![\"Screenshot](\"https:\/\/platform.theverge.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2025\/12\/Screenshot-2025-12-09-at-9.48.25%E2%80%AFAM.png?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100\")
<\/a><\/p>\nI do love a wet bar. Image: Redfin \/ The Verge<\/p>\n
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\u2019t seen it before because it turns out to be a relatively new addition<\/a>, one that hasn\u2019t even made it to the mobile app yet \u2014 you\u2019ll find it only using a desktop or mobile browser. It\u2019s pretty straightforward: tell the robot what you\u2019re looking for using natural language, and it will come up with some listings to match your criteria.<\/p>\n I cooked up some initial prompts and got off to a promising \u2014 if a bit depressing \u2014 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s Playhouse. It either can\u2019t or won\u2019t search the entire country in one query \u2014 I guess my quest to find a home with a Polynesian-themed indoor pool and bar continues.<\/p>\n Depressing! Image: Redfin \/ The Verge<\/p>\n But it does a pretty good job when you keep your searches confined to a single city. And there\u2019s a real benefit to having a large language model involved. Searching for a \u201ctiki bar\u201d will also yield results that describe a tropical theme, even though the exact search terms don\u2019t appear in the listing. If you\u2019re seeing a trend here, it might be because the sun goes down at approximately 3:12PM these days. I make no apologies.<\/p>\n AI search is also how I discovered that my dream home is real and it\u2019s in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan<\/a>, for a mere $3 million \u2014 the price of just three charming craftsman homes in Seattle! The interior has been a little Mar-A-Lago-ified, but that curved brick exterior? The sunken living room? That\u2019s the stuff.<\/p>\n Closer to reality, the AI search tool came up with just the kind of thing I was looking for<\/a> when I asked for modern-style houses with natural wood siding in the Cincinnati area, plus or minus a coat of vibrant blue paint. And a tastefully updated mid-century ranch house<\/a> that backs up to a wooded ravine for less than $500,000? Seattle \u2014 as much as I love it \u2014 could never.<\/p>\n With natural language search, you don\u2019t need to spend hours tinkering with filters and keywords<\/p>\n For all the questionable-at-best ways AI is being bolted onto things these days, AI search on a real estate website strikes me as actually useful. I realized that over my many years of searches \u2014 both when I was actively looking to buy a home and as a leisure activity \u2014 I\u2019ve gotten really good at navigating the likes of Zillow and Redfin. This, I assure you, is a skill that comes with extremely limited benefits, and I probably could have spent that time doing something more useful, like reading a goddamn book, but here I am. With natural language search, you don\u2019t need to spend hours tinkering with filters and keywords like I have; the AI just does all that administrative stuff for you.<\/p>\n This doesn\u2019t seem to be a universal experience for AI-assisted search, though. Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel does a lot of window-shopping on Cars.com and reports that its AI search is hot garbage. Redfin\u2019s search doesn\u2019t always nail it either \u2014 we have different ideas about the definition of \u201cfully updated,\u201d for example. But on the whole, it makes it a lot easier to sort through a sea of listings.<\/p>\n And crucially, the AI isn\u2019t promising to go on and buy the house for you, do the paperwork, and have the keys Doordashed to you, though I\u2019m sure the top minds at Redfin are working on that. There are human agents who do all of that, and when we\u2019re talking about purchases in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, I don\u2019t see that changing anytime soon.<\/p>\n But the lower stakes task that is sifting through listings? AI can help with that. And if you\u2019re a real estate rubbernecker like me, it\u2019s a serious enabler \u2014 for better or worse.<\/p>\n Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.Allison JohnsonClose Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.<\/p>\n FollowFollow<\/p>\n See All by Allison Johnson<\/a><\/p>\n AICloseAI<\/p>\n Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.<\/p>\n FollowFollow<\/p>\n See All AI<\/a><\/p>\n ReportCloseReport<\/p>\n Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.<\/p>\n FollowFollow<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nAllison Johnson<\/p>\n