Look, I’m as fed up as the next guy with AI chatbots stuffed into every app. I don’t want to brainstorm coverage options with an LLM every time I renew my car insurance. I’d much rather message a human than a robot to pester FedEx about my missing package. But I have found one scenario where AI is actually pretty great: real estate.
I need to confess something: I’m a Redfin looky-loo. A Zillow zealot. Not because I am actually shopping for a new home. With these interest rates? God, no. But I am perpetually window-shopping for a new home — partly out of nosiness, and partly because I like imagining what life might look like in a different arrangement of bedrooms and bathrooms.
What if I uprooted my family and moved us to Iowa, into the late-1800s farmhouse where my dad grew up? What if we moved to an island in the Puget Sound with iffy ferry service but gorgeous water views? I can spend hours on a real estate listing website imagining all the ways we could downsize, upsize, and sideways-size — with a little neighborly snooping in the mix. You better believe I’m taking a gander inside the house down the street the moment I see a for-sale sign pop up in the yard.
It was on one such occasion recently when I opened the Redfin website and saw an unfamiliar prompt when I tapped on the search bar: the option to search listings with AI. I hadn’t seen it before because it turns out to be a relatively new addition, one that hasn’t even made it to the mobile app yet — you’ll find it only using a desktop or mobile browser. It’s pretty straightforward: tell the robot what you’re looking for using natural language, and it will come up with some listings to match your criteria.
I cooked up some initial prompts and got off to a promising — if a bit depressing — start. How many single family homes in the Seattle area could I find with two bedrooms, one and a half bathrooms, close to public transit in a walkable neighborhood? Many! How many were $500,000 or less? Two, both sold as-is! I decided to take a detour from reality and branch out.
The Redfin AI search has some expected guardrails: it will politely refuse if you ask it to find houses likely to be haunted, or a home in the Los Angeles area that looks like Pee-Wee’s Playhouse. It either can’t or won’t search the entire country in one query — I guess my quest to find a home with a Polynesian-themed indoor pool and bar continues.
But it does a pretty good job when you keep your searches confined to a single city. And there’s a real benefit to having a large language model involved. Searching for a “tiki bar” will also yield results that describe a tropical theme, even though the exact search terms don’t appear in the listing. If you’re seeing a trend here, it might be because the sun goes down at approximately 3:12PM these days. I make no apologies.
AI search is also how I discovered that my dream home is real and it’s in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, for a mere $3 million — the price of just three charming craftsman homes in Seattle! The interior has been a little Mar-A-Lago-ified, but that curved brick exterior? The sunken living room? That’s the stuff.
Closer to reality, the AI search tool came up with just the kind of thing I was looking for when I asked for modern-style houses with natural wood siding in the Cincinnati area, plus or minus a coat of vibrant blue paint. And a tastefully updated mid-century ranch house that backs up to a wooded ravine for less than $500,000? Seattle — as much as I love it — could never.
With natural language search, you don’t need to spend hours tinkering with filters and keywords
For all the questionable-at-best ways AI is being bolted onto things these days, AI search on a real estate website strikes me as actually useful. I realized that over my many years of searches — both when I was actively looking to buy a home and as a leisure activity — I’ve gotten really good at navigating the likes of Zillow and Redfin. This, I assure you, is a skill that comes with extremely limited benefits, and I probably could have spent that time doing something more useful, like reading a goddamn book, but here I am. With natural language search, you don’t need to spend hours tinkering with filters and keywords like I have; the AI just does all that administrative stuff for you.
This doesn’t seem to be a universal experience for AI-assisted search, though. Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel does a lot of window-shopping on Cars.com and reports that its AI search is hot garbage. Redfin’s search doesn’t always nail it either — we have different ideas about the definition of “fully updated,” for example. But on the whole, it makes it a lot easier to sort through a sea of listings.
And crucially, the AI isn’t promising to go on and buy the house for you, do the paperwork, and have the keys Doordashed to you, though I’m sure the top minds at Redfin are working on that. There are human agents who do all of that, and when we’re talking about purchases in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, I don’t see that changing anytime soon.
But the lower stakes task that is sifting through listings? AI can help with that. And if you’re a real estate rubbernecker like me, it’s a serious enabler — for better or worse.