Hello From Your AI Overlords
There’s been much made of artificial intelligence these days. And there should be. AI is streamlining our lives in incredible ways. As someone who has trouble focusing on boring tasks—who doesn’t?—it has been a godsend. In a world where there seems to be more and more to do, efficiency is the watchword.
Of course, AI isn’t just for cleaning up your email inbox, suggesting tours for your next vacation or work trip, or giving you better answers than Google can. Every industry appears to have jobs upon jobs on the chopping block. Based on the volume of articles being written about it, one might think that almost no job is safe from AI.
Zooming In
Which brings us to real estate. Which homeowner doesn’t have a war story to share about their purchase? Which prospective buyer or seller doesn’t want a shortcut to finding their next home or homebuyer? Will AI be the salvation to this messy, stressful buying and selling experience?
Here’s a thought experiment: Let’s say an Agentic AI real estate agent existed to recommend homes for you. But would you trust its suggestions? I doubt it. Believe me, I’ve tried for years to streamline the process for buyers. But despite previewing properties with videos, investing in 3D tours and the like, that won’t cut it for most of you. You’ll still choose to visit properties in person before you buy.
AI also lacks curiosity. It may ask you questions, of course, because in our specific use case it has been programmed to help find you a home. But would you call that curiosity? Does it want to get to know you, or manipulate you?
Really, how well could it know you? It will never visit a house. It will never live in your neighborhood. It will never have children. It will never eat at a great restaurant. It will never live a life like yours, or like anyone else’s.
AI also lacks desire to build community. It will never attend a church service. It will never volunteer to hand out food at Thanksgiving. It will never yell or scoff at a board meeting, either, because it believes strongly in its position. Bots may disagree with me, of course.
Sure, you might want to say it is altruistic in some capacity, though that has been shown not to be true. Indeed, AI will strategically lie to you, despite programming to avoid doing just that.
Perhaps being selfless is less critical to your homebuying success, regardless of who, or what, you employ. Real estate agents, too, deserve to be happy, and they don’t need to approach sainthood in order to make you happy. But being kind and decent is a sort of backstop in relationships, if an agent wants to maintain them. Human beings worry about what the newspaper is going to write about them. They worry about their reputation. It’s been proven that buyers and sellers value testimonials more than anything else in the agent marketing toolkit. You can’t really say that AI cares what you think about it. Or if it does, it’s only to make sure that you don’t shut it down. Let’s face it: AI doesn’t care about you.
And that is the main point. Whether you are working with an Real Estate agentic AI, or a flesh-and-bones real estate agent, going down the road of efficiency ignores the most important work in your purchase or sale: Emotional Intelligence.
Humans Aren’t Perfect Either
However, it’s not just Artificial Intelligence that can’t make the intuitive leap from that first sit-down to truly effective property suggestions. Many agents can’t either.
Do you want to have a really frustrating experience? Hire a real estate agent that doesn’t really listen to you. You’ll know it when you feel it, because you won’t feel like this person “gets” you. They are talking past you. They are trying to sell you, when you need them to hear you. You’re calling out for empathy, and you’re getting statistics. You need bullet points, and you’re getting monologues. You’re worried about your kids, and they’re showing you why this neighborhood is up and coming. The disconnect is obvious to you, your spouse, or to both of you.
Whether agents like it or not, if they aren’t doing the most important work of all—going below the transaction to truly engage with the stressed-out humans involved—things will go off the rails. You will get mad at them. You’ll be mad at yourself for having chosen them. You’ll be furious that you spent more time binge watching Netflix or planning your weekend vacation than you did hiring your real estate agent (although perhaps you can dedicate less time to the planning now than you did before Grok, Claude, Gemini, or Chat GPT existed). And worst of all, you’ll bang your head against the wall, not loving these houses as much as you want to. Or finding that it takes much longer than you ever expected to find the right place, if you ever find it.
I’m not saying that agents can’t learn emotional intelligence, though. I’m saying the opposite. I believe that good agents must be emotionally intelligent, and I believe that every agent can substantially overcome any natural tendency to be less so.
At the same time, buyers want a better experience, so they won’t part of the more than fifty percent of homeowners who have buyer’s remorse after they close. I’m acknowledging that homebuyers desperately want shortcuts. But the most effective shortcut, despite the almost complete focus by many on closing a deal, is emotional intelligence.
There’s Another Way
If you really want to be more efficient, and way more effective, I have good news for you. It’s not all that hard, and you don’t need artificial intelligence to get there. I’ll give it to you in three steps:
- Get to know your own communication style, which I call your House Language
- Ask around, do your research, and compile a list of agents in your market
- Interview those agents and see how they make you feel
It sounds simple, but of course I haven’t exactly explained how to do the first and most important step. So here’s how. Take this buyer assessment. It’s part of the free resources on my book’s website. It will take you less than 5 minutes, I promise.
What will you find out? You’ll discover that whatever your communication style is in the rest of your life, you’ll bring that into your home search, too. Are you a data gatherer? Are you more emotionally-oriented? Do you worry about everyone in your family more than yourself? Are you future-oriented and think that feelings are a distraction to your goal?
There’s no right answer, but there is your answer. That is the key. Once you get a better sense of not just what you need to learn to get comfortable with your home search, but how that information must be delivered, then you’ll be in much better shape to really get things going.
No one expects you to magically change your communication style, or how you process information when you start looking for a home. Except perhaps unskilled real estate agents. If you want a James Beard Award-winning recipe for successful house hunting, though, find an agent with emotional intelligence. And perhaps leave AI for tasks that don’t require critical human skills.
Scott Harris is a veteran real estate agent and the founder of boutique New York City real estate firm Magnetic, and the author of new book The Pursuit of Home: A Real Estate Guide to Achieving the American Dream (Matt Holt Books), available now. Pick up your own copy today!
