Don’t miss our latest video – Inside AI Episode 8 with Zach Gorman, co-founder of RealReports.
What if we have been thinking too small about AI in real estate?
For the last few years, much of the AI conversation for real estate agents has centered on saving time. Write my listing description. Draft this email. Summarize these documents. Create a social post. Those are valuable uses, and when you add up all those little time savings, they can make a meaningful difference in an agent’s day.
But Zach Gorman, co-founder of RealReports, is pushing the conversation somewhere else. During my latest Inside AI interview, Zach boiled his argument down to six words that stopped me in my tracks: “5 minutes is different than $5,000.”
That doesn’t mean saving five minutes isn’t valuable. I would argue exactly the opposite. I teach agents every week that one of AI’s greatest benefits is its ability to eliminate dozens of small, repetitive tasks that collectively consume hours.
Zach’s point is that AI can go further. Instead of only waiting for an agent to ask it to do something, what happens when AI understands enough about the agent, the client, the property and the business to recognize an opportunity before the agent even thinks to ask?
That is where this conversation gets both incredibly exciting and, for me, a little uncomfortable.
From property intelligence to business intelligence
RealReports started by attacking one of real estate’s oldest technology problems: property information is everywhere.
That means agents often jump among public records, tax data, permits, environmental information, neighborhood data and a host of other sources to understand a single property. RealReports built its platform around pulling that information together. Today, the company says its property intelligence covers more than 150 million properties and draws from over 100 trusted data sources.
That foundation matters because the latest version of RealReports is not simply layering a chatbot over a traditional real estate database. Its AI assistant, Aiden, is being built as an intelligence layer across the platform, connecting property information with tools and workflows designed for prospecting, pricing, client engagement and other parts of an agent’s business.
Zach calls what RealReports is building a “business momentum engine.”
Is that phrase a marketing move? Sure. But when you dig a little deeper, it does change the question. Instead of asking, “What can AI do for me?” the question becomes, “What opportunity am I missing right now?”
Zach describes a system that could look at what an agent is doing, combine that with relevant property and business information, and surface opportunities that deserve attention. Maybe there is a client meeting tomorrow that requires preparation. Maybe an agent recently closed a transaction in a neighborhood that should be prospected. Maybe information sitting in several different systems suddenly becomes valuable when AI connects the dots.
That is a very different AI experience than staring at a prompt box.
Agentic AI raises the stakes
I remain excited about agentic AI, but I am also an AI safety-first skeptic about how quickly we should turn over control.
Generative AI creates something and gives it back to us. Agentic AI takes an action. Once software starts sending something, changing something, spending something or communicating externally for you, the consequences can become much more serious.
That is why one of the most important parts of my conversation with Zach had nothing to do with how powerful RealReports’ AI, Aiden, has become. It was about what happens when Aiden needs to stop.
Zach explained that RealReports has built in a transparency log showing what the AI is doing, including its steps and the tools it is using. More importantly, and this is my favorite part, there are points where the AI must raise its hand and wait for human approval before taking consequential or irreversible actions.
That approach is what I teach: always keep the HIM (Human In the Middle) and HER (Human Evaluate and Review) in AI.
We have already seen enough examples outside real estate to know that giving an AI agent a goal and some guardrails does not guarantee it will behave exactly as expected. The more autonomy we give AI, the more important transparency, checkpoints and human review become.
As Zach put it, “Transparency is so key here,” and I could not agree more.
Bad data can make great AI look smart
There is another reason RealReports is an interesting company to watch in the AI race, and it may ultimately be more important than which model it uses: data.
Everyone wants to talk about the latest large language model. Is GPT better? Gemini? Claude? What happens when the next version comes out?
Zach believes those models will increasingly become commodities. The differentiation will come from the information and context feeding them.
“The data is always going to be the most important piece here,” he said during our discussion.
That makes enormous sense in real estate. A beautifully written AI response based on incomplete, stale or unreliable information is still a bad answer. Splashy text can make bad information more dangerous because it makes the answer sound more convincing.
Real estate also has an unusually complicated data problem. Property data, MLS information, public records, client communications, CRM records and transactional information live in different places, under different rules and with different levels of reliability.
The AI that knows everything on the public internet does not necessarily know what it needs to know about your client, your property or your business.
That distinction is going to matter more, not less, as AI agents become more commonplace.
Show me the money
Zach and I also talked about something anyone who sells technology to real estate agents understands painfully well: agents hate paying for technology they are not convinced they need.
Free remains one of the most powerful words in real estate technology, and it pains me to admit that, but it is true.
That becomes a problem with AI because business-grade AI costs money and will be getting more expensive. The more we connect tools, use premium models, process data, and employ AI agents to perform work, the more it becomes clear that AI can’t operate on a free plan or even a flat monthly fee.
I have been telling agents they need to start thinking about an AI wallet (a nod to Justin Lundy), just as they budget for their CRM, marketing, photography and other business tools.
Zach’s response was refreshingly practical. If you are going to ask an agent to spend $200 a month, his question is straightforward:
“Tell me how I’m getting that $200 back.”
That is exactly the conversation AI companies need to have.
Don’t tell an agent your AI can read more information at once, remember more of the conversation or uses a newer model. Prove the business value. Show me how it helps me prepare for a listing appointment faster, follow up with more leads, uncover a past client I should call, spot a homeowner who may be ready to sell, create a better CMA, or save enough time each week to handle more business without adding staff.
That may be $200 recovered through productivity. It may be a transaction opportunity the agent otherwise would have missed. It may be better client service, faster response time or a stronger listing presentation. Whatever the benefit is, agents eventually need to see it in terms that matter to their business.
AI may make being human worth more
One of my favorite moments came near the end of the interview when I asked Zach the question I ask nearly everyone: If AI keeps doing more of the work, what becomes more valuable about the human?
His answer surprised me. “I think that the human piece becomes the luxury good.”
The more I thought about that, the more I liked it. That’s exactly why Florida Realtors’ Tech Helpline is so successful: the human factor of having nice people help agents with their tech problems is far more effective than talking to a chatbot.
If AI makes basic information, routine content and administrative work ubiquitous, then those things stop being differentiators. Everyone can have them. Everyone can produce them quickly.
What becomes scarce is judgment. Empathy. Creativity. Accountability. Trust. The ability to sit across the table from someone making one of the largest financial decisions of their life and understand what that person really needs. Agents hold their hands. AI can’t hold a hand.
That is why Zach believes the human experience could become more valuable, not less, as AI takes over more of the routine work. He and I completely agree on one thing: AI is not going to replace the real estate agent.
My view goes one step further: Agents leveraging AI will replace those who do not. That’s the magic of marrying safe AI, including carefully controlled agentic AI, with a human agent.
Want more? Watch Episode 8 of Inside AI with The REAL AI Guy for my full conversation with Zach Gorman, co-founder of RealReports to hear what your AI experience could look like next.
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Kevin Hawkins, a partner with WAV Group, is editor and co-founder of REAL AI, real estate’s No. 1 weekly AI newsletter and companion podcast, and his Inside AI with The REAL AI Guy video interview series. Kevin has written more about AI than anyone in real estate and is the Amazon bestselling author of the newly updated edition of The REAL AI Guide for Real Estate Agents. Known throughout the industry as The REAL AI Guy, in the last 18 months he has taught thousands of real estate agents in the U.S. and Canada how to use AI in the best and safest ways.
The post Inside AI – Episode 8 with Zach Gorman – Where Does AI Go Next? appeared first on WAV Group Consulting.
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