According to HousingWire's reporting on the Delta Media Real Estate AI & Leadership Survey, brokers' concerns about artificial intelligence have climbed back up after a dip. The worry score among brokerage leaders hit six point three-eight out of ten in two thousand twenty-six, down from the previous year but climbing back toward where it sat in two thousand twenty-four. What's interesting is that the share of leaders expressing serious concern, scoring it an eight or higher, followed the same pattern, dropping in two thousand twenty-five before ticking upward again this year.
The uptick in worry appears to be tied to a shift in how brokerages are actually using AI. Rather than sticking with simple tools, firms are now moving toward what they call agentic AI, which means systems that can actually take action and automate tasks on their own. This represents new territory for the industry, raising fresh questions around compliance, data security, who's liable when something goes wrong, and how accountability works when an AI system makes a decision.
One interesting finding from the survey is how concerns break down along gender lines among brokerage leaders. Women in the industry tend to focus more on compliance with real estate regulations and data privacy, while men are more likely to worry about the costs of implementing AI and whether they'll actually see a return on that investment. These differences suggest that leaders are thinking about AI risk through different lenses depending on their background and perspective.
Brokerage size also shaped what leaders worried about most. Smaller firms, those with twenty agents or fewer, were particularly anxious about staying compliant with regulations, which makes sense given they have fewer resources dedicated to technology and governance. Larger brokerages with over a hundred agents, meanwhile, were more concerned with the practical headaches of integrating AI across multiple systems and managing data across different sources. Their challenges are more about execution at scale than regulatory burden.
What I am seeing locally in the Bay Area and East Bay is that brokers are at different stages of wrestling with these same questions. The firms that are moving faster toward automation are the ones asking the harder questions upfront about security and compliance, and that's smart thinking. For those of us working with agents and teams, it's becoming clear that you can't just pick an AI vendor based on features alone anymore. You need to understand what's happening behind the scenes with your data and how a system actually fits into your existing operations.
