AI isn’t about replacing people, Kate Hulbert writes. It’s about reducing friction, improving consistency and allowing your team to spend time on high-value work.
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There are plenty of ways to use and misuse AI in the real estate industry. Over the past year, we’ve been exploring simple, practical ways to implement AI in our brokerage to protect our brand, clarify company policies, and support onboarding and training, all while reducing staff time without replacing the people who make our brokerage work.
3 ways we’re using AI to improve brokerage operations
Here are a few wins worth sharing (and replicating).
1. Custom GPT for brand and social media compliance
Like many brokerages, we have a comprehensive brand book that outlines our approved fonts, colors, photography style and design standards. And like many brokerages, we still struggle to maintain brand consistency across dozens of agents, platforms and marketing materials.
The challenge isn’t a lack of guidelines; it’s scale. Agents are creating social posts, graphics, emails, letters and marketing pieces every day, often moving quickly and making small design decisions that slowly pull the brand off track.
The solution: We built a custom GPT agent that allows agents to upload their graphics, marketing materials, emails, etc. The agent checks each piece against our brand guidelines and returns a clear list of what needs to be adjusted to bring it back into compliance.
Why we love it: Instead of policing agents’ content after the fact, the AI acts as a built-in brand check before anything goes live. Agents get immediate feedback, our brand stays consistent, and our marketing team is freed up from endless revisions and reminders.
2. Custom GPT for company policies and internal knowledge
Chances are, your brokerage’s administrative staff spends a significant amount of time answering the same questions over and over:
- Can I post a coming-soon listing?
- What’s our policy on personal branding?
- How do we handle team splits?
- What time is my floor shift?
Not only is this time-consuming, but it also creates real challenges when there’s staff turnover. Institutional knowledge lives in people’s heads, inboxes or scattered documents — and when someone leaves, so does a lot of that clarity.
The solution: We built a custom GPT that references our company policies, internal documents and MLS guidelines. Agents can use it to get clear, consistent answers to their questions in real time, without tracking down an office manager or digging through PDFs.
Why we love it: It creates a single source of truth. Agents get answers faster, staff time is freed up for higher-value work, and everyone is working from the same information. It’s also become an invaluable onboarding tool, helping new agents get up to speed quickly while reducing confusion across the company.
3. AI for agent onboarding and training
Onboarding a new agent is not for the faint of heart. Between processes, marketing standards, MLS rules and all the unwritten “this is how we do things here” knowledge, the onboarding process takes a significant amount of time and effort for both the agent and the brokerage.
The solution: We built a custom GPT trained on our onboarding documents, educational materials, MLS rules, best practices, policy documents and marketing standards. New agents can ask this GPT anything, anytime, without the fear of “bothering” someone or feeling like they should already know the answer.
Why we love it: Joining a real estate team as a new agent can quickly turn into information overload. Giving agents a place to ask questions as they arise, and as many times as they need, helps reduce overwhelm and builds confidence faster. At the same time, it allows us to standardize our training process and ensure everyone is learning from the same source, no matter when they join.
Implementing AI in your brokerage does not have to become a major overhaul to be effective. In our experience, the best use cases aren’t about replacing people or automating everything; they are about strengthening the systems we already have in place.
By using AI to protect our brand, centralize internal knowledge, and improve onboarding, we’ve reduced friction, improved consistency, and created more space for agents and staff to focus on higher-value work.
Kate Hulbert is the marketing director at Bozeman Real Estate Group in Bozeman, Montana. Follow her on Instagram or Facebook.
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