is a senior reviewer with over a decade of experience writing about consumer tech. She has a special interest in mobile photography and telecom. Previously, she worked at DPReview.
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.
I do love a wet bar. Image: Redfin / The Verge
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.
Depressing! Image: Redfin / The Verge
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.
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