Technology Journalist Uses AI to Market $500,000-Plus Home, Surprising Real Estate Agent
Updated
Updated · The New York Times · May 28
Technology Journalist Uses AI to Market $500,000-Plus Home, Surprising Real Estate Agent
4 articles · Updated · The New York Times · May 28
A real estate agent called about a potential offer on the journalist’s house and said the private listing looked so professional she assumed a Realtor had handled it.
The seller had instead relied almost entirely on a couple of chatbots to write the listing, organize materials and draft emails in an experiment on whether AI could replace a human agent.
The test put the family’s largest financial asset at stake and aimed to see how AI would perform in the more intricate Hudson Valley housing market.
The episode adds real estate to the journalist’s broader reporting on AI’s spread across fields including medicine, business and warfare.
As AI makes selling a home easy, are traditional 6% real estate agent commissions now obsolete?
If an AI makes a costly error in a home sale, who is legally liable: the homeowner or the AI developer?
Should states ban AI-driven private home sales to protect the market, or embrace the technological shift?