During the Spring of 2025, I put this prompt into ChatGPT:
“Draft a blog post on realtor associations and financial sustainability during a time on potential consolidation, risks to the industry, negative media coverage, and potential loss of revenue from MLS decoupling and the removal of the NAR three way agreement”
I deliberately wrote the prompt to touch specifically on the largest looming threats and more heavily argued discussions in organized real estate today. ChatGPT did not disappoint in that it pushed back a deep dive into each of these issues.
The result in 30 seconds was an astonishing 600-word treatise on issues being heavily debated in organized real estate. Its reasonably professional if provocative title was “Weathering the Storm: Financial Sustainability for REALTOR® Associations in a Time of Industry Upheaval” and it proceeded to break it down into multiple subtitled sections with snappy paragraphs, bullet points and recommendations for future action.
Recommendations included things like “Diversity Revenue streams”, “Reassert Local Value” and the grammatically-awkward “Plan For Financial Contingency”. It concluded with “Adaptation is Not Optional” and a call to action: “Now is the moment to lead boldly, manage wisely, and build strategically.”
Fair enough. You can agree with the findings or not. But now what do you do? What you maybe shouldn’t do is CTRL-V that chunk of text right into your blog and call it a day. Here’s why:
ChatGPT proceeded to ask “Would you like me to tailor this for a specific audience, like association executives or board members?” I said “Yes, please”. (Note the “please”, just in case.)
Down the Content Rabbit Hole
It produced another 750 words in another 30 seconds of the same general content with a noticeable change in how it presented its arguments. Then it asked, “Would you like a companion slide deck or summary memo version of this for internal board use?” The result was a summary of eleven presentation slides plus something titled “Executive Summary Memo: Key Points for Board Discussion”.
After that, it was “Would you like help developing talking points for board leadership or a member communication template tied to these plans?”
Then, it thoughtfully asked, “Would you like this memo formatted in a Word or PDF template for distribution? I can also create a simple presentation deck to brief your board.”
And so on. I went deep down the rabbit hole until I thought to open a new browser tab – and a new instance of ChatGPT – and start with the same original prompt I put in at the beginning.
The result? A 1,000-word blog post with a different title, “Realtor Associations and Financial Sustainability: Navigating Challenges Amid Industry Shifts”, and completely different text with approximately the same arguments however this new one ended with a hopeful sentence: “By staying ahead of these challenges, Realtor Associations can chart a course for financial sustainability and remain an indispensable part of the real estate landscape for years to come.”
The common thread among all these pieces of content, other than that they say roughly the same thing, is that below the title they include this nugget:
“By [Your Name]”
Which is why you ought to think twice before releasing “your” written content right away. It looks professional, right? Well-structured? Appropriate language? Targeted audience?
AI is the means, not the end
But is it actually true? Do you need to do some fact checking? Most of all, do you actually believe what ChatGPT wrote? Does your board of directors agree with it?
But how did ChatGPT land on these insights? In part, it came from “training” its vast databases of logic under Large Language Model theories – which means that it vacuumed up impossibly huge amounts of data from other sources and extracted any trends it could find.
And that is why you check. Garbage in, garbage out. You may agree with it or not. You may touch a nerve with your audience and create either controversial blowback or a wider, healthier discussion. It’s hard to predict sometimes, so do your homework first and, for the sake of all that is good, remove the line that says “By [Your Name]”.
