Summary
Artificial intelligence is already changing the way real estate professionals work. It can write listing descriptions, analyze property data, answer consumer questions, and perform administrative tasks that once required hours of human effort. But a new generation of companies is beginning to ask a more consequential question: How much of the real estate transaction still requires a traditional real estate agent?
Artificial intelligence is already changing the way real estate professionals work. It can write listing descriptions, analyze property data, answer consumer questions, and perform administrative tasks that once required hours of human effort. We’ve covered many of these stories here on Weekly Real Estate News.
But a new generation of companies is beginning to ask a more consequential question: How much of the real estate transaction still requires a traditional real estate agent?
Bradd Fisher has an answer.
Fisher, a longtime technology entrepreneur who has bought and sold about seven homes over the years, used an early version of the Ridley platform to sell his California home. He paid the company $1,000 to get started, added access to an attorney, and handled some of the marketing work himself. About 30 days after accepting an offer, the transaction closed.
Fisher estimates that he saved somewhere between $105,000 and $156,000 compared with what he might have paid under a traditional commission structure.
“It was a slam dunk for me,” Fisher said.
His experience offers an early look at what could become one of the more disruptive applications of AI in residential real estate. Instead of simply giving agents better technology, Ridley is using AI to help consumers manage much of the transaction themselves, bringing licensed professionals into the process when their expertise is required.
That distinction is important. Ridley CEO Mike Chambers isn’t necessarily building a world without real estate agents. He is questioning whether consumers should have to buy all of an agent’s traditional services as a single package.
A $100,000 Problem
The idea grew out of Chambers’ own experience selling a home in Boulder, Colorado.
“I was facing more than $100,000 in commissions and just didn’t feel like the value I was going to receive was in line with the price I was being asked to pay,” Chambers told Weekly Real Estate News.
He decided to sell the home himself and document the experience online. According to Chambers, the story went viral, generating responses from thousands of consumers who shared his frustration over the cost and transparency of traditional real estate transactions.
Going through the process also changed his perception of the work involved.
“The transaction isn’t nearly as complicated as we’ve been led to believe,” Chambers said. “AI could make navigating it dramatically easier.”
That became the premise behind Ridley: create a centralized platform capable of helping consumers understand information, organize the transaction, and complete much of the administrative work while providing access to licensed professionals for services that require them.
Ridley owns a licensed real estate brokerage in Colorado and works with brokerage partners in other states where it operates. Chambers said the company is careful not to position artificial intelligence as a substitute for licensed legal, brokerage, or other professional advice.
“We’re very thoughtful about where AI should automate work and where licensed professionals need to be involved,” he said.
Putting AI to the Test
Fisher was particularly well suited to test that proposition. He has worked in technology for more than two decades, including smart-home and commercial technology systems, and was already familiar with AI platforms.
He also wasn’t a novice homeowner. After several previous transactions, he had become increasingly frustrated by what he perceived as a disconnect between the amount of work some agents performed and the commission they received.
On several previous home searches, Fisher said he had located properties himself online and then contacted his agent to arrange a showing. By the time he was preparing to sell his California home, he was already researching flat-fee and lower-commission alternatives.
Then he encountered Chambers on TikTok.
Fisher followed Ridley’s development, spoke with Chambers about some of his frustrations with traditional real estate, and eventually volunteered to become an early user. The company was so new that some of the services available through Ridley today had not yet been built.
Fisher created his own Wix website. He took photographs and drone footage. He created materials for his open houses and hosted the events himself. He said Ridley has since added services that can handle many of those tasks for sellers who don’t want to do them.
The transaction nevertheless gave Fisher an opportunity to test whether AI could handle some surprisingly consequential decisions.
Pricing was one of them.
Before listing the property, Fisher hired two independent appraisers. One valued the home at approximately $2 million. Another, who Fisher said spent several hours examining and scanning the property, came back at roughly $2.05 million.
Fisher thought the house was worth more.
He then entered his property information into Ridley’s system. Within minutes, he said, the platform returned a valuation significantly above the two appraisals.
The property eventually sold for about $2.6 million.
The experience doesn’t establish that an AI valuation will outperform a professional appraisal. But for Fisher, it reinforced his belief that technology could provide useful guidance on decisions traditionally associated with real estate professionals.
The market supplied another test.
Fisher listed the property and scheduled open houses for Thursday through Sunday. He hosted them himself, reasoning that nobody knew the property better than he did. He said the home generated seven or eight offers, including some at higher prices that came with closing timelines he wasn’t willing to accept.
The eventual buyers had an agent. Fisher negotiated the economics of that representation as part of the deal and said he ultimately paid a 1% buyer-agent fee. The transaction closed within approximately 30 days.
There was no moment, Fisher said, when a traditional listing agent had to step in and rescue the deal.
But Is Fisher the Typical Seller?
That may also be the most important limitation of Fisher’s experience.
He is technologically sophisticated, comfortable with AI, and experienced in buying and selling real estate. He was willing to produce marketing materials, conduct his own open houses, evaluate offers, and participate actively in negotiations. He also approached the transaction already convinced that there should be a better alternative to the traditional commission model.
Fisher recognizes that other consumers may find the prospect much more intimidating.
A typical seller, he said, may wonder whether they can take adequate photographs, conduct an open house, or negotiate effectively. More importantly, they may worry about contracts and the consequences of making a mistake during one of the largest financial transactions of their lives.
Ridley has been building services around precisely those concerns.
Fisher said many of the things he handled himself during his transaction have subsequently been incorporated into the platform. Chambers also emphasizes that Ridley isn’t asking AI to perform every role in the transaction.
Nema Daghbandan is a partner with Fortra Law. He was one of the founders and currently serves as the CEO of Lightning Docs, a company that provides fast, attorney-grade loan documents to business-purpose lenders, credit unions, and law firms using AI. He understands how to deploy AI in a complex industry.
“AI does what computers do really well,” Daghbandan said. “Computers process significant amounts of data really well. So, think of it as the ultimate researcher. It’s better than any human at this point. You can apply that in the real estate context.”
Daghbandan says that AI applied to the huge datasets that exist in the housing industry could disrupt this business to the potential benefit of the home buyer.
“Imagine instead of looking at comps for three or four different houses, imagine being able to consume every comparable that has ever existed,” he suggests. “Those are really great uses of AI. And I think we will find more and more use cases.”
But there are some parts of the real estate business that Daghbandan doesn’t see AI impacting anytime soon.
“AI cannot be the person standing on the street corner looking around, assessing curb appeal, and having a deep fundamental appreciation,” he says. “The agent knows their market. They know it well. I think those are the sorts of things where the human value comes in.”
A Different Future for Agents
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Ridley’s model is that its success wouldn’t necessarily mean the disappearance of real estate agents.
It could mean their jobs become unbundled.
Chambers said more than 3,000 agents have applied to become Ridley Pro agents. Under the model, professionals can be paid for specific work they perform rather than depending entirely on a commission paid when a transaction closes. Chambers said participating agents receive actual assignments rather than leads, can perform some work virtually, and can continue operating their traditional real estate businesses.
That points toward a potentially different relationship between AI and real estate professionals.
Instead of replacing an agent with a machine, technology could separate the many jobs agents traditionally perform and automate some while creating an on-demand marketplace for others. Pricing analysis, transaction organization, and administrative work might increasingly be handled by software.
Consumers who need help with an open house, negotiation, contracts, or another part of the process could bring in a professional for that specific need.
There are limits, even Chambers readily acknowledges.
Ridley is currently focused primarily on sellers, although the company has a buyer product in beta. Chambers believes traditional agents can be especially valuable to first-time homebuyers, who may need considerably more education and guidance through the process.
That suggests the future of AI-powered real estate may be more nuanced than predictions about technology eliminating agents. Even so, like every industry disruption in the past, not everyone in the business today will survive the changes that are coming.
Laura Lasher is CEO of Worthy Performance Group. She has been in the housing industry for over 40 years, both as a real estate agent and a mortgage loan originator. She was previously President of Mortgage for Arbor Bank. Today, she provides coaching and mentoring services to mortgage originators and real estate agents. She no longer originates new mortgages but still holds her real estate license.
“The bots can do the data pieces and parts,” she says, “which still need to be double-checked. The relationship part, the building of it, and the trust factor still needs to come from the Realtors. Homebuyers still want to talk to a human.”
For Fisher, the economics are difficult to ignore. In the future, more homebuyers and sellers are likely to agree with him.
His experience doesn’t prove that the average homeowner is ready to manage a home sale through an AI-centered platform, at least not today. Fisher may represent exactly the kind of technologically sophisticated early adopter who would be expected to embrace such a system first.
But he did sell the house.
And if other consumers discover that AI can perform much of the routine work while allowing them to call on licensed professionals only when they actually need them, the real estate industry will certainly be disrupted.
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