REAL AI:  AI can make your holiday card, Danger of free AI, AI stats and facts, headlines, and quote of the week

By Kevin Hawkins with Korey Hawkins | Vol. 3 Issue 48

New Best-Selling AI Book for Agents! “The REAL AI Guide for Real Estate Agents” on Amazon: $19.95 paperback or $9.95 Kindle.

Subscribe to our free newsletter here: realai.blog

AI can make your holiday card

Looking for just the right photo for a holiday card? Do we have a hack for you! And if you already have your card done, save this for next year.

We really didn’t want to dress up for a holiday card, which always is a struggle to get that perfect shot, right? We instead started looking through Google Photos and our iPhones where we all looked great.

We found a great family shot, but it was missing the holiday spirit: a selfie snapshot taken on the windswept Oregon Coast in June.

It screamed “beach,” not “season’s greetings.”

Nano Banana to the rescue

Enter Gemini Pro and its hilariously named but wildly useful Nano Banana photo-editing tech.

Google recently has been on an AI improvement tear, and Gemini Pro is a tool real estate agents should have in their AI toolkit, if today, just for its image editing skills alone.

What makes Gemini’s Nano Banana special is its “persistent memory.” It’s a fancy way of saying Gemini knows how to make precise changes to an image without messing up everything else. Remove a coffee mug on a desk? It won’t accidentally erase the stack of papers next to it or change the person’s face like ChatGPT.

Using Gemini Pro for editing a photo is your image easy button. It keeps the original image intact and that’s what sets it apart from every other chatbot editor out there today.

One step magic

Here is the family beach photo I uploaded into Gemini Pro. I then gave Gemini 3.5 this exact prompt:

“Put Santa hats on all of us and a tiny hat on the dog.”

This was the result:

That’s it. Less than 30 seconds later, holiday magic. Zoom in and look at how the hats fit our heads: they look so real. Our little Shih Tzu in a little Santa cap steals the show. I uploaded the new image into Canva, removed the Gemini watermark, added a simple message at the top, and just like that, we had our holiday card!  Fast. Personalized. Done.

How agents can use this

Once you try this hack, you’ll see how simple it is to master. You can use it to create your own memorable card – this year or next. You can offer to do it for clients who aren’t tech-savvy. Or you can include these step-by-step instructions in your holiday message or newsletter. It’s fast, free, and guaranteed to win client appreciation.

What you need

Gemini Pro comes with the Google One AI Premium plan (~$20/month). You can use it to do this for free, but you will be limited to two images created or edited per day. Consider that a demo, not a strategy.

Hot tip: Only ask Gemini Pro to do one thing at a time. Add a hat? One prompt. Change the background? Another. Combine too many edits and it will make mistakes or do nothing at all. (-Kevin)

The Danger of Free AI

At NAR NXT, one of the speakers started her session by saying she was only going to demonstrate “free AI tools” because she knows agents are thrifty.

I almost shouted at the top of my lungs, “Noooooooooooooooo!”

If you’re teaching AI, know your tools and know your audience. This speaker did neither.

Jus one example: She told agents to use the free version of HeyGen, a great AI video platform, to create social posts. But here’s what she missed in a big way:

According to HeyGen’s terms, their free versions are prohibited for commercial use. An agent is in violation of copyright usage laws if they post it anywhere publicly. Copyright violations are subject to hundreds to thousands of dollars in penalties.

You can’t license the free videos from HeyGen, and they also watermark every free video.

Use a free version of an AI product to test, yes! But don’t use a free AI product for your business to avoid putting you and your business at risk. (-Kevin)

AI Facts & Stats

1. 78% of executive leaders surveyed said they’re struggling to integrate AI with their existing systems.

2. 43% of enterprise leaders surveyed stated their top concerns about AI are data breaches and security risks.

3. 41% of senior executives surveyed said delayed AI adoption is making them fall behind their enterprise competitors.

4. 99% of leaders at enterprise-level businesses surveyed claim their organizations have formal AI strategies in place.

5. 87% of enterprises surveyed reported that they have secured leadership buy-in for AI adoption.

Source: Zapier (-Korey)

AI Headlines

Tech Trends: New Book Details How Real Estate Agents Can Embrace AI | 11/26/25 WRE News
Read Kevin’s interview with Weekly Real Estate News about AI and real estate and his new book.

What real estate professionals need to know about agentic AI | 11/26/25 HousingWire
While Agentic AI can shoulder some of the workload for real estate agents, maintaining the human touch is important.

The MLS Can Become Exceptional by Adding Process Intelligence to Data Intelligence Using AI | 11/26/25 WAV Group
AI is enabling the MLS to move beyond just a data source.

Q&A: The role of AI in the future of real estate | 11/26/25 Digital Journal
Kevin Greene of Cotality discusses how AI is accelerating innovation and redefining trust and transparency in real estate.

ChatGPT and Gemini can crack jokes, but they don’t quite get your puns | 11/28/25 Digital Trends
AI assistants haven’t reached comedian status – yet!

Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.5 is here: Cheaper AI, infinite chats, and coding skills that beat humans | 11/24/2025 Venture Beat
New Claude version crushes code tests and turns up the heat on OpenAI and Google. (-Korey)

AI Quote of the Week

Free newsletter here: Real AI newsletter here – and please share it with friends!

Content suggestions welcomed: email korey@wavgroup.com