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AI Adoption in Real Estate: How Agents Use It and What Comes Next

AI adoption in real estate is nearly universal. How agents use AI today, what worries brokers and why virtual staging is next for AI.

· Co-founder

· 9 min read

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Real estate agent typing on a laptop at a stone-topped kitchen island in a sunlit home, with a phone, house keys on a green leather tag and a coffee mug nearby
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  1. AI Adoption in Real Estate by the Numbers
  2. Almost No Brokerage Is Holding Out
  3. Listing Descriptions Come First, Marketing Matters More
  4. Guardrail Worries Are Back
  5. Our Bet: AI Will Take Over Listing Production and Virtual Staging
  6. Why Virtual Staging Goes First
  7. From Empty Room to Staged Photos With TINTY
  8. What It Costs Next to Physical Staging

OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public on November 30, 2022, and real estate agents found a use for it almost immediately. That makes sense once you look at an agent’s week. A lot of it is writing: listing descriptions, follow-up emails, social posts, a bio for the brokerage website, a neighborhood summary for a buyer moving from out of state. A chatbot that turns five bullet points into a clean paragraph pays off on the first day, with no training and no software rollout.

Adoption followed quickly. In a Delta Media Group survey released in January 2024, just over a year after ChatGPT’s launch, nearly 80% of leading brokerages said their agents had adopted AI tools. Delta Media CEO Michael Minard told Real Estate News he was surprised the figure wasn’t 100%, and his advice to agents was blunt: “if you’re not part of it, you’re going to be left out.” In the same interview he said the industry as a whole was unprepared for what AI would bring. Two years later, the new survey backs up both points.

Key takeaways

  • In Delta Media’s 2026 survey, 97% of brokerage leaders say their agents use AI. In early 2024 the figure was nearly 80%.
  • Only about 4% of firms haven’t adopted AI, down from more than a fifth in 2024, and leaders now rate AI’s importance at 7 out of 10, up from about 5.
  • Listing descriptions are the most common use (82% of agents), but more leaders call marketing content the most important use (26% vs. 15%).
  • Concern about AI guardrails is back up to 49%, and small brokerages worry most about compliance and data privacy.
  • Our view: AI will take over the production side of a listing, from the copy to virtual staging of empty rooms, while agents keep the client and negotiation work.

AI Adoption in Real Estate by the Numbers

Bright brokerage meeting room with open laptops, printed house photos and a small wooden house model on a long oak table, two agents working out of focus at the far end

Delta Media surveyed more than 100 broker-owners and senior brokerage managers in December 2025 and published the results on January 29, 2026. Their firms handled over two-thirds of all U.S. real estate transactions in 2025, so this is a view from the top of the industry. Of those leaders, 97% say their agents now use AI.

Keep in mind who answered. These are brokerage leaders describing their agents, not agents reporting on themselves, so the number shows that AI is present in almost every large firm. It doesn’t show how deeply each agent relies on it. Delta Media’s release calls AI use among brokerages “virtually ubiquitous,” and Minard has moved past “should we?” He says the question for 2026 is how brokerages make sure AI is used accurately and responsibly, in ways that deliver real value to both agents and consumers.

Almost No Brokerage Is Holding Out

Only 4% of firms in the survey haven’t adopted AI. In 2024, more than a fifth hadn’t. Looking ahead, just 2% of leaders say they don’t plan to adopt AI in 2026.

Leaders also rate how important AI is to their business. In 2024 the average score was 5.45 out of 10. In 2026 it’s 7.12, and they expect it to reach 8.25 within the next 12 to 18 months. Here’s how we read that jump: a 5 is a tool you’re curious about, while a 7 is a tool the office would miss on Monday morning. The move took two years.

Listing Descriptions Come First, Marketing Matters More

Writing listing descriptions is still the job agents hand to AI most often. Delta Media puts it at 82% of agents, up from 58% in 2024. Content for blogs, social posts and email campaigns comes next at 74%, and 49% use AI to plan and manage social media marketing.

The more telling question was about value. Asked to name the single most important use of AI in their firm, only 15% of leaders picked listing descriptions. Roughly a quarter, 26%, picked marketing content such as blogs, emails and social posts.

Our read is that the listing description has become table stakes. Any agent can get a decent one in a minute now, so it no longer sets anyone apart. Marketing works differently. It’s how an agent gets in front of the next seller, and there is always more of it to do: another email, another post, another version for a different platform. That’s where leaders expect AI to pay for itself, and their plans point the same way. Sixty-three percent intend to expand AI use for social and digital marketing automation, and half say they will deploy agentic AI tools that carry out multi-step tasks on their own. We cover where listing promotion is heading in our piece on listing marketing trends for 2026.

One gap stands out. None of the survey results Delta Media has published this year mention photo editing or virtual staging. We think that’s the next big line on the list, and we come back to it at the end of this article.

Guardrail Worries Are Back

Comfort with AI hasn’t grown in a straight line. In 2024, 50% of brokerage leaders were highly concerned that AI lacks proper guardrails, meaning safeguards that limit risk and liability. In 2025 that share dropped to 42%. In 2026 it climbed back to 49%.

Small brokerages worry the most. They have fewer resources to train agents and fit AI tools into daily work, and they named compliance and data privacy as their top concerns. Across the whole survey, the main barriers to adoption were privacy, integration and compliance.

We don’t read the rebound as a turn against AI, because adoption kept rising over the same period. It looks more like what happens when a tool spreads from a few early fans to the whole office. More people use it, so more can go wrong, and the agent is still responsible for every word and every photo in the listing. An AI-written description can mention a feature the house doesn’t have. An edited photo can make a room look bigger than it is. Neither problem is new, but AI makes both faster to create.

So the answer is training, not avoidance. Agents need a few simple rules: which AI output gets checked line by line, how edited or staged photos are labeled, and which client details never go into a public chatbot. In our view, brokerages that write those rules down get the time savings with far less exposure.

Our Bet: AI Will Take Over Listing Production and Virtual Staging

Oak desk with a laptop, phone and mug beside two prints of the same living room, empty and virtually staged

This part goes beyond the survey. It’s our opinion, and we have a stake in it: we build TINTY, an AI virtual staging tool for real estate listing photos.

Think of an agent’s job as two kinds of work. The first is production: the listing description, emails and social posts, photo edits, and staging empty rooms so buyers can picture living there. The second is people: talking a seller through a price, reading a buyer during a showing, negotiating repairs after an inspection, keeping a deal together when something goes wrong.

Our bet is that AI won’t just help with the first kind of work. It will take it over completely. Listing descriptions are nearly there already, at 82% of agents. Marketing copy is close behind. Photo work is next, and virtual staging of empty rooms is the clearest case because the task is so well defined: the same room, the same walls and windows, plus furniture that fits the space.

The second kind of work stays with agents. Back in 2024, Minard openly wondered whether the 1.5 million Realtors working today could shrink to 800,000, or even 200,000, by 2030. We won’t guess at headcount. Our forecast is narrower: the agents who stay in the business will spend far less of their week producing listing materials and far more of it with clients.

Why Virtual Staging Goes First

Staging works, and agents know it. In NAR’s 2025 Profile of Home Staging, 83% of buyers’ agents said staging makes it easier for buyers to picture a property as their future home, and 73% rated listing photos as more important or much more important to their clients. The catch has always been cost and time. The same report puts the median cost of a staging service at $1,500.

Virtual staging, which took off in the 2010s, went after part of that problem: designers furnish the listing photos digitally instead of hauling in rented furniture.

AI goes after the rest. With hand-made virtual staging, a designer furnishes each photo and sends the files back later. With AI, the agent does it alone, in minutes. For the everyday vacant listing, we think the human production step goes away entirely. Designers will still take on complex or high-end projects, but as a specialty, not the default. Our history of virtual staging and its pros and cons covers how staging got here and where hand-made work still makes sense.

From Empty Room to Staged Photos With TINTY

Here’s how an agent with a vacant listing gets staged photos in TINTY:

  1. Upload a photo of the empty room.
  2. Choose the room type: bedroom, kids room, nursery, living room, dining room, living–dining, studio, home office or terrace.
  3. Choose a style (Contemporary, Transitional, Scandinavian, Modern, Japandi / Organic or Minimalist) and an accent color such as sand, green, taupe or navy.
  4. Get furnished previews in about 30 seconds. If the first style doesn’t suit the buyer you have in mind, try another.
  5. Keep the preview you like and render the finished photo. When you download it, you can add a “Virtually staged” label, which helps with MLS disclosure rules.

That room list lines up with where agents actually stage. In NAR’s report, the rooms sellers’ agents staged most often were the living room (91%), the primary bedroom (83%) and the dining room (69%). TINTY covers all three.

What It Costs Next to Physical Staging

Previews in TINTY are free and don’t need a credit card. A free account includes 20 previews a month and 3 finished photos with a TINTY watermark, so you can test it on a real listing before paying anything.

For a single property, the listing pack is $29 one-time for 10 finished photos, valid for 12 months. Agents with a steady flow of listings can pick a monthly plan instead: Base at $9 for 4 finished photos, Standard at $39 for 20 or Professional at $79 for 50, with yearly billing available.

Physical staging still has its place, especially when buyers will walk through furnished rooms at showings. For the listing photos, though, the gap between a $1,500 median staging bill and a $29 pack is hard to ignore.

One rule doesn’t change with the tool. Staged photos show what a room could look like, not what comes with the house. Label them, follow your MLS rules on showing the original photos, and never use staging to hide a defect. Within those limits, we see little reason to list an empty room empty anymore. The quickest way to judge is on a room you’re listing right now: stage your first empty room with TINTY, and the previews cost nothing.

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