The 3 Levels of AI for Real Estate Agents (And How to Move Up One)
- Jerad Larkin
- 11 minutes ago
- 13 min read
What are the three levels of AI for real estate agents? Level 1 is prompt, where you ask AI questions once in a while. Level 2 is project, where you upload files and get real work out of it. Level 3 is agent, where AI stops answering and starts doing the task for you.
I teach a lot of AI classes to real estate agents around Denver, and the same thing happens in every room. I ask people where they are with AI and the hands go up all over the place. Some folks opened ChatGPT once and never went back. Some have it running tasks while they sleep. Nobody in that room is wrong, they are just standing on different rungs of the same ladder.
That is the whole problem with most AI training. It gets aimed at one level, and everybody above it gets bored while everybody below it gets lost. So I stopped doing that. Now I put people on a level first, then hand them one next step from wherever they are actually standing.
Below is the full presentation, plus a written breakdown of all three levels, what each one looks like in practice, and the single thing I would go do next if that is where you land. The theme running through the whole thing is curiosity. You do not have to learn every tool that comes out. You just have to be willing to talk to the one you already have.
Watch the presentation, then find yourself in the levels underneath it.
Why I Put Agents on a Level Before I Teach Anything
When I ask a room how they are using AI, the most common answer I get is listing descriptions. That is it. One task, done manually, over and over. Meanwhile the same person is paying twenty dollars a month for a tool that could be running their market analysis, their prospecting research, and half their inbox.
The gap is almost never intelligence or effort. It is that nobody told them what the next rung looks like. So here are the three rungs:
Level 1: Prompt. You have an account. You ask it things once in a while. You are scratching the surface.
Level 2: Project. You pay for it. You use it weekly. You are uploading files and getting real work out of it.
Level 3: Agent. AI stops answering and starts doing. It runs the task for you while you go live your life.
Read all three. Even if you are a Level 1 today, seeing where this goes is the part that makes it worth the twenty bucks.
Level 1: Prompt
You have an account, probably a free one. You ask it a question here and there, you take whatever comes back, and you are still learning your way around. That is a completely fine place to be, and it is where most of the real estate community still lives.
Pay for the tool before you do anything else
If you take one thing from this entire post, take this one. The gap between the free version and the paid version of these platforms is not small anymore. The paid models are meaningfully smarter, they hold more context, and they can actually do things the free ones cannot touch.
It runs about twenty dollars a month. Everyone reading this is worth more than twenty dollars an hour. If the tool buys back a single hour in a month, it already paid for itself and then some. Whatever platform you like, whether that is ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, pick one and pay for it. You do not need all of them.
Fix the robot voice before you build anything
The complaint I hear more than any other is that AI output does not sound like the person who wrote it. It sounds like a robot. Here is my honest answer to that: garbage in, garbage out. How you talk to it directly determines what comes back.
The fix is to personalize it once, up front, so you are not fighting the default voice on every single task. In ChatGPT this lives under Projects in the left sidebar. Gemini calls them Gems. Claude also calls them Projects. Same idea everywhere: a saved set of instructions plus your files, so you stop retyping the same context over and over.
Here is how I would build your first one:
Create a new project and name it something obvious, like Sound Like Me.
Upload real writing that you actually wrote. Not AI-assisted writing, real writing.
Fifteen to twenty past emails is a great starting point. Add video transcripts, Zoom recordings, or call recordings if you have them.
Give it instructions in plain language: match my tone, keep my sentence length, do not use words I never use.
Then work out of that project instead of a blank chat window.
The reason this matters is that voice is the thing clients notice first. Real recordings of how you actually talk are far more useful training material than any prompt describing your tone, because your speech patterns are already in there.
Build a listing description project you never rebuild
Listing descriptions are the number one AI use case in real estate, and almost everyone does them from scratch every single time. There is no reason for that.
Build the instructions once, inside a project, so the workflow becomes: paste the property address, and it searches for the property, pulls the available details, hands them back to you to verify, and then writes the description with Fair Housing rules already baked into the instructions.
Two things to hold onto here. First, you verify the data before it writes. AI pulling property details off the internet is a starting point, not a source of truth. Second, these prompts are yours to change. If you do not like how it writes, tell it. That is the entire skill.
Your one next step at Level 1
Build one project. Just one. Use it twice this week. That is the whole assignment, and it is the thing that moves you to Level 2 faster than any course will.
Level 2: Project
You pay for it. You use it weekly. You have started uploading documents and you are getting real work out of it. You are also leaving most of the tool on the table, and here is where.
Check which model you are actually using
Most paid accounts default you to the fast model. Faster answers, less thinking. That is fine for a quick caption and genuinely bad for anything that requires reasoning across a lot of information.
If you are asking it to analyze data, compare options, or build something structured, switch to the higher reasoning model. Yes, it takes longer, usually thirty seconds to a minute. The result is not slightly better, it is a different quality of answer. Every major platform has this setting. Go find yours.
Use deep research to build prospecting lists
Deep research is the feature almost nobody in my classes has tried. Instead of answering from what it already knows, the AI goes out and reads across the internet for fifteen to thirty minutes and comes back with a sourced result you can download as a spreadsheet.
For a Denver agent, that turns into referral partner lists you would otherwise build by hand:
Divorce and family law attorneys in your county
Estate and probate attorneys who handle real property
CPAs and financial planners
Property managers
HR and relocation contacts at Denver's largest employers
Builders and developers active in your area
HOA board members in the neighborhoods you farm
It can also build things like a fully branded neighborhood guide, a marketing strategy for a specific listing with a buyer profile attached, or a competitive analysis of a property.
One caution from me: verify contact details before you use them. Deep research pulls what is published online, and published information goes stale. Treat the list as a strong head start, not a verified database.
Your MLS is a gold mine and you are sitting on it
This is the one I would put money on being the most valuable thing in the whole presentation. You already pay for the best real estate data set in Colorado, and most agents only ever look at it through the search screen.
Run your search in REcolorado, select the results, and use the full export option to download the spreadsheet. Then hand that file to AI and ask for the analysis.
A full export carries hundreds of data columns, including public and private remarks. Reading through that by hand takes hours. AI reads it in under a minute and surfaces the patterns you would have skimmed past.
The real unlock is granularity. Most market reports stop at the city or zip code level. Pulling your own export lets you analyze one subdivision, one pocket, one street, using actual MLS data instead of a national estimate.
Let the data carry the price reduction conversation
If you have a listing sitting right now, you know the call. The seller wants to know what you are going to try next, and the honest answer is often that the marketing is fine and the price is not.
That is a hard conversation to have on opinion alone. It is a much easier conversation when you pull the comparable properties, hand the export to AI, and ask it to tell you whether this home is priced correctly and what makes it different from everything else that sold.
What comes back is a report that names the nuances, the square footage story, the condition notes buried in remarks, the concession patterns. You are not the one delivering bad news anymore. You are the one who brought the data and let the seller decide.
Make it presentable with Gamma
Here is where a lot of agents stall out. The analysis comes back as a wall of numbers and paragraphs. It is useful, and it is not something you would put in front of a client.
Paste it into Gamma. You can start free. Drop in the raw AI output and pick your format: presentation, document, webpage, or social graphic. It builds the layout, and you can brand it to your colors and style.
A year ago I would have built all of this by hand in Canva. Now I describe what I want and spend my time editing instead of assembling.
Your one next step at Level 2
Run the full workflow once: MLS export, AI analysis, Gamma, client. Three tools, about twenty minutes, and you will have a market piece that looks like it took a whole afternoon.
Level 3: Agent
This is the level where the language changes. People throw around agentic AI and it sounds like jargon, so here is the plain version. AI 1.0 is you type something in and get a result, then you go do something with that result. AI 2.0 is the AI doing step one and then finishing steps two, three, four, and five on its own.
It stops answering and starts doing. If you want the longer version of this, I wrote a full breakdown of agentic AI for real estate agents that goes deeper.
Start with the Chrome extension
The easiest on-ramp is a browser extension that can operate your browser for you. You install it in Google Chrome, it lives in your toolbar, and you open it as a sidebar next to whatever site you are on.
You describe the task. It writes back a plan. You approve the plan. Then it takes the mouse and does the work while you watch.
A few things I have actually used it for:
Inbox cleanup. It scans for promotional and spam senders, numbers them, asks which ones to keep, then unsubscribes and deletes the rest.
MLS pulls. Run a search for everything closed in the last thirty days in a zip code, select all, and run the full export.
Hunting down and testing promo codes across a checkout page.
Data entry and report pulling that eats your afternoon for no good reason.
Travel and shopping research, which is not business but is absolutely time back.
My favorite use, and the one I push hardest in class, is having it do things you do not know how to do. Something technical in your CRM, a tracking pixel on your website, a setting you have been avoiding for a year. Turn it on, ask for the outcome, then watch it work and learn from what it does. If you want more ideas, I put together 40 practical ways to use agentic browsers that you can steal from.
The honest tradeoff: it is often slower than doing the task yourself. The win is that it is not your attention. Leave it running in one tab and go do the work only you can do.
Move into Claude Cowork
The browser extension works on the internet. The desktop version works on your computer, and that is the real differentiator. You can connect it to the tools you already use, and you can give it access to specific folders and files on your machine if you choose to.
Once it is connected to things like your email, calendar, drive, and Gamma, you can hand it repeating work and schedule it:
Check my email every hour for these specific topics and draft responses for me to review at the end of the day.
Two days before a class, pull the registration list and send every person a personalized reminder text.
Go into the MLS, run the search, build the report, draft the email, and have it waiting for me.
Organize a folder of documents and tell me what is in it.
If you want the setup walked through step by step, I already wrote a five minute Claude Cowork setup guide with the exact downloads and account settings.
Record a skill instead of writing a prompt
This is the feature that changed how I think about the whole thing. Instead of trying to write the perfect prompt describing a process, you hit record. It captures your screen, your clicks, and your voice while you walk through the task the way you actually do it.
Then it saves that as a repeatable skill. For a complicated internal process with fifteen small steps nobody has ever documented, this is far better than trying to explain it in writing. You stop learning how to prompt and start just showing it.
Your one next step at Level 3
Install the Chrome extension and hand it one task you would normally do yourself. Watch the whole thing. That single session teaches you more about what is possible than reading about it ever will.
The Part I Always Say Out Loud in Class
AI gets you eighty five to ninety five percent of the way there. You are the expert, and you make the final call. That is not me hedging, it is the actual working relationship.
It takes away most of the effort. You still have to do the last ten percent and get it across the finish line. It is never going to be perfect on the first pass, and it is not supposed to be.
That last ten percent is also where your compliance lives. Anything AI writes for you is still your responsibility for Fair Housing, MLS accuracy, and your brokerage's advertising rules. Review it before it goes out, every time, and check with your broker when something is unclear.
There is a related worry I hear a lot, which is that leaning on AI makes everything feel less personal. I understand it. The way I think about it is that this is not about replacing relationships, it is about creating better systems so you have more time for the relationships. Let it handle the pulling, sorting, and formatting so you can spend that hour on an actual conversation.
Where Chicago Title Fits Into This
As an Account Executive with Chicago Title of Colorado, I work with agents across Denver Metro every day, and teaching this material is a real part of the job. Chicago Title has been a trusted title partner for agents throughout Colorado for decades, and my role is making sure you have the tools and training to grow alongside a title company that is invested in you.
It also runs the other direction. On our side, work like Owner and Encumbrance reports, seller net sheets, property books, and farm lists is exactly the kind of repeatable task that these tools help us turn around faster for you. If you need any of that for a listing or a client conversation, just ask me.
Get the Full Slide Deck
Everything in this presentation, including the prompts I walked through on screen, is in the deck. You can download the whole thing here: https://bit.ly/whats-your-ai-level.
Take the prompts and change them. They are meant to be edited. If one of them does not work the way you want, tell the AI what to do differently. That is the skill this entire post is trying to teach.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between a prompt and a project in AI?
A prompt is a single question you type into a blank chat window, and the context disappears when you close it. A project is a saved container that holds standing instructions plus your uploaded files, so the AI already knows your voice, your market, and your rules every time you open it.
Do real estate agents really need to pay for AI?
If you want anything past casual use, yes. Paid plans run around twenty dollars a month and unlock the stronger reasoning models, larger file uploads, deep research, and agentic features. The free versions are fine for testing and will cap you quickly on real work.
What is agentic AI?
Agentic AI is AI that completes a multi-step task instead of just answering a question. Rather than handing you a result you then act on, it operates your browser or your computer and works through the steps itself, checking in with you for approval along the way.
Can AI analyze MLS data for a market report?
Yes, and this is one of the highest value uses for an agent. Run your search in the MLS, download a full export, and hand the spreadsheet to AI for analysis. Because you are working from your own MLS data, you can drill down to a single neighborhood instead of relying on city or zip level reports.
Which AI platform should a real estate agent start with?
Start with whichever one you will actually open. Most agents land on ChatGPT first, and Claude is where I spend most of my time because of the desktop and browser features. The bigger mistake is jumping between platforms every time a new one gets attention. Pick one, pay for it, and get good at it.
How long does it take to move up a level?
Less time than people expect. Level 1 to Level 2 is usually one afternoon spent building a project and running one MLS analysis. Level 2 to Level 3 is installing the browser extension and handing it a single real task. The jump is a decision, not a course.
Want More Tools Like This?
Pick one thing from this post. Do not try all of them. Whichever level you landed on, take the one next step I listed and stay curious about the rest.
If you want more tools, tactics, and resources like this, subscribe to my weekly emails at milehightitleguy.com. I share real estate marketing ideas, AI tools, and exclusive invites to classes and events across Colorado.
I also run hands-on AI workshops around Denver Metro where we show up with laptops out and actually build this stuff together, because there is a real difference between hearing about it and doing it. You can find the upcoming ones at milehightitleguy.com/classes-i-teach. If this would be useful for your office, I am happy to come teach it.
Jerad Larkin The Mile High Title Guy Chicago Title of Colorado 303.630.9430 | Info@MileHighTitleGuy.com milehightitleguy.com
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