I have watched this movie before. After 20 years in this industry, I know exactly how it ends for most agents.
When social media first took off in real estate, posting was not the problem. The problem was that most people had no strategy. They were posting just to post, scrolling while telling themselves they were working and confusing activity with progress.
TAKE THE INMAN INTEL INDEX SURVEY
That distinction matters because social media itself turned out to be incredibly valuable.
The agents who used it strategically, with focus and consistency, built a real long-term advantage. They stayed visible. They deepened relationships. They built audiences and attention that still pay dividends today. Social media was not a waste of time for them. It was a weapon.
But for many agents, it became something else: a dopamine machine dressed up as business development.
They would open Instagram or Facebook to “do marketing,” drift into doom-scrolling, make a post, tweak a caption, check engagement and walk away with the comforting feeling that they had done something important. Meanwhile, their database got colder, their pipeline got thinner, and the agents who stayed focused on money-making activities quietly took market share.
That is why I think AI is so dangerous right now.
Not because AI is bad. I think AI is genuinely good, and I think it will become a massive advantage for the people who use it strategically, just like social media did. In some cases, it already is. But most agents are not using AI strategically yet. They are using it in a way that feels productive.
And that is not the same thing.
The National Association of Realtors’ 2025 Technology Survey makes the gap impossible to ignore. According to NAR’s Realtors Property Resource, 68 percent of agents now use AI tools daily or several times a week. But only 17 percent report AI having a significant positive impact on their business. Forty-six percent see no noticeable impact at all.
That is not an adoption problem. That is a strategy problem. And it rhymes with something we have all seen before.
I know this because I’ve lived it
AI is even more seductive than social media was, because it gives you something tangible. A dashboard. A workflow. A polished email. A landing page. A custom GPT. Something that looks and feels like progress.
The brain rewards completion. Forward motion feels good. And AI is very good at producing the sensation of both, even when the business hasn’t moved an inch.
I work in marketing technology. I understand AI and agentic workflows at a level most agents don’t. And I have still spent hours, real and irreplaceable hours, having an AI agent help me build a dashboard, a research tool, a copywriting workflow. Then more hours refining it. Tweaking it. Improving it. Because the output kept getting better, and that felt like progress.
At some point, I had to ask myself an uncomfortable question: Am I actually saving time here, or am I just really enjoying the build?
Because the tool kept improving. The process it was meant to fix stayed broken. And the pipeline did not care how close the automation was to being finished.
That is the trap in its purest form. AI can help write the thing, build the thing, automate the thing and prototype the thing, and each step delivers a small hit of accomplishment. The dopamine machine just got an upgrade. But spending three hours to save fifteen minutes, two weeks building something that never gets deployed, or a month polishing a system that never closes a deal is not real progress.
This is where agents need to be brutally honest with themselves.
Are you using AI to augment real work? Or are you stuck in a loop that makes you feel productive while you quietly abandon the work that actually makes you money?
Ask yourself one question: Am I giving up money-making activities for something I hope will make me money someday once it is finally done?
Because that “someday” is where a lot of agents get buried.
I see it especially with agentic AI and build-heavy experimentation. Someone starts building a workflow or an internal tool, and because the output keeps improving, it never really feels unfinished. So they keep going. And keep going. It becomes a permanent state of almost useful.
Meanwhile, the pipeline does not care.
The work that still matters
While agents are stuck in the endless dopamine machine, the market opportunity has been growing, not shrinking.
Expired listing volume is up 83 percent year over year. That is not a blip. It is a structural shift in the market, and it represents a large and growing pool of motivated sellers who have already tried to sell and couldn’t.
Current data from REDX shows that 44.6 percent of all expired and cancelled listings eventually relist with an agent, at an average of just 36 days after expiration. That window is short. The sellers who relist are not waiting around. They are deciding quickly, and they are deciding based on who shows up.
That is not a technology problem. That is a prospecting problem. The agent who is connecting with those homeowners during that 36-day window wins the listing. The agent who is still refining an automation workflow that doesn’t go live, does not.
The same math applies to FSBOs, pre-foreclosures, and vacant rentals. The opportunity is there. The question is whether you are in front of it.
Real estate agents should protect their best hours for activities that directly generate revenue: calling and following up with the people most likely to need an agent right now, staying visible in their sphere, and putting consistent and focused outreach in front of sellers before someone else does.
AI should support those things. It should sharpen them, speed them up, organize them and enhance them. But it should not crowd them out.
We have seen this pattern before. The agents who won with social media were not the ones who spent the most time on it. They were the ones who used it with intention after the core business was already being handled.
The agents who win with AI will not be the ones who tinker the most. They will be the ones who kept doing the hard, human, money-making work and used AI to amplify it.
That is the mistake most agents made with social media. Don’t make it again.
Curtis Fenn is President at REDX, a real estate prospecting platform based in Orem, Utah. Connect with REDX on Instagram and LinkedIn.
