The best submission should not beat the best person

There is something fundamentally wrong with an awards process if the best operator in the category never makes the finals because they were too busy doing the job to spend hours building the perfect submission.

We want to change that.

For the Real Estate Today Awards 2027, we have launched an AI Submission Helper directly within the entrant portal to help people across Australia and New Zealand find the evidence they already have, organise it and build a stronger submission.

Because the truth is, most people do not have an evidence problem. They have a time problem. They have an organisation problem. And sometimes, they have a “I have no idea how to talk about myself” problem.

PARTNER

eXp Enterprise · For office ownersYour best year shouldn’t be your network’s biggest payday.For office ownersYou grew the GCI. Did your margin grow?For office ownersKeep the office. Rethink the model.Three things to consider01 Keep your identity · 02 Rethink your fees · 03 Grow on your termsFree booklet for office owners4 pages. A confidential principal conversation.Download the booklet

Your best work is probably already sitting in your inbox

Think about how much happens in a year:

Most of it is documented somewhere. In an email, a report, a spreadsheet, a presentation, a client testimonial, a monthly result, a sales dashboard, or a folder you have not opened in six months.

The achievement exists. The evidence exists. But when someone asks you to sit down and summarise an entire year of work, suddenly your mind goes blank.

That is exactly what this tool is designed to help with.

We do not want AI inventing your submission

This is not about asking ChatGPT to tell you how brilliant you are. And it is certainly not about manufacturing achievements that never happened.

The AI Submission Helper has been designed to help you find your own evidence. It gives entrants practical prompts they can use in their own ChatGPT account to search through information they have access to, identify relevant achievements and organise those results into something useful.

How it works

AI is simply helping you find them.

Awards should not favour the person with the biggest support team

This matters to us. A major network may have marketing teams, communications people and dedicated resources available to help prepare submissions. A brilliant independent operator may have none of that.

• A property manager may finish their day with 150 emails still sitting in their inbox.
• An administrator may have transformed an entire office without ever thinking of what they did as “award-worthy”.
• An operations manager may have delivered millions of dollars in value to a business and still struggle to write 500 words about themselves.

Those people deserve a genuine shot. Recognition should not belong only to the people who know how to package themselves.

The work should matter more than the polish.

Some of the industry's best people are terrible at self-promotion

And frankly, that is part of the reason we built this. The people who constantly tell everyone how good they are are not necessarily the people doing the best work. Some of the strongest operators in real estate barely talk about themselves at all.

Ask them what they achieved this year and they will say:

“I don't know. I just did my job.”

Then you start asking questions.

They simply never stopped long enough to recognise it. We want them in these awards.

We would rather help you enter than watch a great submission never get finished

Every awards program loses good entrants because people start a submission and then life gets in the way. The phone rings. A listing comes in. There is a staffing issue. A tenant needs help. A deal falls over. A vendor needs an answer.

And the submission sits unfinished.

We do not believe the answer is to make people jump through more hoops. It is to remove unnecessary ones.

So if we can give somebody a tool that helps them go back through 12 months of work, uncover the strongest evidence and make the process less overwhelming, we will.

This is what technology should actually be used for

There is a lot of noise around AI. Much of it is about replacing people, producing more content or doing things faster. We are interested in something slightly different.

Can technology help a great person get recognised for work they have already done? In this case, we believe the answer is yes.

The Real Estate Today Awards will still be judged on the entrant: their results, their leadership, their contribution, their performance, their innovation and their impact.

AI does not change that. What it can change is whether the person actually gets their story onto the page.

If you have done the work, we want to see it

If you are sitting there thinking you have nothing to submit, there is a good chance you are wrong. Go back through the year:

• Look at what changed because you were there.
• Look at what improved.
• Look at what grew.
• Look at who you helped.
• Look at what you built.
• Look at what your clients said.
• Look at the problems you solved that nobody else saw.

The evidence may already be sitting in front of you. Our job is to help you find it.

Because the Real Estate Today Awards should not be won by the person who is best at writing an award submission. They should recognise the person who did the best work.

And if we can make it easier for that person to put their hand up, we will.