Don't get us wrong . . . ChatGPT is amazing!
Open AI’s GPT technology is bedazzling and terrific. It instantly produces text that is grammatically correct, sometimes accurate, rarely original, and almost never exactly what we want to say. I have no doubt that someday that sentence will require significant revision toward the positive—but not in time to publish your next MLS property description.
As far as we can tell, Nila June is the only automated property description service that does not use GPT.
Need an "AI Property Description Generator?" Take your pick.
Every few days, we see the launch of another “property description generator” that is a simple overlay to GPT3 (or GPT4, 5, or beyond, by the time you read this). As of May 6th, there are more than 30! These services are easy to use. You type a few facts about the house into a text window, or click on a few amenities from a list. These hints are sent to GPT3, which returns a short description of a house you might not recognize. Frankly, the results—though inaccurate and ordinary—are at least free of abbreviations, which is more than can be said for many published descriptions.
So, there is room for these services. They will vie for business from a large subset of agents who view the property description as a box to be checked. Nila June’s customers see the property description as an opportunity to distinguish the listing (and themselves) in a competitive market. I mean no disrespect to agents who hold the less ambitious view. In recent, frothy years, many of them have been quite successful.
Every seller deserves the best property description
Nila June serves listing agents who share our belief that the property description is the most important piece of marketing collateral for any listing. When those many tens of thousands of real estate photographs on Zillow begin to look as distinct as waves in the ocean, the property description remains an opportunity for differentiation.
Beyond the opportunity to spotlight their listing, agents who use Nila June are also mindful of what the description says to potential sellers. For anyone who is choosing a listing agent, online property descriptions are Google-able examples of professionalism. When your Nila June description stands out, so do you.
Accuracy, speed, & ease-of-use
GPT wrappers return their wares after minimal user engagement, which can be impressive initially. But without “knowing” much about the house, the system is not likely to provide many specifics about it. You might as well search Zillow to find something similar, and start from there.
In order to produce a better result, Nila June offers the agent a higher level of engagement. We think most sellers would expect their listing agent to spend at least a few minutes “briefing the writer.” And by “few minutes,” we’re really only talking seven or eight. Our methodical process might even remind you to mention features that you hadn’t considered. When you’re done, your coffee will still be hot, and your bagel still mostly intact. The payoff for fully engaging with the Nila June property briefing survey is a description that is specific to your listing. Your sellers will recognize their home. The writing will be remarkable in accuracy, creativity, and effectiveness. As with any piece of writing from any professional writer, you’ll need to read it. You might choose to make adjustments, but when that Nila June description appears on your screen, you’re on your way to a win.
We don’t aim to win on price
Our decision not to hit individual users with subscription fees or annual contracts is based upon our appreciation of the real estate agent’s workflow. Why should you pay Nila June during months when you don’t have a listing? On the other hand, when you have a commission in sight, it makes sense to spend $19.99 for a great description—even if you have several listings in one month. Many of our customers have this “problem.” They are happy to buy as needed—maybe multiple times in a single month, maybe none for a month or two.
Our descriptions are $19.99 per delivery. Each delivery includes two versions of the property description—one longer, and one shorter. Most of our business is from repeat customers. Our refund request rate is 0.29%–fewer than 3 per 1,000 deliveries.
"Free" property description generators can be very expensive!
There are cheaper services than Nila June. Most of the GPT description services are cheaper. Their prices will decline further as competition heats up among them. Agents who prefer to go the DIY route entirely can contend with a blank screen for “free,” if they value their time at $0 per hour. But ask yourself: doesn’t the seller who is about to pay you thousands in commission deserve a great property description? Is that ChatGPT property description going to win you a great referral?
There are more expensive services, too. An automated property description is simply not going to fit every house. For an implausibly extreme example, Nila June would not do a good job describing the International Space Station. Agents should turn to professional human freelancers to handle outlier properties.
The final product is writing. No one cares about tech.
We’re obsessed with Nila June’s purpose-built, custom natural language generation system. Not a day goes by when we don’t improve some aspect of it. But we don’t often talk about our tech, and here’s why: It’s not important to our customers. Agents don’t care. Sellers don’t care. Buyers don’t care. Nila June’s product is not the data entry process, or a connection to the hot new language model. Our product is those two descriptions that we deliver with every purchase. As co-founder Paul says on our calls with MLS representatives: “Nila June is a writing-forward product.”
Has anyone ever said, “You’ve gotta read this novel! It was printed on a printing press!”?
Will Nila June ever use Open AI’s GPT or other Large Language Models?
Our priority is to serve agents like the all-stars at Fox Home Teams, who are working hard to help hopeful buyers and sellers through one of the most important transactions of their lives. We do that by providing the best property descriptions that we can create, and we’ll use any means to get there. So, it’s easy to imagine including GPT in our process someday. For now, though, we are sticking to our knitting, building our human-powered natural language generation system by the paragraph, sentence, phrase, and word.
Our advice: Try’em all!
We welcome any bake-off. And as I said earlier, there is a market for simple GPT wrappers that return results similar to what you might get from direct engagement with ChatGPT. If that works for you, then great! For those who are willing to spend a little more time for a higher grade of output, Nila June is probably the way to go. Give Nila June a try, and perhaps you will add our instant property description service to your set of professional real estate tools.