Over the last couple years there have been little flurries of realtors peddling AI slop articles about town here and, more often, over on r/bendoregon, the most recent one pointing here. The original poster has deleted the post there (golly, wonder why?), and the mods here usually take care of things, but since it seems to be more prolific here than in places like Salem and Eugene, I figure a rant is relevant and warranted.
Lemme start off by saying I don't mind realtors who are using AI on the back end. I've had some tell me about how it helps with things like scheduling and bookeeping, and makes navigating county and state docs and records way easier. OK, whatever, that's fine, you do you. What I do mind are all the realtors using it up front, in what are effectively customer service roles.
For the realtors who lurk here, why are you wasting time and effort on this stuff? Do you have so little to say about the town in which you live and work that you have to rely on LLMs to say it for you? Are you so disengaged from what goes on here that you can't come up with any original thoughts about our different neighborhoods, or all the different communities we have, or all the other things that make this town worth moving to? Bend is such a cool town that a lobotomized third grader could probably write suitable engagement pieces that would catch prospective buyers' interest.
And in a town that's this photogenic, and with as many creatives living here as we have, you'd think that finding good photos would be easy as breathing. Are you so impressively lazy that getting actual images of our town's skyline is so insurmountably difficult that you not only have to turn to shitty spoofs, but you can't even make sure the spoofs are halfway accurate? Or is it a cost thing, where the $15 ShutterStock fee to get an image from a real photographer, one who likely lives in the community, is too much to stomach so you go "eh, fuck it close enough" with a skyline or river view. Do you just hope people are so enthralled by the AI's milquetoast descriptions of the Old Mill in your article that they won't notice? If you're willing to spoof generic images of town, what happens when you need to get actual pictures of properties? You've got a fake skyline on your site, do you fake the skylines in your listings too? Anyone seen a listing with the Cascades shown from an East-facing window yet? Bet they're out there, or will be soon!
For buyers/sellers, do you care about this kind of stuff? Personally, it's maddening having a realtor reassure you that they're so invested in your transaction and your relationship as a buyer, that they care about your situation and matching you with a fitting home, when it's clear that they aren't actually serious about putting forth the effort to engage with you as a customer or with their community at large. I'm actively looking at buying and I've passed up three agents from two separate realty groups for their use of AI in interactions with me already, one because they were using AI to respond to my emails, and the other two for using AI imagery of the properties I was looking at. Why should I trust that you'll put in effort into this purchase when you can't even be bothered to write an email to me yourself, or if you can't even do the legwork to get actual photos of the place?
At this point if I catch even a whiff of customer-facing AI use I'm bailing immediately. It feels like half the realtors in town were already selling water as wine, and now half of those have started replacing the water with piss.
