AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTYou have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load.Over five frantic days, I gambled my family’s life savings on a hunch that A.I. could outperform a real estate agent.Listen · 18:03 min
Al Torreggiani
By Stuart A. ThompsonStuart Thompson is a technology journalist who just moved his family out of New York’s Hudson Valley.May 28, 2026, 5:00 a.m. ETI was sitting in my car when I got a phone call that was potentially worth more than half a million dollars. It was a real estate agent whose client was considering making an offer on my house. She wanted to clarify a few details, including: Had I really handled the whole listing privately? She couldn’t quite believe that I was an amateur.“So — you’re not a Realtor?” she asked.“No,” I said. “It’s the first house I’ve ever sold.”“I’ve been in this job for, well, more than a day, and I was sure you were a Realtor,” she said. “Everything — the language you used, the organization, the emails.”But none of that was me. It was all A.I.A few days earlier, I had pressed go on an experiment involving my family’s single largest financial asset. Could I sell our home without a human real estate agent, relying almost entirely on a couple of chatbots?As a technology journalist, I had watched artificial intelligence transform medicine, business and even warfare. But I didn’t know how it would function in the far more intricate world of Hudson Valley real estate.“Can we really do that?” my wife asked. “We don’t know anything.”“Just trust me” was the best I could come up with. “A.I. can handle it.”Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENT
