The Shape of AI-gency to Come?

Always mindful of continuing professional development (CPD), I was pleased to see that that our sector’s professional body, RICS, has organised a 5-part series this autumn titled, “Where Surveying Meets Innovation: Demystifying AI for the Built Environment”. After a commitment of 7.5 hours in total, I am looking to be equipped with the 6 learning outcomes.

But, as with the accumulation of any knowledge, it’s not enough just to be in possession of it. The important thing is what you do with it. I’d also argue that, with AI, what you don’t do with it is of equal importance.

AI is big business. At the end of May, North Lincolnshire District Council received plans for a £7.5 billion AI mega-campus on the former RAF Elsham Wolds base, near Scunthorpe with the North Lincs region making a play to become one of the UK’s official AI Growth Zones.

The prospect of having one of these new wave of tech parks in my patch has got me considering the extent to which AI and data-driven technologies in all forms can be best harnessed within the agency profession.

We are a discipline that loves to use data. We track valuations, yields, trends and statistics etc. Lovely, lovely data. So AI, unquestionably, can help us do that at greater speed and improve data gathering efficiency from multiple sources which we can then analyse ahead of making recommendations to clients. 

But those clients, themselves, can now access that data with many of the big real estate funds making investment decisions built on real time market data. So why are they still going to want to come to a commercial property agency?

In taking the grunt work out of data gathering, our time is being freed up for more considered, nuanced analysis based on deep and long established knowledge of the region or locale in question. Being relieved from back office work, sees us with more time to dedicate to cultivating client relationships because agency is, at heart, a human pursuit based on good relationships.

Dealmaking is, ultimately, what agency does and here is where real time dashboards could be a boon. While we have yet to initiate them, imagine how all the external and internal parties involved in a transaction can log in and monitor the live progress of a deal at any one point and where there’s any slippage, move quickly to rectify the situation.

We can’t be too far from the time when, in the matter of marketing, immersive visualisation is the go-to tool when it comes to illustrating property instructions. In a move away from the very flat, 2-D experience of the standard brochure and property details, an immersive experience would allow potential occupiers to experience how they would inhabit the property as it is and how they might fit it out to be.

Of course, such illustrative packages exist now but have been prohibitively expensive so the kind of ‘democratising of digital technologies’ that AI is bringing would really be welcome by agents, clients and occupiers - particularly when it comes to new-build developments because even the best CGIs struggle in representing what the finished product will be like, far less the experience of ’being’ in it.

In a way that I don’t recall when the advent of the Internet and email came into the world of work, there is discussion and debate about the ethics of AI use - be it cognitive which relies on rules-based systems of learning or the more learning from patterns, generative sort. The obvious risks for property agency are inaccuracy, misrepresentation and bias. 

Again, here, on the matter of ethics, I’d vouch for the importance of the human element of agency in building trust and being authentic in its client relationships. 

In the near future, in taking for granted the ‘objective’ elements of property agency where opinions are based on the kind of facts and data that are available to all, it will be those agents who retain and value the human qualities who will be the ones offering the kind of advice and service for which clients will be happy to pay a premium.

But then I’ve not been on the RICS course yet so what do I really know about the shape of AI-gency to come? 

What I do know is that it’s too easy to panic at the thought of upheaval to working practices. There’s also a comfort in remembering that in the 1970s and 1980s, there was a school of thought wondering what workers were going to do with all the leisure time that computerisation and technology would free them up to pursue as working hours shrunk. As it turned out, the answer was more work. 

Perhaps at this point in history, the answer will be higher value work.