Inman Connect 2024: Real Estate Agent Insights from the New York City Conference

Inman Insights:

I don't believe in gatekeeping information and am always open to collaboration and sharing. I've put together a few highlights and takeaways from Inman that I thought might be of value to other agents:

-AI is affordable leverage agents can’t afford to ignore. This was easily the main topic of the conference. AI will not replace agents, but agents who use AI the most efficiently to better manage their time, will replace those who don’t use it at all. Agents need to be researching prompts and detailed instructions for HOW to tell AI how to best work for them. We dove deep into a lot of the "how to's", and so if you have further questions about this, feel free to ask.

-Nobody cares about your Just Sold, Just Listed, or Market Stats photo on social media. They care about the value you bring to them on social platforms in the form of knowledgeable local insights and expertise that can't be found on Google. Video is one of the best ways to demonstrate this.

-Baby Boomers replaced Millennials as the main homebuyer category in 2023 due to equity in their homes and investments, and millennials getting hit hard by affordability and interest rate woes.

-Many agents in 2023 expanded to secondary markets as a strategy to be able to sell more home in a low inventory market.

-Economists estimate that home prices will continue to increase in 2024, but that competition for spring listings will become even more fierce amongst agents this year, and it starts right now. New construction is expected to increase and perform well as builders find opportunity with interest rate relief, many new housing projects that were started in 2023 and will be available for sale in 2024, and continued limited inventory in the resale market.

-Do not sleep on LinkedIn as a promotional platform as an agent.

-Lots of conversations about NAR after lawsuits. Mauricio Umansky is creating a new organization called the American Real Estate Association and the CEO of Anywhere challenged individual leaders to start stepping up when facing local legal real estate issues.

-Homes.com is the second leading platform for real estate web traffic, and the Costar CEO blamed Zillow, Redfin, and Realtor.com for the giving the industry a bad reputation through the negative user experience of selling user data to third parties instead of the “your listing, your lead” model.