Is Artificial Intelligence About to Replace Estate Agents?
It’s often said that artificial intelligence or AI is the future and will change how we do everything. So can AI help you find a home to buy or assist you in selling one? Let’s find out.
What is AI?
AI is technology that enables computers to simulate human intelligence.
It can gather information, learn from it and even make decisions.
You may already use AI in your daily life.
For example, Alexa can tell you what’s in the news today. And if you ask ChatGPT for, say, a Victoria sponge recipe it will find you one instantly.
Can AI take the hard work out of finding a home?
To find out, we ran a simple experiment.
We told a few popular AI tools what we were looking for and asked them to find us a house to buy in our area.
Here’s what happened.
Alexa could find us just about anything we could ever want to buy. But it couldn’t find us any houses or flats.
Siri was a fail, too. It just gave us directions to the place we were looking to buy in.
ChatGPT did much better. It came up with a list of properties for sale and links to their listings on sites like Rightmove.
But there was a snag. While some of these properties fit our requirements, others were nowhere near. It struggled to understand what we really wanted.
Grok, the newish AI tool from X, gave us a lot of information about the area. But it couldn’t show us any listings. It just suggested we use sites like Rightmove.
Gemini didn’t even give us any area information. Again, it just referred us to property platforms and suggested we try estate agents.
In short, AI didn’t make our property search any easier than a human search would. In some ways, it made it harder.
So can AI help you sell your home?
Based on our experiment, if AI can’t help buyers find a home to buy, then it’s hard to see how it can help sell one either.
Maybe AI will be able to do this in the long term, but it’s not there yet.
Until that happens, working with a good old human estate agent is still the best way to buy or sell a property.
An experienced local agent will have a much more in-depth and intuitive understanding of the area and what buyers and sellers are looking for.
If you’re thinking of selling, why not give us a call and speak to a real person today?
We hope you’ve found this article interesting. If you know somebody who’s thinking of buying or selling a home, please help them out by sharing it.