EQ Over AI

Ask someone to define what a real estate agent does, and they will likely give you an answer that involves helping people buy and sell homes, land and investment properties. They might also mention leasing or property management, and possibly even the marketing and sale of businesses, all of which are indeed part of a day’s work at our brokerage.

With the advent of technology and increased public access to information, it was predicted that we would see our role as agents diminish in the process of a real estate transaction, and yet the more advanced technology becomes, if anything the agent’s role has become more refined and integral in coordinating the many other variables that surround a transaction.

To be sure, AI has certainly proven useful in many aspects of real estate, like helping with marketing and identifying likely property matches, but the complex and varied nature of the situations that provide the need for each transaction to occur taps into not only an agent’s Real Estate IQ, but also the factor of their Real Estate EQ, that elusive Emotional Quotient which exists entirely outside the capacity of AI. 

During the course of a recent day, I counted multiple EQ-intensive discussions and meetings, which included:

• Discerning between four different sets of parties submitting competing offers, to discuss perimeters of price and terms, while also measuring their strength and viability relative to the other parties;

• An extended family facing both health and financial distress whom we are helping relocate to a rental and prepare their longtime family home for the market so they can get out from under a reverse mortgage;

• Another family where the sheriff was called in to help settle a dispute between siblings. I remained on the line while the sheriff helped mitigate the situation, showing a high level of empathy and EQ of his own that no Robocop could ever hope to replicate; and 

• A longtime local business owner who wants help finding a suitable successor to carry on the legacy they have built at a fair price, despite having cut back on activity in recent years.

Each of these clients are at crucial junctures in their life journeys, and as sophisticated as AI may be, there isn’t a prompt I know of that can get them the answer to: “How can I reach an acceptable middle ground with my family member over our current disagreement?”, or: “What options can you offer to help us optimize the presentation of our home given the constraints of our current budget?”, or: “How can we leverage the intrinsic value of our family business that is cherished by the community but is currently under-utilized due to current circumstances”, or for that matter: “What would be our best Plan B if our Plan A doesn’t work out?”

It is clear that in the battle of man versus machine, or in this case Real Estate EQ versus Real Estate AI, the element of EQ has proven to be indispensable until someone can figure out how to program EQ into a computer.

At least for now.