I’m obsessed with Redfin’s AI research

Look, I’m as fed up as the next guy with AI chatbots stuffed into every app. I don’t want to think about coverage options with LLM every time I renew my car insurance. I would rather send a message to a human than to send a message to a robot to bother FedEx about my missing package. But I am He owns I’ve found one scenario where AI is actually great: real estate.

I want to admit something: I’m a Redfin native. Zillow fanatic. Not because I am In reality Shopping for a new home. With these interest rates? God no. But I’m always shopping for a new home — partly out of curiosity, and partly because I like to imagine what life might look like with a different arrangement of bedrooms and bathrooms.

What if I uprooted my family and moved us to Iowa, to the late 1800s farmhouse where my father grew up? What if we moved to an island in Puget Sound with sketchy ferry service but great water views? I could spend hours on a real estate listings website imagining all the ways we could downsize, upsize, and resize—with a little snooping from the neighbors in the mix. You better believe I’m wandering into the house down the street the minute I see a for sale sign in the yard.

It was on one such occasion recently when I opened Redfin’s website and saw an unfamiliar prompt when I clicked on the search bar: the option to search listings using artificial intelligence. I had never watched it before because it turned out to be that A relatively new additionan app that hasn’t made it to the mobile app yet – you’ll only find it using a desktop or mobile browser. It’s very simple: tell the bot what you’re looking for using natural language, and it will come up with some listings that match your criteria.

I cooked up some initial claims and got off to a promising — if somewhat disappointing — start. How many single family homes in the Seattle area can I find that have 2 bedrooms, 1.5 bathrooms, close to public transportation in a walkable neighborhood? a lot! How much was $500,000 or less? Two, both are sold as is! I decided to turn away from reality and get away from it.

Redfin AI’s search has some expected guardrails: It will politely decline if you ask it to find houses that are potentially haunted, or a house in the Los Angeles area that looks like Pee-Wee’s Playhouse. He either can’t or won’t search the entire country in one query – I guess my quest to find a house with an indoor pool and a Polynesian-themed bar continues.

But it does a pretty good job when you keep your searches limited to one city. There is a real benefit to having a large language model. Searching for “tiki bar” will also return results describing a tropical theme, although the exact search terms will not appear in the list. If you’re seeing a trend here, it might be because the sun sets around 3:12pm these days. I don’t apologize.

AI research is also how I discovered this My dream home is real and it’s in Bloomfield Hills, Michiganfor only $3 million – price alone three Charming Craftsman Homes in Seattle! The interior looked a little like Mar-A-Lago, but that curved brick exterior? Sunken living room? These are the things.

Closer to reality, the AI ​​search tool came Just the kind of thing I was looking for When I asked about modern-style homes with natural wood siding in the Cincinnati area, plus or minus a coat of vibrant blue paint. And a Tastefully updated mid-century farmhouse Who supports a wooded valley for less than $500,000? Seattle — as much as I love it — never could.

Despite all the questionable-at-best ways in which AI is being installed on things these days, searching with AI on a real estate website actually seems useful to me. I realized that over many years of searching — both when I was actively looking to buy a home and as a recreational activity — I had gotten really good at navigating the likes of Zillow and Redfin. I assure you, this is a skill with very limited benefits, and I could probably spend that time doing something more useful, like reading a damn book, but here I am. With natural language search, you don’t need to spend hours tweaking filters and keywords like I did; AI does all that administrative stuff for you.

However, this does not appear to be a universal experience for AI-assisted search. edge Editor-in-Chief Nilay Patel does a lot of shopping at Cars.com and points out that its AI research is hot garbage. Redfin’s search doesn’t always work either – we have different ideas about the definition of “fully up-to-date”, for example. But on the whole, it makes it much easier to sort through a sea of ​​lists.

Most importantly, the AI ​​doesn’t promise to still buy the house for you, do the paperwork, and hand you the keys, although I’m sure the best minds at Redfin are working on that. There are human agents doing all of this, and when we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars in purchases, I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

But the less dangerous task of sifting through the lists? Artificial intelligence can help with this. And if you’re a real estate buff like me, that’s a serious enabler — for better or worse.