Thad Wong warns against AI replacing the personal client connection

Technology has long been a focus for Thad Wong, the co-founder and co-CEO of @properties Christie’s International Real Estate, which is now owned by Compass International Holdings. In fact, he built an AI platform years ago for @properties that has evolved over the years.

Wong said he and his team have been careful to ensure that any AI implementations should enhance the agent-client relationship, not replace it. 

“The piece of the agent that’s most valuable to the customer, that gets that referral, are either the unique qualities and the communication style of that agent or the connection they have with their customer,” Wong told attendees of HousingWire’s AI Summit on Tuesday afternoon. 

Lessons learned

At first, Wong said he and his team looked at replacing conversations between agents and clients with AI. 

“We were looking at replacing interaction so we could have a dialogue with a customer and then once it got to a substantive point, we’d hand it off to the agent and there’d be a switch. That was a really bad idea. It was good to explore it, to learn it, but really what it was, was just not a good use of technology,” Wong said. 

Wong said they discovered through this process that the best use of the technology was figuring out how to replace all of the “unseen and repeated behaviors” that occur in the background, freeing up more time for agents to interact with consumers. 

“The minute you start to replace the personal connection, you lose. The minute you are using these other tools to enhance that connection and make the agent more valuable, you win. I’ve heard of people sending out emails of AI versions of themselves talking. Even if you can’t tell it, it’s almost like that’s the kiss of death. Now you’re not in control of your identity, which makes the relationship less valuable,” he said. 

One way in which Wong said they have used AI to enhance agents’ relationships with clients is by helping them reconnect with past clients. Sometimes, Wong said, agents feel uncomfortable reconnecting with these people and jumping right back into giving them high level market data. To help facilitate these conversations, @properties built a tool where you can upload historical email conversations as well as Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn feeds to help them revive these connections. 

“If you can do things in such a way where you can bring back a conversation or something of interest from them a long time ago and integrate it into your conversation, it makes you far more valuable and interesting as a person,” Wong said. “It’s not replacing that, but it’s making you better by helping you get a greater understanding of your customers, enabling you to have a better dialogue and higher conversions.” 

In addition to this, Wong said in order to further increase agent efficiency, their AI tools help agents prioritize who to reach out to by providing them with a list of people with why they should reach out. 

“It’s an incentive for them to directly communicate with these people and exactly why they should and with what information,” Wong said. “I think when you tee it up like this, you get a lot more people that are focused on those outcomes and what can result from those conversations.”

Personalizing the luxury experience

Wong sees the relationship between Christie’s International Real Estate and Christie’s auction house as an opportunity to use AI and data to create a much more personalized experience for clients — and to connect the real estate and luxury sides of the Christie’s brand. The idea is to understand a client’s interests beyond real estate, including art, wine, handbags and watches, and use that information to deliver relevant opportunities. For example, if the brokerage knows a client follows a particular artist, the agent could be alerted when that artist’s work is coming up for auction and reach out with a personalized message and a link to the piece.

He said the collaboration can create value on both sides of the Christie’s relationship. The auction house gains exposure to a broader pool of potential clients, while Christie’s International Real Estate agents have another way to stay connected with buyers and sellers between transactions. Rather than simply telling consumers that Christie’s is a luxury brand, Wong’s approach is to demonstrate that connection by helping clients discover and manage the luxury goods and experiences they already care about. In his view, AI makes it possible to do that personalization at scale while giving agents a more meaningful reason to reach out — strengthening the relationship rather than replacing the agent’s role in it.

The evolution of more productive agent

According to Wong, this is all part of his firm’s goal to figure out how they can help each agent become more productive. While this may be the goal of most firms working to implement AI into their workflows, Wong acknowledged that how a company thinks about AI may be impacted by the resources they have available, “Whether you have an AI team or you don’t even have anyone in a tech department — it is putting you in a different position, but the beautiful thing about AI is, is that if someone is thorough and intentional, everybody can use it equally. It is super available and it just about chaining our habits on how we discover how to do something,” Wong said.

For Wong this means rethinking ways things are done or structured. 

“The more we just keep addressing things the old way instead of shifting them into the new way, the longer we’re going to take to get anywhere that’s substantially different than where we are today,” he said.