I Tried Using AI to Sell a House

AI isn't going to replace a good agent. But agents who use AI effectively are going to replace those who don't.

A buddy of mine who sells real estate here in the Pacific Northwest called me a few months ago, completely overwhelmed. "James," he said, "I'm hearing about AI everywhere. Am I going to be replaced by a chatbot that tells jokes and offers virtual cookies?"

I get it. The hype is off the charts. You see articles about the AI boom driving up home prices in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, and you wonder if you're falling behind. I'll be honest, my first few attempts to use AI for real estate tasks back in 2023 were a disaster. I asked it to "write a good listing for a 3-bed house" and got something so generic my Australian Shepherd could have written a better description.

But since then, I've spent a ton of time with clients, from small brokerages in Austin to independent agents here in Seattle, figuring out what actually works.

AI isn't going to replace a good agent. But agents who use AI effectively are going to replace those who don't. It's a tool to make you faster, smarter, and more efficient. Here are the prompts and stories from the trenches.

1. From Bland Listings to Bidding Wars

This is the most common use, but 90% of agents are doing it wrong. They feed the AI a list of facts and get a boring paragraph back.

Let me give you a real example. I was working with a client in Texas selling a family home near a new tech campus. Their first attempt was a classic "garbage in, garbage out" situation.