Every year, the National Association of Realtors (NAR) in the United States asks its members a fundamental operational question: how do you use technology in your daily practice? Recently, the organization released its comprehensive annual technology report, serving as the closest industry equivalent to a comprehensive scorecard tracking artificial intelligence adoption. For professionals operating north of the border, obtaining equivalent domestic data remains a challenge. Canada lacks a centralized, standardized scorecard of this scale; neither the Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA), provincial real estate boards, nor regional regulators currently publish an equivalent annual survey tracking how registrants integrate artificial intelligence into their workflow.
Consequently, Canadian real estate professionals and managing brokers must look to the American numbers for macro-level insights. Yet, a closer examination reveals that these figures deserve a rigorous, nuanced reading. When parsing the data, the headline statistics and the underlying operational details tell two entirely different stories about the state of digital transformation in modern real estate.
The headline story is one of undeniable adoption and expanding familiarity. In June data gathered by the NAR, 23 per cent of surveyed Realtors reported using artificial intelligence daily, while another 25 per cent reported weekly usage. This widespread engagement marks a sharp departure from the landscape observed just a year prior, when nearly a third of respondents had never even attempted to experiment with the technology. Today, only 12 per cent of agents report having no plans to incorporate these tools into their businesses. Furthermore, 55 per cent of respondents state that artificial intelligence has had a positive overall effect on their business operations, representing a notable rise from the 50 per cent who expressed the same sentiment previously.
However, a dive into the granular details exposes a more sobering reality regarding the actual business payoff. When asked about the magnitude of that positive impact last year, 17 per cent of Realtors reported a significant positive impact on their bottom line. In the most recent survey, that figure ticked downward slightly to 16 per cent. This statistical shift highlights a critical gap: even though nearly half of the industry now utilizes artificial intelligence on a weekly basis, the share of professionals extracting transformative business results has remained essentially stagnant. Almost all of the year-over-year growth in positive sentiment has landed in the "moderately positive" category rather than driving major operational breakthroughs.
Even more concerning to industry observers is the trajectory of negative outcomes. Last year, a modest 4 per cent of Realtors indicated that artificial intelligence had exerted a negative impact on their business operations. In the latest survey, that figure surged to 11 per cent. Roughly one in nine working agents now report that utilizing these digital tools is actively costing them something, whether in terms of lost time, eroded client trust, or diminished professional efficacy.
Surveys of this nature naturally carry inherent methodological limitations. The NAR invited more than 73,000 active members to participate in the study, yielding 1,165 usable responses—representing a response rate of approximately 1.5 per cent. Furthermore, the cohort of respondents surveyed this year comprised different individuals than those who participated in the previous cycle. Within statistical margins, a one-point downward movement from 17 to 16 per cent can easily be categorized as statistical noise. Conversely, a sharp jump from 4 per cent to 11 per cent in reported negative impacts is significant enough to demand serious attention from brokerage leadership and industry regulators alike.
Where the Time Goes
To understand where these divergent experiences originate, one must examine the specific tasks for which agents deploy artificial intelligence. The NAR report details a clear hierarchy of utilization. Writing property listing descriptions leads the category overwhelmingly at 75 per cent utilization. Drafting social media posts follows closely behind at 56 per cent, while composing routine client emails and managing follow-up correspondence accounts for 52 per cent of usage.
In stark contrast, utilization drops precipitously when looking at the core tasks most directly tied to revenue generation and transaction execution. Generating pricing insights and comparative market analysis (CMA) support drops to just 23 per cent. Improving lead generation and prospect prioritization sits at a low 11 per cent. Sending clients automated status updates accounts for 9 per cent, while automatically populating transaction forms from client-provided information claims a mere 7 per cent of usage.
The collective behavior of the industry indicates that real estate professionals have overwhelmingly adopted artificial intelligence as an advanced writing assistant. Yet, writing is arguably the least expensive and most easily commoditized part of a modern agent’s job description. A listing description that historically required ten minutes of focused drafting can now be generated in roughly thirty seconds, returning more than nine minutes of time to the agent. However, no home seller has ever hired a specific real estate agent purely because of the eloquence of a property description.
Agents themselves are acutely aware of where financial value lies within their practice. When asked why they choose to adopt new technology in the first place, 81 per cent of respondents cited saving time, while 57 per cent pointed directly to closing more deals. When queried about what technologies they hope to try next, 48 per cent identified artificial intelligence-powered lead generation and client follow-up as primary objectives. The professional intent to leverage technology for business growth is clearly present. What prevents agents from making the leap is the steepness of the learning curve, cited by 63 per cent of respondents as their primary operational obstacle, closely followed by software cost at 59 per cent.
From a Broker’s Desk
While the industry survey data clearly establishes that 11 per cent of users feel negatively impacted by artificial intelligence, the reports do not elaborate on the specific mechanics of those failures. In everyday brokerage management, however, the digital missteps that cross a managing broker’s desk share common characteristics, and they are rarely dramatic cinematic failures.
Instead, they manifest as subtle, avoidable errors. It might be a property description generated by a digital tool that inadvertently promises a luxury feature the home simply does not possess. It could be a neighborhood market summary compiled using outdated historical data from the previous year. Alternatively, it might be a routine client outreach email written in such a generic, formulaic tone that it reads identically to every other agent’s correspondence, causing the recipient to stop opening messages altogether.
Individually, these mistakes appear small and harmless. Yet, in the regulated environment of real estate, advertising that is inaccurate, false, or misleading constitutes a serious compliance issue. Provincial real estate regulators across jurisdictions hold registrants strictly accountable for all marketing and communications, regardless of whether a human being or an automated algorithm drafted the text.
Addressing these challenges requires a deliberate pivot in how real estate professionals approach digital tools. Industry experts suggest several practical strategies for brokers and agents navigating this technological transition. First, professionals should critically audit their artificial intelligence usage by mapping tasks directly against revenue sources. By cataloging every function for which these tools were employed over the preceding month and evaluating whether those applications actively secured clients or protected deals, agents can quickly identify gaps if their usage is restricted entirely to basic copywriting.
Second, practitioners should focus on building systematic operational workflows rather than relying on random, ad-hoc prompt engineering. Selecting a single revenue-focused task from the lower end of the industry adoption spectrum—such as generating a standardized pricing brief prior to every listing appointment or automating a consistent weekly status update for active clients—creates repeatable value. A single, dependable system integrated into daily operations is ultimately worth far more than a hundred hastily written prompts.
Third, editorial oversight remains non-negotiable. Given that one in nine agents now reports experiencing negative outcomes from artificial intelligence usage, the essential safeguard is human verification. Every single word destined for a client or public marketing channel must be thoroughly reviewed before dissemination. An agent’s professional reputation and legal liability rest on their own name, not the output of a software program.
Finally, because comprehensive macro data remains scarce in domestic markets, individual brokerages and practitioners benefit from tracking their own internal metrics. Measuring the exact hours saved by an automated workflow and determining whether those efficiencies directly touch active leads or completed transactions provides infinitely more actionable intelligence than relying solely on generalized international surveys.
The Same Tool
Last year, the fundamental question facing the real estate industry was whether working agents would embrace artificial intelligence at all. That question has now been definitively answered by widespread market adoption. The central question today is no longer if agents use these technologies, but what they are using them for. Thus far, the industry-wide answer points overwhelmingly toward the administrative writing tasks that clients notice the least.
One striking data point from the broader industry research offers significant food for thought: 91 per cent of Realtors who utilize artificial intelligence rely specifically on ChatGPT. This overwhelming market share means that the top-performing agents who report achieving significant, high-value business impacts are holding fundamentally the same software tool as everyone else in the industry. The differentiating factor lies not in possessing exclusive technology, but in directing those capabilities toward entirely different, high-value areas of the profession.