AI Journey – Journal #1
I am a residential and commercial appraiser. In the last 6 months, I have started a journey to transform my practice using Artificial Intelligence. How can I not? It’s all anyone is talking about.
So, I tried Grok, Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude. I dabbled with Perplexity as well.
Yes, I know there are many other platforms, but I concentrated on a LLM that would be able to crunch data, analyze documents and give me professional, objective information that I could use in my reports. Gemini and ChatGPT seem great for real life stuff, like “make me a t-shirt design” or “tell me how many dentists are in an area” etc. Grok is a good platform, but I drifted away from it when I met Claude. Claude is a nice gentleman, easy to talk to and work with, unassuming, and extremely powerful. I now use Claude Desktop hourly.
First, I looked at my process of writing a typical appraisal report. We’ll concentrate on a commercial report, because that’s where I’m getting the most bang for my buck initially. I looked to first find repetitive tasks and see if I can automate those quickly with the ability to quickly check the accuracy. That was pretty easy.
Then, I moved into downloading Claude into Excel so I can work directly in my spreadsheets. Mainly, I use it for crunching numbers, organizing, and ranking data, way faster than I can do normally. Now I use Claude in Word and in Excel, and make them talk to each other.
The picture below is an example. I downloaded about 1,700 sales from MLS into Excel. They were residential home sales from 2021 to the present. I wanted to see the pattern on sales volumes, median pricing, DOM, etc. This would have taken me about 10-12 minutes in Excel; however, I threw it to Claude and went and worked on another part of the report. With this method, it took zero minutes of MY time. It also formatted the information how I like it, so I can drop it in a report.
So, my advice to start using AI is to start using AI. You will figure it out. Your brain will alert you when you can save some time by using it.
