Real AI: $300 Billion, Digital Twins and Musk Says He's an Idiot

September 12 2023

Real AI is a 100% human-created weekly roundup of all things AI in real estate and emerging AI innovations in other sectors likely to impact real estate.

Why Revive Vision AI is a game-changing use of AI

wav real ai 20230908 1 Pre-sale renovation leader Revive kicked off their biggest product release – Revive Vision AI – with a huge launch party last week. This is precisely the kind of AI we need right now in real estate.

First, a bit of background.

The pre-sale renovation category is one of the hottest new modern movements in real estate that can help agents win more listings and unlock new inventory.

How does it help agents win more listings? Massively better ROI.

For example, the average increased proceeds for Revive renovated homes is $186,000. The average ROI is north of 250%!

How can a pre-sale renovation unlock inventory?

It can help give a financial incentive to the homeowner who does not want to give up their low 30-year fixed-rate mortgage.

A typical $450,000 mortgage at 3% versus 7% is a $1,000 a month higher payment. But if you are going to net $186,000 more with a pre-sale renovation, that's a BIG incentive to sell.

You'd have to hold your mortgage over 15% before your total payments are higher on a 7% mortgage loan versus one with 3%.

Never, ever move?

When someone thinks about their sub-par 3% mortgage today, they swear they'll never, ever move, as they don't want to lose that rate.

But life happens – divorce, death, empty nesting, college, grandkids, relocation – a host of life events will cause people to move. They will need to sell if they can't keep the home as a rental.

The other side of the moving coin is the invention of new modern products like pre-sale renovation.

Flippers have been doing this for decades, right?

But Compass Real Estate gave access to non-flippers, average homeowners like you and me, when they launched Compass Concierge in 2018. Although limited in scope and total dollars, it was the first company-wide pre-sale renovation program.

That move eventually morphed into companies like Revive, which today fronts tens to sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars for homeowners to maximize their sales, taking improvement repayment at closing.

$300 billion problem or opportunity?

wav real ai 20230908 2 At the RISMedia CEO & Leadership Exchange last week in unbearably hot D.C., Dan Weisman, Director of Emerging Technology for the National Association of Realtors, moderated an AI panel. He made this recommendation: Only adopt AI tools that solve a problem.

Pre-sale renovation can help solve a $300 billion problem. People who sell a home as-is leave 15-20 percent of extra profits at the closing table. $300 billion is the total equity homeowners walk away from each year when they don't opt to do a pre-sale renovation.

The challenge is most real estate agents have yet to work with a company like Revive.

But with the launch of this computer-vision-powered mobile app (using computer vision leader Restb.ai tech), Revive can scale rapidly. This wickedly smart tool can dramatically increase the number of agents showing their sellers exactly how much extra they can make with a complete pre-sale renovation plan, with details down to the local contractor costs, at the listing table.

Revive Vision AI can do in seconds what used to take hours.

If you are an agent who wants more sales sides, you need to have a pre-sale renovation discussion during every listing presentation. Better yet, reach out to your sphere and tell them about the coolest new AI tool you have that may help them. Revive Vision AI empowers you to remain the expert and keeps you the agent at the center of the transaction.

Agents can help turn this enormous problem into a $300 billion opportunity.

Revive Vision AI is in beta and offers a wait list for agents who want early access. More details are here.

Clone Wars: Create your own digital doppelganger

Apparently, the speed of generative AI and computer vision creating new applications does not have a limit. At the Florida Realtors annual convention, I mentioned that celebrities already were spending big bucks getting full body scans and having their voice digitized and replicated to control their brand.

Read this story in Slate.

wav real ai 20230908 3

My presenting colleague Craig Grant from The Real Estate Technology Institute shared that there are new software services that allow anyone to create a digital avatar just by using photos.

Now comes this incredible – if not completely scary – story from Venture Beat that takes things to the next level: You can now make an AI clone of yourself — or anyone else, living or dead — with Delphi.

Here's a quick summary from the article:

Simply upload as few as four documents containing your communications to it — and as many as thousands, including emails, chat transcripts, even YouTube videos or audio files such as podcasts or voicemails — and Delphi will create an AI chatbot that mimics, as closely as it can, your personality, manner of writing, or speaking, audibly, as of today, through a partnership with voice-cloning startup ElevenLabs.

You can then deploy your AI clone on a website, in Slack, or even hook it up to a phone number to answer calls and engage in discussions with callers on your behalf.

Delphi also tries to recreate your unique thought processes in your clone, to the extent that it can provide what it thinks would be your response to a given prompt.

Even if it doesn't work as well as it should now, the Moore's Law nature of all things tech tells us it soon will. Just ask futurist Salim Ismail.