Keeping real estate human in the age of AI. Why the human part is not optional.

By Giordano Stepancic, Founder and CEO, Property.Credit

A few years ago, I got a phone call that changed the way I think about this business.

A real estate agent in Melbourne, a friend, referred me to one of his clients. His name was Ken. There was no context attached, just a name and a number. When Ken called, he told me his wife had recently been diagnosed with dementia, and it was progressing faster than anyone had expected.

“How could a man who owned his home outright, with plenty of equity behind him, be left without a way forward?

They owned their home outright, no debt. Ken had already put down a deposit on a place for her, and a unit nearby for himself. But that was not what he called about. What he actually wanted was simple, and less to do with finance: he wanted to spend time with her while he still could. Specifically, he wanted to buy a caravan and drive her around Australia before things became too difficult.

His home was not even on the market yet. He had tried the banks, and everyone else he could think of, and nobody had a way to help him do something pretty straightforward. So, we did. We helped him buy the caravan. They drove from Melbourne, and somewhere along the way, they sent us a selfie from Cairns. By the time the sale settled in Perth months later, Ken and his wife had spent the time together that he had been trying to buy in the only way that actually mattered.

I still ask myself the question that started this whole business: how could a man who owned his home outright, with plenty of equity behind him, be left without a way forward? Why was there no solution for something so simple?

The part of this business that cannot be automated

I tell that story because it is easy, in a year when everyone in real estate is talking about AI, to lose sight of what actually made that moment work. It was not a system. It was a person who picked up the phone, listened to a stranger’s situation, and treated it as something worth solving properly rather than something to be processed.

That has stayed at the centre of how we operate, even as the technology underneath the business has grown a lot more sophisticated. We use automation for exactly the parts of the process that benefit from it: assessing a financial position quickly, getting someone a pre-approval within minutes of an online application, keeping payments organised and visible. Technology is genuinely good at that, and there is no reason to make a person do it by hand.

But the phone call that follows is not an assessment. It is a conversation. Some of our team will spend a long time on a single call with an elderly customer who is struggling to understand what happens next. The conversation may have less to do with finance and everything to do with a big change in her life. In that moment, we are not a finance company. We are simply someone she can talk to, for as long as she needs.

Why the human part is not optional

I think a lot about the online chatbots that became common a few years ago. You would type in a perfectly reasonable question and get an answer that made it clear the system had understood almost none of it. Most of us have a story like that. It did lasting damage to people’s trust in automated support, and I think the industry risks making the same mistake with AI, just with a much more convincing interface.

Here is the thing about trust: once you deplete it with a bad automated experience, you have also depleted the empathy and the emotional weight that a good human conversation would otherwise carry. You cannot get that back with a better chatbot. You get it back with a person.

So on our end, every path still leads to a real human being. If someone jumps on our website chat, it is a person answering, not a bot with a friendly avatar. The technology supports our team so they can spend more time on the phone and less time on admin, not so the phone call disappears.

What this means for agents

I think the role of the agent becomes more valuable as this technology improves. As more routine assessment and admin is automated across the industry, the more valuable the agent’s actual skill becomes: sitting with someone, understanding what they are actually trying to achieve, and solving that problem, rather than simply processing a transaction.

That is what happened with Ken. An agent picked up the phone, listened properly, and made a call that had nothing to do with a script. As this industry brings in more AI, that is exactly the kind of judgement agents will need to keep bringing to the table: knowing when a person needs something more than a standard process.