Real Estate Agents Want AI Help Their Brands Aren't Giving

Eighty-eight percent. That is the share of independent real estate agents in a new survey who admit they have sent AI-generated content to clients without editing it first. More than half, 57%, say they do it "usually" or "always."

The numbers come from CYPHER Learning, a training platform that sells to franchise networks and multi-brand companies, which released the survey Oct. 22. It polled 400 U.S. independent agents across real estate, finance and insurance in September, 150 of them in real estate, all working inside networks of at least 50 agents or locations. Small sample, vendor source. It still matches what brokerages are doing.

This weekend we reported that The Agency is building its own AI platform for its 4,000-plus agents. Last week Real put 36,000 agents on pay-per-task AI.

Adoption is not the problem. Ninety-six percent of respondents use AI tools at least a few times a week, most often to research properties (65%), answer client questions (55%), create marketing content (54%) and draft client messages (53%). Nearly all, 97%, say their brand has offered AI training, but 55% call it too broad, and when stuck, 79% ask ChatGPT while 55% turn to official resources.

Here is the part broker-owners should read twice. Agents ranked better AI tools and guidance as the benefit most likely to raise their loyalty, second only to better commission. Half (51%) said better tools would make them more loyal, and 21% said they are very likely to stop selling for their current organization within a year. In a franchise brokerage, where revenue follows agent count, that is a retention lever hiding in the tech budget.

"Independent agents represent a brokerage or brand in the field, but for some reason, they are excluded from the AI enablement that corporate employees receive," said John Mazur, CEO of CYPHER Learning.

The compliance numbers are worse than the headline. Only 31% of agents are very confident their AI use meets legal and compliance requirements, and 97% say they or someone else has bent or skipped brand guidelines to close a deal. The splashier finding, that 82% expect AI could push them into another career, matters less than unedited messages already going out under the brand's name.

CYPHER's answer is training, through a new Bright MLS AI Academy built with Bright MLS. That is one fix. The other is to move the riskiest work, answering client questions and drafting client messages, off personal chatbot tabs and into tools the brokerage configures and can see. That is the approach Revscale, which publishes this site, takes with its agents: a web chat agent trained on a business's own pages and documents that hands off to a person when needed, and an inbound agent that keeps the full conversation on the lead record. Neither replaces training, but both leave a record a broker can review.

The survey leaves brokers with a simple test. When an agent's AI answers a client at 10 p.m., would anyone at the brokerage know what it said?

Revscale Media is published by Revscale.