Become the Neighborhood Expert Using AI Market Research

In this episode, Kandice Coleman shows you exactly how to use Perplexity AI to research any neighborhood in South Carolina in under 15 minutes—and how to answer buyer questions without crossing any fair housing lines.

You’ll learn the exact questions to ask Perplexity for each category of neighborhood information agents should know, and how to package your research into client-facing guides, buyer consultations, and social media content.

This episode also includes a critical compliance section: AI doesn’t know fair housing law, so Kandice breaks down what you can and cannot say when sharing neighborhood data—including how to handle crime statistics, school ratings, and demographic information safely.

This episode builds on Episode 6 (CMAs), giving you the neighborhood research that makes those market analyses even more valuable.

If you’re hosting showings, meeting with buyers, or presenting listings this spring, this episode will help you position yourself as the neighborhood expert in your market.

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Gary

* Gary serves on the South Carolina Real Estate Commission as a Commissioner. The opinions expressed herein are his opinions and are not necessarily the opinions of the SC Real Estate Commission. This podcast is not to be considered legal advice. Please consult an attorney in your area.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:05

It's spring. Buyers are actively looking, and the number one thing they want to know about besides the house is the neighborhood. They want to know all about commute time, walkability, whether or not there's any future developments. They want to know about resale trends. When buyers start rapid fire asking these questions, you don't have to panic, you don't have to stall. Today, I am going to talk about an AI tool that you can use to become the neighborhood expert. Let's get into it.

SPEAKER_00 0:33

Welcome to Dishin Data, AI Edition, the podcast where we make artificial intelligence simple, practical, and profitable for real estate agents. Here's your host, Candace Coleman, a real estate attorney at Blair Cato Pickren Casterline. Each week, Candace breaks down one AI tool or technique that real estate agents can use immediately. No overwhelm, no tech jargon, just actionable steps you can put to work today. If you're a realtor who wants to work smarter, serve clients better, and stay ahead of the curve, this podcast is for you. And now, here's Candace.

SPEAKER_01 1:11

Today's episode, we're gonna build on something that we spoke about before in episode six. We talked about creating professional CMAs using Claude and Gamma and doing so quickly in 15 minutes. That episode was mostly about numbers, so comparable sales, market trends, pricing analysis. This episode is all about the neighborhood research that goes into making those CMAs and your entire buyer consultation even more valuable. Instead of opening up 10 browsers or more and bouncing between them, trying to gather all this information, I'm gonna show you how you can ask smart questions to one tool and get the answers to all of your questions in a summarized form with sources. I'll be covering the exact tool we're using for neighborhood research, Perplexity AI. I'll go over the specific questions that you want to research for every neighborhood you work in, talk about how you can package all this information up for any client-facing use. I'll also discuss the legal considerations that you want to take when talking about neighborhood data. Let's talk about why having this neighborhood expertise gives you a competitive advantage. We know buyers have access to Google, Reddit. They have the information readily available about certain neighborhoods. But when they're asking you questions, they want a deeper understanding. Buyers want that local insider knowledge. So they don't just want to know what Google told them about there's a grocery store nearby. They want to hear there's a public two miles away, and also there's a new development that has just been approved that is gonna add more retail to the surrounding area. So of course they want to know what's here now, but they also want to know what's coming, any new road improvements, any future developments, how it could affect traffic patterns. Being a neighborhood expert allows you to provide a level of insight quickly and you become incredibly valuable to buyers. And the best part, you don't have to spend hours researching every neighborhood in your market. AI can help you become an expert and come up with neighborhood summaries in about 15 minutes per neighborhood. I'm introducing a new tool here. The tool we're using today is perplexity.ai. You'll be using perplexity in the same way that we use the other chat box platform. So I'm talking about Claude, ChatGPT. You're gonna ask it questions and it'll be answering your prompts, but it does work a little differently. And of course, on dishing data, we don't get into all the tech jargon. We cut to what actually matters and we get straight to the point. But I do want you to understand that perplexity is searching the web in real time, pulling that data from multiple sources and then citing its sources. So it's gonna tell you where it got the information from. And this is critical for neighborhood research because you need that recent data. You want the information that is current today, not something that's from three years ago. And you'll see that Perplexity is citing each of its sources when it's giving you information. So you can go and click on the links and see exactly where it's coming from. You're gonna recognize some of the sources and know, okay, that's a trusted source. And this is great because you can easily verify where the information is coming from. And if need be, you can share exactly where you got the information from and your sources with your clients. To get started, you're gonna go to perplexity.ai and just set up an account. You can actually use it without creating an account, but I do recommend you create one because that way it will save your history. And to create an account, you just give an email address and then you'll start asking questions. So the magic of perplexity, just like all these other AI platforms, is how you ask your questions, how you're prompting. You want to be specific. And when you have your account set up, perplexity, it does remember your conversation. So you can ask follow-up questions. When I'm starting out, I like to give my prompt and then within that first initial prompt, say, ask me questions and ask me one by one interview style. That way it makes it easier for us to have a back and forth where it just asks me one question at a time, I answer it and we kind of do a little bit of a dance. Sometimes if you say ask me questions, it'll give you five questions and you're trying to scroll up and make sure that you've answered everything. Just go ahead and prompt it to give you one question at a time interview style in the beginning, and it will know to do that moving forward. When you're using perplexity for market research, you want to think about what answers do you want to have readily available about the neighborhood. So here are a few categories of information that you probably want to have an understanding about when it comes to certain neighborhoods that you're working in. So you can create your own neighborhood checklist of all the information that you want to know. But here, here are some things to get you started. Schools, buyers want to know about schools, whether it's because they have children or resale value. So you can ask what schools serve blank neighborhood and blank city, South Carolina, include elementary, middle, and high schools. And this way you just know what schools are in the area. If buyers ask anything about schools, you'll be able to point them to the right school district website or any third party website. Regarding future developments, what new developments have been approved or proposed near blank neighborhood and blank city? Are there any planned commercial projects, roads, or infrastructure improvements near blank neighborhood? Where can I see those city or county's long-range planning documents for this area? So you want to know about that shopping center or road project that may be coming up so that when if a buyer is asking how the area may evolve, you'll be able to kind of paint a picture for them. Walkability and amenities. So, what is the walk score if that's available for the neighborhood? Um, what amenities are within a short drive or walk of blank neighborhood? Include parks, grocery stores, restaurants, coffee shops. And when I was testing this out, perplexity did include all of those things without me actually having to give those details. What are the closest hospitals and urgent care centers? And this just allows you to give buyers that concrete, objective information that they can use to with an idea about what daily life is like in the neighborhood. Commute times, you can ask perplexity for the typical commute time during rush hour from this specific neighborhood to downtown. And then property value trends. You can ask what have home prices in Blank neighborhood in Blank City, South Carolina done over the past five years? You can include the average days on the market for a home in the neighborhood. So here you're giving kind of a bigger picture of why it might be a smart buy for the buyer that is concerned with resale value. And then another category, local events and cultures. What annual events or festivals take place in Blank neighborhood in South Carolina? Are there neighborhood associations or community organizations that are active in this neighborhood? And this once again allows you to paint a picture of what it's like to live there. So the sky's the limit. I'm sure that you have some more ideas on what questions you would like to know about certain neighborhoods. This is just a start. Once you've gathered all your information and you have it all, what do you do with it? You can create a neighborhood guide. You can turn all of your research into a one-page neighborhood guide that you share with buyers. And if that's something that you are interested in, you can do this by using the same workflow that we used in episode six. So if you have not listened to episode six, I would suggest you go back and do that. But you're gonna want to copy the research from Perplexity, which is very simple to do. You just copy it and then you'll paste it into Claude, prompt Claude. You'll ask Claude to organize a neutral, fact-based neighborhood guide and site sources. And then once Claude gives you that organized content, you just drop it into Gamma and you'll have a beautiful PDF with your branding. But if you're not ready for Claude and Gamma yet, you can just take the information and drop it into a Google Doc for you to use later. The point is you have the information and you're readily able to share it. And it didn't take you having 50 tabs open and hours to gather the information. And you want to start off by doing this for the neighborhoods that you know you frequent. But if you are showing a home in a neighborhood that you're not as familiar with, then you can simply do it beforehand and show the buyer, hey, this is what this is the information that I gathered. And so you showed up prepared, you did your homework, and you are providing value to your buyer. And you can always use your insight and your research for social media, things to know before buying in XYZ neighborhood or a post about the parks and amenities, events in a neighborhood, or even why homes in blank neighborhood have been selling faster over the last three years. And it's also great information that you can include with those open house follow-ups that we talked about last week. So you can see here that you're selling a house, but you're also selling the neighborhood. Um I've seen social media posts that do where agents have done an excellent job showcasing the beauty of a neighborhood, the parks, what is going on, shops to visit, things to do, what not to miss out on. You having all of this information and research is great because not only can you position yourself as an expert in front of your clients that you have, but also on social media as well. I do have to talk about some legal and compliance considerations. You guys already know there are some legal landlines when sharing neighborhood information. AI does not know fair housing ones. So these AI platforms, they're gonna bring you this information from around the land, but they do not know what you are legally and ethically allowed to say as a real estate agent. That means it may include and it will include, most likely, information that you cannot repeat to clients. So this is a reminder not to just copy and paste. It may tell you this neighborhood is great for families or the neighborhood is this neighborhood is considered safe. Red flags. It's your job to review everything and make sure that you filter out everything that is not within the ethical and legal guidelines. So I'm just gonna give you a little bit of a checklist here so that you can make sure that you're in compliance. Make sure, once again, you read the full response and you're not just copying and pasting blindness because you know that the AI does not know what you know regarding fair housing laws, ethical guidelines, and legal compliance. Remove all red flag, subjective language, perfect for, safe, dangerous. If it's not objective, go ahead and remove it immediately. Any sort of statements that describe the type of person that lives in the neighborhood, eliminate and make sure that you're verifying any bachelor's language. If it states that there's this new development, go to the website, verify. You're responsible for the accuracy of everything that you're putting up. And when clients are asking questions about particularly crime or school demographics, you know the sources that you can point them to so they can get that information themselves and interpret it. You cannot use information to steer buyers towards or away from any specific area based on protected classes. So you can provide factual data or neutral sources, but you cannot interpret that data in a way that steers buyers. So you have to keep that in mind as you are giving out this information. So I hope you're able to understand that while these AI tools are incredibly helpful, they are not perfect, and you are still driving the bus, you are still responsible for everything that you ultimately decide to put out to clients. You can share your sources with your clients, that protects you and also gives your clients verifiable information. And when you're sticking to objective, verifiable facts, you can let the data speak for itself and allow your clients to draw their own conclusions. All right, so let's put this into a workflow that you can use and give you some homework. Step one, make a list of your top five neighborhoods where you get the most fire inquiries and you work the most off. Go to perplexity.ai, set up an account and start your research on one neighborhood. I would say set aside 15 to 20 minutes for neighborhood. So you can either set aside a whole afternoon and knock them all out, or do them one by one as you find the time. Step three, copy and paste your research into either font if you are going to come up with neighborhood guides that you want to share with clients or into a Google Doc so that you can just go back and reference that. Adding a Google Doc where it's all laid out for you will allow you to reference it quickly. And then you'll have the neighborhood completely researched and ready to sit share with clients moving forward. You're gonna see exactly how much time you save doing this and how prepared you feel. I must add, you want to revisit this about quarterly because neighborhood information changes. And I do want to share one more tip. As you're using perplexity over time, you're gonna come up with ideas and questions and research that you want to do. You can even ask if you're unfamiliar with the neighborhood, how is this neighborhood typically marketed by other agents? And it will give you an answer and help you understand how the neighborhood is being positioned by other agents. You may decide that you want to follow their lead, or you may decide to position the neighborhood a little bit differently when marketing. For example, if perplexity lets you know that this neighborhood is typically marketed as close to downtown, you may decide to talk about the future development plans for the nature that is surrounded. I'm sure that as you get familiar, you'll come up with a lot of other ideas and ways that you can use this tool to help you. It's extremely valuable. Perplexity makes it easy for you to research any neighborhood in South Carolina in about 15 minutes. So you're not spending hours Googling and compiling information, and you don't need to be a local historian to provide this valuable information to your client. All you need to do is ask the right questions and package them in a way that allows you to show up as an expert for your buyers. Be sure to like, comment, and subscribe and join us again next week for more ways that AI can help you in your real estate business. Now go become a neighborhood expert in your market. Thanks for listening. This is Dishing Data AI Edition.