According to a piece from HousingWire, mortgage industry leaders are increasingly turning to AI to create their content instead of hiring human ghostwriters and coaches. What used to be a standard practice of working with professional writers to extract and shape an executive's real thinking has quietly shifted toward using AI tools to generate posts and marketing materials. The problem is that when everyone relies on the same AI models trained on the same knowledge base, the output becomes remarkably similar across the industry, creating what experts call a sameness problem.
A researcher working on the Mortgage Bankers Association's AI program explained that all the major AI foundation models produce essentially the same results when given the same prompts. This means executives who hand their brand entirely to AI are getting averaged together with every other executive doing the same thing. An AI tool will generate fifty different versions of a post, but they'll all sound forgettable and interchangeable. The old ghostwriters earned their fees by doing something AI cannot do: they interviewed the executive to pull out their authentic thinking and perspective.
The column proposes three principles to stand out in this sea of sameness. The first is taste, which means having the discipline to reject content that sounds generic, even when it's well-written. A simple test is whether you can remember and quote back a line from what you published the day before. If you cannot, it probably was not worth publishing. The second principle is guts, which requires taking a real position that someone would actually disagree with rather than publishing safe platitudes everyone agrees with. The third is receipts, which means backing up your positions with specific dates, dollar amounts, and real decisions you have made or held the line on.
The piece points out that careful, risk-averse content is costing mortgage leaders real opportunities. The recruit evaluating your company, the realtor partner considering working with you, the person doing diligence on your brand is seeing the same averaged posts from your competitors. When everything you publish sounds like it could have come from anyone, your brand becomes invisible at the exact moment someone is deciding whether to choose you. A genuine position with specificity attached to it is what makes someone recognizable as a real person with real thinking, not just another content-generating account.
What I am seeing locally in the Bay Area and East Bay is that this applies directly to how real estate professionals market themselves and build their brands. Fremont and the broader East Bay market have plenty of talented agents and brokers, but many are publishing the same generic talking points about rates and market conditions that do not tell anyone what makes them different. The ones who are going to stand out are the ones willing to take a real position on something in their market, back it up with actual deals and decisions, and write in their own voice rather than relying entirely on whatever tool generates the fastest content. In a competitive market like ours, authenticity and specificity are becoming the real differentiators.
