Marketing your real estate business is a major endeavor. It takes time, energy, and other resources to do it right, and because of how interconnected the world has become, much of real estate marketing today takes place in online environments. In fact, a whopping 97 percent of buyers used the internet for house hunting in 2011. If you’re not marketing your professional brand as a real estate professional online, you’re not going to have much success.

There are an untold number of tools and resources available that facilitate online marketing. One of the newest and perhaps most disruptive is based on the burgeoning field of artificial intelligence – specifically, the ability for machine learning algorithms to generate unique image content after being provided with just a few snippets of text. Known as AI text-to-image generation, this new technology has the potential to revolutionize your online marketing efforts. Here’s how to use it for real estate.

What Is AI Text to Image Generation?

If there’s one thing that AI is good at, it’s parsing huge amounts of data so that it can identify trends and commonalities within that data. Most of the time, these machine learning algorithms are used to analyze numerical variables like sales figures, which can then be used to show reveal trends that would have taken much longer to identify if all that data was analyzed manually. However, those same techniques are now being used to create visual media based on prompts from users in the form of text.

In the case of a text-to-image generator, a machine learning algorithm takes the prompt it’s been provided and then scours its dataset for all instances of that prompt that are associated with an image. Then those results are compiled, commonalities are identified, and a new, original image based on all those commonalities is produced. The nitty-gritty is much more complex that this simple explanation, of course, but this covers how AI text-to-image generators work in a general sense.

What Are the Possible Benefits?

Using artificial intelligence to generate images from text prompts is a technological breakthrough to be sure. At first glance, however, it seems like not much more than a parlor trick. It seems like a bit of a leap to use this in a professional setting, though. How do you apply this breakthrough in practical situations, though? More specifically, how can an AI text-to-image generator to help you market your real estate business more effectively? 

It all comes down to how you can leverage image content as part of your marketing strategy. Online marketing proves, without a doubt, that a picture is worth a thousand words. The impact that visual content has over simple text-based content has been well-documented, such as research that clearly shows Twitter posts with images have an 18 percent higher click-through rate than posts with just text. With an AI text-to-image generator, creating unique and effective visual content becomes much easier.

A Streamlined, Cost-Effective Process

Minimizing the resources you need to devote into marketing yourself properly is often tricky. You want to ensure your efforts are effective, but this can easily become a drain on both your time (which could be better spent working on other aspects of your real estate business) and your budget. AI text-to-image generation has the potential to speed up the process of creating unique and interesting image content for your online marketing, and at a price that is unlikely to be quite as high.

The key here is taking the guesswork out of sourcing images. Traditional routes for image sourcing include paying for stock photos, hiring digital artists to create them on your behalf, or creating them yourself. All these approaches have an associated resource cost – either their purchase price or the time you spend in creating them. AI text-to-image generation takes a fraction of the time and, in many cases, is nowhere near as potentially expensive.

Which Image Generators Can You Use Commercially?

Using AI text-to-image generation has the potential to free up time and resources to help you market your online content better through unique and compelling images. There is, of course, a complication with such a plan – you need to be sure that you’re using a platform to generate these images that allows you to use those images for commercial purposes.

Thankfully, many of the most advanced AI text-to-image generation tools, such as OpenAI’s DALL-E 2, allow their AI-generated images to be used commercially, provided you comply with their content policy requirements.  Midjourney, another text-to-image platform, which most recently made waves when a piece of its AI-generated artwork entered a fine arts competition and took home first place, also offers commercial use as long as you abide by its own terms as well.

The Future Is Now – Or At Least Right Around the Corner

AI text-to-image generators for real estate represent the potential to take much of the difficulty out of marketing your professional brand. Being able to create high-quality and unique images that you can then use in your online marketing costs you less time and money than traditional methods. 

While AI image generation may not be able to help you if you have truly specific image requirements for your marketing, such as pictures of an actual property you’re selling, machine learning technology can go a long way in streamlining your image marketing needs.