A Florida man may be one of the first to sell a home through Artificial Intelligence — instead of a realtor.
But how did the inspiration strike?
Robert Levine of Cooper City told "Florida Matters Live & Local," it all began with a road trip to North Carolina.
He was in his car with his wife and kids, and they had almost 16 hours to reach their destination. So, they pulled up ChatGPT and started having a conversation about how to sell.
The first question they asked: "ChatGPT, can you help us do this? How do we begin?"
He said the large language model for AI is very conversational, so ChatGPT walked them through the entire process. Levine said it asked for more details about their specific property, was clear which markets the model would work in and which markets may struggle. He said what he did is a very basic use case of ChatGPT — so although he does subscribe to the premium version, it's not needed.
"It asked us for more details about our specific property, and it just turned into a dialogue," he said. "I was surprised with the entire process."
Levine said they sold a home about 20 years ago using a traditional real estate agent, but were ready to try something new.
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"We certainly didn't set out to disrupt real estate," Levine told host Matthew Peddie. "We just wanted to solve a problem, and we use technology and AI all the time professionally. I help guide hotels and casinos how to better use it."
Before they pulled the trigger, they did invite a few top real estate professionals in their market to meet with them and share their perspectives about what they thought the house would be valued at and how they would market it.
But ultimately, they decided to lean on AI.
"After we met with them, we felt we had more confidence doing it ourselves and leveraging ChatGPT to help guide the process," Levine said.
He said ChatGPT was critical in marketing their home — not just from how they talk about the property, but also in how it's distributed. He said the tool helped them understand that real estate agents use Multiple Listing Service (MLS) to view inventory.
"So it did help us, not only understand that's critical, but it helped us understand how we could physically do it, which different providers could list us on the MLS and which ones we could trust," Levine said. "It aggregated all the social and Google reviews so that we could really cut through and understand which partner we should select to list us on that channel."
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Levine said he does think real estate agents add "tremendous value," but he had the bandwidth to prioritize the sale. He said they've heard various responses about the sale — including some agents thinking they left $200,000 or $300,000 on the table. But he questions if that's real.
"Our home — despite not having a premium view in the neighborhood or being the largest lot, we're still one of the highest sales price, price per square foot," Levine said. "So ultimately, when we sold the house, we did sell it for almost $100,000 more than what one of the premier agents thought the house would be worth."
Overall, Levine believes it's essential to "trust but verify." He encourages people to cite their resources, dig in and go through — validating and inspecting what you expect. He added that in some markets, AI is not allowed to provide legal advice. So in Florida, they chose to use a lawyer to validate and inspect what they expected with their contracts.
And although he chose to go through AI to help him sell and won't hesitate to leverage it again, he doesn't believe this means real estate agents' jobs are at risk. As an example, they had 15 showings within 72 hours of listing the property — they were all represented by agents.
"I'm confident that this doesn't replace real estate agents, but it does allow folks like myself that are more focused on getting a higher sales price and less cost associated with the sale," Levine said. "It is a tool that can help you accelerate the process."
You can listen to the full interview in the media player above. This story was compiled from an interview by Matthew Peddie for "Florida Matters Live & Local." You can listen to the full episode here.
