody asked for a robot to replace their client relationships.
Almost everyone gave a version of the same answer: let it handle the admin so I can get back to the people.
You don’t need to overhaul your office before Christmas or chase every new app in your feed.
Four foundations put you ahead of most of the market:
- Pay for one assistant and switch off training on your data.
- Take audio notes, with consent, in your next few appraisals or landlord meetings, so nothing promised at the table gets lost.
- Ask your CRM and property management providers whether your AI can read your own data, and when.
- Pick one weekly job you dread and work out how AI can do the first 80 per cent backstage. The final check and the client stay with you.
AI won’t take your job. But it will take your excuses.
Want a hand turning one-off wins into repeatable workflows?
Transform XV starts on Monday 16 November, and doors close at 11am Brisbane time as we kick off.
It is built for working sales agents, property managers and principals, with no coding and no jargon: 15 minutes a day for 30 days, plus live sessions with me, all aimed at taking three recurring jobs a week off your desk.
Join Transform XV before doors close (today at 11.00am)