Previously known as “The Property Planner, Buyer and Professor”
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Show Notes – Underquoting
Today’s episode kicks off with a deep dive into one of the biggest shifts in modern property research: the rise of AI for property advice. Australians are now turning to artificial intelligence for everything from budgeting and suburb comparisons to market summaries and investment planning. The conversation explores where these tools genuinely accelerate your decision-making, and where they can lead you wildly off course.
A new study from MCG Quantity Surveyors puts AI to the test in a real-world scenario: can ChatGPT accurately recommend investment-grade suburbs across five capital cities? The experiment used both a simple everyday prompt and a highly structured workflow packed with real data, including growth rates, listings, vacancy rates, Census variables and infrastructure notes. The findings were startling. More than half of the AI’s “data-driven” recommendations failed basic fact-checks, with incorrect price trends, wrong days on market, mismatched listing counts and even suburbs that weren’t in the supplied dataset.
This exposes a fundamental problem. AI is brilliant at producing polished narrative, but it is not a disciplined analyst. It can summarise infrastructure projects and draft suburb overviews with ease, but it struggles to weigh the true drivers of capital growth. It often overemphasises yield, underestimates supply-side risk and treats structured data as more text, not something to analyse – resulting in confident outputs that crumble under scrutiny.
The episode unpacks why this happens, explaining how large language models predict text patterns rather than perform logical reasoning or weighted evaluation. In a field like property, where nuance, local variation and asset selection can make or break a portfolio, this gap becomes critical.
There is also a growing trend of clients arriving armed with AI-generated checklists and theories. It’s lifting the quality of early conversations, but many assumptions need careful unpacking before they lead people down the wrong path.
Gold Nuggets
Cate Bakos’s gold nugget: Cate applies caution to those who don’t question where the data source is actually coming from. AI scoops up all kinds of threads, sales spin and incorrect claims. It’s critical to apply critical thinking.
Mike Mortlock’s gold nugget: Mike tells a little story….. a newspaper story in a paper for Pakistan featured a ChatGPT prompt at the end of the article….ouch. Verifying sources and watching out for those M-dashes is important!
Dave Johnston’s gold nugget: Dave shares a tip he got from a Harvard professor; “Treat AI as just another smart person in the room”
Resources:
- Ep. 14 – How to choose a location for investment. What to look for and what to avoid
- Ep. 21 – Why price point should determine location and strategy
- Ep. 125 – Does size matter? Should you buy a small block in a great location, or a bigger block further out?
- Ep. 292 – Property trends to watch in 2025
- Ep. 322 – Expert tips for interpreting median data
