Agents Cite “Significant” AI Gains — But Not From Their Brokerage’s Tools

Real estate brokerages are finally seeing productivity gains from artificial intelligence, but those boosts aren’t coming from in-house tech.

And for a growing share of agents, these tools are providing what they describe as a “significant” boost to their work output.

The latest results of the Intel Index survey show broad increases in AI adoption across categories, especially in image editing and analysis of market data.

But they also suggest that recent rollouts of brokerage-provided AI tools are so far failing to displace — or even rise to equal standing with — agents’ preferred external tools, such as ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini.

Intel set out to better understand how agents are actually using AI. In its April survey, Intel explored questions like whether agents are still mostly employing a chat interface, or whether they’re beginning to experiment with more integrated and autonomous tools.

Read the initial findings in this first installment of Intel’s series on AI in the brokerage.

Agents embrace AI tools — but whose?

In previous surveys, the vast majority of agents who used AI were merely generating text for listing descriptions and social media marketing.

That’s beginning to change. And it’s resulting in bigger self-reported boosts in productivity than agents reported before.

• A larger majority of agents responding to Intel surveys — 70 percent in April — are now reporting they’re seeing at least some productivity gains from AI.
• That’s up from 62 percent when Intel last asked this question in August.

And for a growing number of agents, those productivity gains are making a big impact.

• The share of agent respondents who told Intel that AI tools have made them “significantly more productive” in their work rose from 11 percent in December 2024 to 15 percent last August, and has now reached 28 percent in April. 

Despite these gains, real estate agents also appear to maintain a healthy degree of skepticism with regard to the accuracy of these tools’ outputs.

But few view accuracy as a critical issue that prevents them from using the tools.

• When Intel first surveyed agents about their AI use in the closing weeks of 2024, about 1 in 6 respondents said that they viewed text generated by AI as fundamentally untrustworthy.
• Since then, that share dropped by nearly half to 1 in 11.

Instead, the vast majority of agents surveyed said that AI outputs were generally good enough to be useful, but required some degree of factual verification.

• 36 percent of agent respondents said they trust that AI results are usually accurate, but will “in rare cases” produce factual errors.
• 49 percent said that they expected AI would “frequently” produce factual errors, but that this wasn’t enough to dissuade them from using it.

Both of these shares in April were virtually unchanged from the August survey.

For the first time, Intel also set out to track agents’ adoption of agentic tools like Claude Code, Claude Cowork, OpenAI’s Codex, the open-source OpenClaw, or another agentic AI platform provided by their brokerages.

These environments have become an increasingly popular way for users to interact with AI tools, especially in fields such as software development.

Instead of a traditional chat interface where the user manually uploads documents and other files, then chats with an AI model to get an answer or generate a simple output, these agentic tools allow the AI model to access files on their computer or in their software suite directly. The model is then able to take multi-step actions on the user’s behalf.

But Intel found that few real estate agents are turning to an agentic AI harness for their work.

• 75 percent of agent respondents in April said that they primarily use a conversational chat interface when they interact with AI tools.
• Only 9 percent, by comparison, said they primarily use an agentic or integrated environment such as Claude Code or Cowork. 

Despite a number of high-profile rollouts of brokerage AI tools in recent months, real estate agents appear to be mostly sticking with the tools provided by OpenAI, Anthropic and Google over their in-house tools for day-to-day tasks.

• 71 percent of agent respondents in April said they used their own preferred AI tools more often than the ones provided by the brokerage. That’s actually a slight increase from August.
• By comparison, 10 percent said they use their brokerage’s AI tools most often, and 19 percent said it’s about an equal mix.

Notably, agents who primarily rely on their brokerage’s AI tools over their own external tools are less likely to say that they’ve seen the kinds of big productivity gains reported by others.

• Only 17 percent of agent respondents who rely primarily on their brokerage’s AI tools say they have seen “significant” productivity gains from AI in their work.
• Nearly twice that share — 33 percent — of agents who mostly use their own external tools say they’ve seen significant productivity gains.

These will be important areas to watch in the months to come as brokerage companies pour resources into developing internal tools and platforms powered by these models.

Intel’s survey also revealed the top ways that agents and brokerage leaders are using AI in their business.

Next week’s report will examine the specific ways the typical agent is getting more use out of these tools over time — and how a smaller set of AI power users are unlocking the biggest productivity gains available today.

Methodology notes: This month’s Inman Intel Index survey ran from April 22 through May 5, and received 435 responses. The entire Inman reader community was invited to participate, and a rotating, randomized selection of community members was prompted to participate by email. Users responded to a series of questions related to their self-identified corner of the real estate industry — including real estate agents, brokerage leaders, lenders and proptech entrepreneurs. Results reflect the opinions of the engaged Inman community, which may not always match those of the broader real estate industry. This survey is conducted monthly.

Email Daniel Houston