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So far Kevin Hawkins has created 346 blog entries.

NAR says REALTORS® do 179 different tasks – AI says it can do 110 of them

What if you could harness dozens of hours each month without cutting a single corner in your client service? For real estate professionals, this is fast becoming a new reality as AI transforms the way agents manage their daily workflow. It all starts with one surprising number: 179. AI versus the checklist: What can be automated today NAR’s widely circulated list of 179 tasks that a REALTOR® may perform during a transaction is a powerful reminder of how comprehensive – and often irreplaceable – an agent’s role really is. But when you look at this list through the lens of [...]

The incredible life of Chris Coile: In remembrance

Jon Coile sent us an email recapping the remarkable life of his brother Chris Coile, a real estate icon who passed last week. Many of us know Jon well from his own real estate journey. He’s widely regarded as one of real estate’s most visionary and respected leaders. Whether serving as chair of Bright MLS, through RESO or leading influential initiatives at HomeServices of America, Jon is a trusted industry voice. What many of us may not have realized was his brother also was a real estate pioneer and a serial entrepreneur.  Below is the email Jon shared with us, [...]

By |2025-08-05T13:33:58-07:00August 5th, 2025|News|2 Comments

Real estate reporters want relationships, not pitches. Are you listening?

What’s the most underrated skill in public relations today? It’s not mastering AI tools, or writing punchy subject lines, or even generating a buzz on social media. For the long game? It is relationships. Not the superficial, connect-and-forget kind built through mass emails or casual LinkedIn DMs. I’m talking about actual relationships. The kind that takes time, trust, consistency, and a deep understanding of the journalists we aim to work with; the kind built over years, not news cycles. The latest Cision One State of the Media survey, which gathered insights from over 3,000 journalists across 19 global markets, drives [...]

By |2025-08-05T12:10:20-07:00August 5th, 2025|Real Estate Technology|Comments Off on Real estate reporters want relationships, not pitches. Are you listening?

Real estate is suffering from AI misinformation

History repeated itself at Inman Connect San Diego this week. Once again, after sitting through AI session after AI session on the first day, I was struck by how much confusion still exists in the real estate industry. As I experienced in early June after attending NAR Midyear, the AI "experts" on stage gave incomplete, misleading, or simply wrong information. One example just floored me. During an AI panel, a presenter proclaimed that Gemini Pro was better than ChatGPT. In what way? For content creation, hardly. Learning about your voice? No way. For daily use? Are you kidding me? And there [...]

NAR Midyear: Political advocacy using AI on your smartphone?

  At this year’s NAR Legislative Meetings, well-known REALTOR®, educator, and author Marki Lemons Ryhal offered a new way to use artificial intelligence as a political advocacy engine. She reframed this unconventional use of AI by giving practical examples for brokers, agents, and association staff to engage with AI in scaling their influence. If you’ve been thinking of AI strictly as a marketing or productivity tool, here’s another reason to think outside the standard AI box. Use your content to drive engagement One strategy is deceptively simple: combine a strong call-to-action with your tone and let AI scale it. She [...]

By |2025-06-02T09:35:53-07:00June 2nd, 2025|Artificial Intelligence, NAR, News|1 Comment

Ben Caballero: Real Estate Titan, Tech Innovator and Texas Legend Sets a New World Record for Home Sales

$27,000,000,000. Nine zeros. That atmospheric number is Iceland's annual GNP. It's also the total homes sales volume real estate titan and Texas legend Ben Caballero of HomesUSA.com did as an individual sales agent over the last two decades (2004-2024). As a solo sales agent for every listing verified by the MLS, Ben averages over $1 billion in home sales annually. Last year, Ben did nearly $4 billion in home sales. Again, that's $4,000,000,000. That's greater than the combined annual GDP of Grenada and St. Lucia! Over seven thousand home sales: one year, one man Ben’s record-breaking billions are only eclipsed [...]

By |2025-05-28T15:09:09-07:00May 29th, 2025|News, Uncategorized|Comments Off on Ben Caballero: Real Estate Titan, Tech Innovator and Texas Legend Sets a New World Record for Home Sales

AI is becoming the Rosetta Stone for real estate data and value insights

As a data junkie, I've often wondered why, in a data-rich industry like real estate, do so many decisions still rely on incomplete or inconsistent information? The answer lies not in a lack of data but in our inability to apply the resources necessary to see what the data shows. That’s where artificial intelligence is beginning to usher in a new era of insight. AI’s most transformative role in our industry may not be content creation, automation, or even marketing. It’s interpretation. It’s AI’s ability to extract, clarify, and illuminate the hidden signals in data that the human eye either [...]

By |2025-05-23T12:10:53-07:00May 26th, 2025|Artificial Intelligence, Real Estate Technology|Comments Off on AI is becoming the Rosetta Stone for real estate data and value insights

How do you get potential sellers to move off the fence?

    Americans are sitting on a record $17 trillion in home equity in the US. According to Cotality, the average homeowner has over $300,000 in wealth locked up in their homes. What if real estate agents could help their potential sellers see how they could increase their net proceeds by $100,000 or more? What if agents could reach out to past clients and "wow" them with a free AI tool that reveals how they can maximize the price of their home by leveraging the newest – and perhaps most powerful way – to sell a home? Research from the [...]

By |2025-05-19T08:30:25-07:00May 19th, 2025|Artificial Intelligence, Real Estate Technology|Comments Off on How do you get potential sellers to move off the fence?

A New Report: Presale renovation is moving from niche to mainstay – and AI is leading the way

Most agents sat on the sidelines when virtual tours made their debut. Now, they are ubiquitous. Back in the mid to late 1990s, when virtual tours were primarily used for luxury listings, they felt clunky and slow, and often required buyers to download special browser plugins just to view a listing. I remember vividly IPIX and its 360 virtual tour tech at the first mainstream Inman Real Estate Connect at the San Francisco Hilton. It wowed the crowd but cost $1000 a tour. Most agents initially looked at virtual tours as a marketing gimmick until around 2010. Fast forward to [...]

By |2025-04-18T12:35:05-07:00April 21st, 2025|Artificial Intelligence, Presale Renovation, Real Estate Technology|Comments Off on A New Report: Presale renovation is moving from niche to mainstay – and AI is leading the way

ChatGPT unleashes the AI copyright beast with its new image powers

We've used ChatGPT and ChatGPT Teams to create much of the accompanying artwork for the more than 200 stories I’ve written for our REAL AI weekly newsletter. For a time, Midjourney was our image champ. Then, we discovered some tricks we could do with Canva's AI image generation tools. But now, it’s all ChatGPT: its image generation capabilities just leapfrogged the competition. Upload a photo to render a new image in almost every art style. Social media users are losing their minds over its ability to Studio Ghibli-style capabilities. The demand on ChatGPT has been so massive that its leader [...]

By |2025-04-01T16:14:43-07:00April 2nd, 2025|Artificial Intelligence|Comments Off on ChatGPT unleashes the AI copyright beast with its new image powers

NAR Report: Gen X leads in income, Millennials stay mobile, and Gen Z quietly arrives

The 2025 NAR Generational Trends Report from NAR just dropped, and it reads like a family portrait of America in transition. Baby Boomers are moving closer to grandkids, Gen Zers are scurrying to scrape together enough savings to buy their first place, Millennials still buy the most homes, and Boomers are the top home sellers. Here are some things agents will want to know about to better understand the differences in the generations they serve: Gen X makes the most and buys the most expensive homes Buyers aged 49 to 58 now top the income charts, with a median household [...]

By |2025-03-28T09:07:52-07:00April 1st, 2025|Broker-Agent Information, Business Intelligence, Marketing, Research|Comments Off on NAR Report: Gen X leads in income, Millennials stay mobile, and Gen Z quietly arrives

REAL AI: Turn AI into your daily habit, AI for criminal minds, AI facts, headlines and quote of the week

By Kevin Hawkins with Korey Hawkins | Vol. 3 Issue 8 REAL AI is a human-created weekly roundup of all things related to artificial intelligence in real estate and emerging AI innovations in other sectors likely to impact our industry. WARNING: Beginning in LESS THAN 10 DAYS, on March 3, this content will only be available via our free newsletter, delivered by email every Monday, so please subscribe here! Turn AI into your daily habit CoreLogic’s Clareity25 MLS confab in the Arizona desert, attended by many industry leaders, just concluded. But unlike most real estate conferences, AI never really took center [...]

By |2025-07-22T06:24:56-07:00February 21st, 2025|Artificial Intelligence, PropTech, REAL AI Newsletter, Real Estate Technology, Technology|Comments Off on REAL AI: Turn AI into your daily habit, AI for criminal minds, AI facts, headlines and quote of the week