AI is Your Realtor

In an article from The New York Times titled “I Tried to Sell My House With a Chatbot”, technology journalist Stuart A. Thompson details his experiment bypassing human real estate agents to sell his upstate New York home using Google's Gemini chatbot. Disillusioned by local agents who predicted he would lose money on the property and put off by the prospect of paying roughly $30,000 in commissions, Thompson relied on AI to write listing descriptions, organize photography, decode real estate jargon, handle high-stakes negotiations, and draft communications to buyers' agents. Despite a few hiccups—such as the chatbot initially suggesting an illegal 0% commission structure that a flat-fee listing service caught—the AI successfully helped cultivate a localized "gold rush" of interest. Thompson ultimately accepted an offer of just over $600,000, pocketing an extra $90,000 when factoring in the final bid premium and the $36,000 saved on agent fees, concluding that AI could soon shift real estate agents from essential professionals into "nice-to-have" conveniences similar to travel agents.