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Comment by danfunk | Hacker News Reader

There are good realtors and bad realtors. I could imagine an AI chat bot that was better than some of the mouth breathers out there. But I wouldn't use those people anyway. But there are good people in the real estate business. if you want someone that can negotiate a good deal, and answer complex questions specific to the local laws, who knows the local neighborhood, and the local realtors, who can handle last minute changes and help you buy that house when your approved loan suddenly falls through ... you want someone on your side in those cases. Not some damn chatbot. ( my wife is a realtor)

Now ... an AI powered tool to helped realtors and buyers communicate, schedule, track progress, .... that would be a great application.

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Is your wife looking to join a startup?

I think many parts of being a realtor are already automated by realtors. They are already trying to automate themselves.

They use scripts to get first clients and negotiate. They use automated email campaigns to advertise their market and local expertise. They use automatic mailers for algorithmically selected properties. They use APIs & software services to determine similar property suggestions.

So these pieces are already automated by softwares that realtors use.

Our difference is we'll wrap everything up with a bow and just fully acknowledge that we are an automated solution.

Yeah it’s pretty hard to imagine an AI negotiating important stuff.

I bought my first house last year and the amount of back-and-forth was insane. So many different ways to move money around, so many different conflicting and seemingly-but-not-actually-conflicting interests.

My agent recommended we get a sewer scope, even though the inspector didn’t think we needed one. Well guess what? The sewer line was fucked, and could back up at any moment and destroy the finished basement.

Thus ensued many many more emails and small changes to contracts that many people needed to sign. It seemed like such a random thing, but all of a sudden $10,000 was on the line that nobody knew existed. All because my agent had worked in that neighborhood before, and knew that those sewer lines were all old!!

After that experience, I’m convinced you cannot automate out the human element of real estate. There is so much nuance, and the stakes are so high.

But like you said, I think there’s room for a LOT of automation in tools that realtors use. And if you can make realtors more productive, maybe you can get fees down.

I think that’s compass’s main draw. They make a bunch of fancy internal tools for their realtors to use, so that they can do more business at a lower rate. At least I think I remember hearing that on a podcast once…?

It's funny you say that, because we are actually working on this exact tool right now. I'd love to chat if you'd like to discuss?

I share your general concern, but tbf these people aren’t doing the obvious and basic “let a chatbot do it” thing, they’re more making a platform that involves a few specialized language models for making the expert-gated stuff accessible to all. Like, they’re not writing contracts or negotiating using an LLM.

I understand your wife is in the industry, but that’s honestly a huge bias in this discussion IMO, not a help. No offense intended, of course; I well understand and totally relate to the sinking feeling of changes coming to your industry! But I think it’s just objectively provable that home realtors and car dealerships are two US industries that have been allowed to fall behind the times for a while, now.

I think there's a balance of some crowd who will love an automated solution and some who will never get there.

Some people still don't want to even shop online! Those people probably won't be convinced to use an AI based service

Imagine how easy it would be to influence the AI to redline.

Slumlords, racists, and other CHUDs are salivating over this

A) this is a buyer’s agent, not a seller’s agent.

B) I don’t think you tell the agent your race, and traditional bias protections (namely doing the whole process without meeting in person) would still be in place AFAIU.

A) Correct.

B) Yes, I think the AI agent actually can more easily ignore your race / age / gender because it is not programmed to go look up those things and people don't text their agent what they are - hard for the LLM to know these things and start to bias

> I think the AI agent actually can more easily ignore your race / age / gender

I challenge you to support that idea in any way.

> because it is not programmed to go look up those things

The concern is what it's trained on. How have you curated your data to avoid introducing biases based on race/gender/etc?

> people don't text their agent what they are - hard for the LLM to know these things and start to bias

The exact opposite. The way people communicate, especially via text, is heavily dependent on their background and is full of social signals. LLMs are trained on data sets that are often annotated with that kind of information.

How would you affirmatively prove that your LLM model wasn't making inferences about those categories that influence it's output?

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