AI is already helping agents nurture the people inside their CRM, but its real power lies in expanding the pool of people who know them, but by connecting head-office scale with local agent authenticity, real estate networks have a rare opportunity to use AI and automation to build trust, authority, and organic reach far beyond the existing database.
What if AI could scale the human side of real estate? Elite Agent recently spoke to the leaders of some of Australia’s most prominent real estate networks about the trends, challenges and opportunities shaping the industry.
Across the responses, there was a common theme around AI: use it to reduce admin, make better use of data, improve communication and help agents build stronger relationships with the people in their database. But there was another opportunity that barely rated a mention – using AI and automation to build familiarity and trust with a much broader audience.
For a large real estate network, that audience could be enormous, with hundreds of offices and potentially thousands of agents, each with their own social media accounts and local audiences. AI and automation now make it possible to create useful content and get it in front of those audiences at scale.
At an office level, that might mean creating local content and distributing it across the social accounts of 20 or 30 agents, rather than relying on the agents themselves. Agents can still create their own content, but the office keeps their social presence consistent.
The same idea becomes considerably more powerful at a network level. Corporate marketing teams already create on-brand content, available through Canva or a marketing portal. But somebody still has to find it, edit it, download it and post it. AI and automation can remove most of that process.
A network could have visibility across its entire social footprint – which offices are connected, how many agent accounts are connected and which social channels are available – and then plan and schedule content to go out through those channels.
If the network wants to explain the new AML requirements, help people understand how to avoid property fraud or talk about something happening across the market, it could create that content centrally and schedule it across hundreds or potentially thousands of appropriate office and agent social accounts.
Now you’re taking something the network wants to say and putting it into the social feeds of the communities it actually wants to reach. And it doesn’t have to be all or nothing – a piece can go national, or be scoped to a state, region or single office.
There is obviously a balance to get right here. Agents should be able to opt into useful, professionally created content rather than having head office decide everything that appears on their social media.
And it doesn’t have to look like the same corporate post appearing hundreds of times. The underlying content can come from the network while the finished post carries the branding, headshot and details of the individual office or agent, giving the network consistency without losing the local and personal connection.
The opportunity, though, isn’t just about distributing more content. All of those social channels also give agents, offices and networks access to an audience that extends well beyond the people they already know.
Building beyond the database
AI is already making it easier to understand the people in a CRM, identify useful signals and recognise when someone might be ready for a conversation. Social media gives you the opportunity to build beyond that database.
In many ways, your social audience is an extension of your CRM. You may not have their contact details yet, but they’re following an agent or office, engaging with content and providing signals of their own.
Some will eventually move from that social audience into the database through an enquiry, appraisal, open home, lead magnet or another interaction. That makes growing and engaging those audiences valuable in its own right.
You’re not only communicating with the people you already know; you’re continually building a larger pool of people who know you. So while AI is helping networks extract more value from the data they already have, social provides an opportunity to continually grow the audience feeding into it.
Scaling content without losing the human element
Being able to create and distribute more content doesn’t automatically make it worth seeing. If we’re going to use AI and automation to increase the social presence of agents, offices and networks, we need to be careful we don’t automate away one of the things we’re trying to build – authenticity.
And I’m certainly not suggesting we use AI to fill everyone’s feeds with more AI slop. We’ve already reached the point where AI can create remarkably convincing images and video. In real estate, that creates some obvious problems.
A property can be digitally altered to look significantly better than it really is, or an agent can appear in a video they never recorded. The technology might be impressive, but it doesn’t take much for its use to start undermining trust rather than building it.
The same consideration applies to the content we’re creating. AI can help develop ideas, turn knowledge into useful content, create graphics, apply branding and distribute it, but that doesn’t mean we should simply automate the whole conversation.
We’re already seeing plenty of AI-written communication that doesn’t sound like the person sending it. Using AI to create the first draft is one thing; handing your voice over to it completely is another.
But there’s another use of voice we’re underestimating: talking to AI. An agent can explain what’s happening in their market, answer a question or share an opinion, and AI can articulate those thoughts and turn them into something ready to publish.
The human provides the knowledge and perspective; AI removes much of the work involved in turning it into content. The opportunity is to combine the knowledge, experience, opinions and personality of the people we’re trying to make more visible with the efficiency of AI to turn those things into content and get it in front of more people.
The economics of organic social have changed too
Once AI and automation remove much of the cost and effort involved in creating and distributing content, the economics of organic social start to look quite different. You don’t pay Meta or LinkedIn every time you publish an organic post or every time somebody sees it.
The reach of an individual post may be modest, but multiply that across the combined social footprint of hundreds of offices and thousands of agents and it becomes a very different proposition.
Organic content also doesn’t have to behave like an ad. Every post doesn’t need to generate an enquiry or justify a media spend, which gives agents and offices far more room to share useful information, opinions, local knowledge and content that simply helps people get to know them.
Useful content can also continue to be found, shared and surfaced after the day it was originally posted, rather than disappearing when an advertising budget stops. The platforms themselves are increasingly able to understand the words, images and video within content and recommend relevant posts beyond an account’s existing followers.
That becomes particularly important when the market is quieter and listings are harder to come by. That’s not the time to disappear from view. Agents, offices and networks should be staying visible and building the audience from which future opportunities will come.
Looking at social differently
The more I’ve thought about this, the more I’ve realised that looking at social media one agent or one office at a time is probably too narrow. When you look at it through the lens of an entire network, all the way down to the individual agent, it starts to look quite different.
There are economies of scale at every level. Knowledge created by the network can flow through offices and agents. Offices can support the social presence of their own people. Agents can contribute their local knowledge and personality without having to create everything from scratch. And all of those individual audiences collectively become a social footprint that is considerably larger than any one corporate channel.
There may also be an opportunity here for networks to influence the way real estate agents are perceived more broadly. You can tell people your brand is knowledgeable, professional and trustworthy, but there’s a limit to what any corporate message can achieve on its own.
Social media gives a network the opportunity to demonstrate those qualities through the people who actually represent it in communities around the country. If those people are consistently sharing useful information, explaining what’s happening in their markets and showing some of the knowledge that normally only comes out during an appraisal or client conversation, they’re doing more than marketing themselves. Collectively, they’re also shaping how people see the network and, potentially, the profession.
The industry leaders interviewed by Elite Agent are right to focus on using AI to improve efficiency, make better use of data and give agents more time to build relationships. But I think there’s another opportunity sitting alongside all of that: using the same technology to help those agents, offices and networks become more visible, useful and human to a much larger audience.
If the purpose of AI is to give agents more time to build human relationships, perhaps we should also use it to help more people get to know those humans in the first place.