Anywhere’s Eric Chesin says the AI transformation is already here for real estate

Eric Chesin, the chief strategy officer for Anywhere Real Estate, believes the industry is in the middle of a “magic moment for progress and change” brought about by the ongoing revolution in artificial intelligence.. 

“It basically threw all of us into transforming our business,” Chesin said from the stage Tuesday at HousingWire’s AI Summit. “The way we look at it is, we are not only transforming the way we operate and how we run our company, but we are also transforming the way we serve our customers.” 

Chesin highlighted two recently launched AI integrations at Anywhere. The first is with an Amazon product called Amazon Q, which is an AI agent that’s integrated with Anywhere’s call center. The AI listens live to every conversation and offers up language as to how best to answer customer questions.

“It is able to sort through thousands of pages of documents to get the answers,” Chesin said. “The result is just a better experience for the customer who is having this conversation with a real human, and the employee on the call has a way easier time coming to the answers they need to help.” 

Anywhere is also leveraging an AI tool from Google that helps create five-minute educational podcasts for agents using the company’s vast library of educational content.

“Agents like things on the go,” Chesin said. “These are well produced, they take minutes to make, and there is no post production or sound stage needed. And it is all based on real content produced by our teams over the years.” 

‘Innovative and entrepreneurial’ agents

While these initiatives are examples of top-down AI integration, Chesin said the company is also taking a bottom-up approach to how it can better leverage AI.

“In our business, we have the privilege of serving 300,000 real estate agents across the globe, everyone of whom is experimenting with AI, both personally and professionally. Agents are also some of the most innovative and entrepreneurial people you’ll ever meet, so if you take that and harness the power of 300,000 agents, that helps us innovate much faster than if we were taking a corporate top-down approach,” Chesin said. 

One of Anywhere’s brands, Coldwell Banker, is currently running a contest among its agents to provide their most innovative AI applications. 

“We have the opportunity in this large gathering to shine a light on some really innovative uses,” Chesin said. “Then, if the opportunity arises, we can productize that to make it easier for the next agent to use. That kind of bottom-up innovation, when we have the scale to be able to spread it around, is a big focus of ours right now.”

By taking this bottom-up approach and meeting agents where they are with AI tools, Chesin said adoption is less of an issue for Anywhere. A recent example of this is the company’s recently announced partnership with Canva.

“The magic is that many of the agents are already using it,” Chesin said. “That was a channel that already existed, so us creating an enterprise arrangement with them helps lower our agents’ costs, but also helps us find how to direct really good, useful real estate use cases for that product with agents that are already engaging with it.”

Chesin said Anywhere has taken a similar approach with some of its proprietary AI applications, working to integrate the tools with products the firm’s agents already use.

“A great example is Listing Concierge,” Chesin said. “The product already has tons of adoption. Over half of our listings in our owned brokerage leverage the product, so we started infusing AI into that to automate listing descriptions and sort, highlight and tag photos.

“But we didn’t need to ask our agents to adopt these AI tools; they just went to the place they go every day and now all of a sudden that product is more powerful thanks to AI.” 

Agent performance predictor

Chesin also highlighted an predictive tool the company built back in 2018 that can be used to predict how an agent will perform in the future, allowing Anywhere and its brokers and franchisees to better focus recruitment efforts. By integrating the tool into brokers’ existing CRM systems, Chesin said that not only has adoption been strong but that the company has seen “massive results.” Now, they are incorporating AI into that tool.

While these applications of AI are certainly some of the most eye-catching, Chesin said that Anywhere has had the “most tangible business impact” in the “least sexy” parts of the business. As an example, he highlighted the company’s use of AI to intake and process documents.

“Already we’ve cut the manual oversight of the document review down 50% and we’ll be at 90% by the end of the year,” Chesin said.

The firm is also using AI to better integrate Anywhere’s different business units — including title.

“We now have AI recognizing when something comes in one way that it should trigger activity on another side,” Chesin said. “So we will open up a title case way earlier than we would have automatically because of information coming in through our brokerage business, because AI is helping to connect the dots between these two large businesses in order to help produce a more seamless, faster output for our businesses.”

As Anywhere and the rest of the housing industry look to the future, Chesin said that AI is not the future — it is the present.

“For every company that is waiting to see how it is going to evolve, we are all at risk of falling behind,” he said. “That is the game — to figure out all the ways that we can leverage the tools now to change the way we operate so we can get ahead rather than behind what our future inevitably is.”