In October, Realtor.com Chief Marketing Officer Mickey Neuberger said the future of home search would be conversational — with artificial intelligence-powered natural language search opening the door to a more intuitive and robust homebuyer experience.
“It’s about making it easier for people to find homes and meeting the new consumer expectation, which is not just in real estate, but in e-commerce, travel, and research, for conversational search,” he told Inman in the exclusive interview. “And there’ll be many, many iterations following this.”
The next iteration Neuberger spoke of is here, with the portal unveiling RealAssist AI on Tuesday.
RealAssist guides homebuyers throughout the search process, with the AI-powered feature answering questions about listings and listing features, nearby amenities and points of interest, commute times, school ratings, affordability and other general real estate concerns, like mortgage loan options.
The feature also allows homebuyers to make side-by-side comparisons of listings and neighborhoods and to visualize what a potential listing looks like during the day, at night or across different seasons, thanks to Google Gemini and Google Cloud integrations.
Damian Eales | Credit: Realtor.com
“Realtor.com is positioned to lead the AI era in real estate — and the data already points that way,” Realtor.com CEO Damian Eales said in a prepared statement. “We lead our competitors in AI brand favorability. We are the most trusted brand among real estate professionals and the No. 1 real estate news publisher in the country.”
“Our collaboration with News Corp and deep industry roots give us an authority in this space that others simply cannot replicate,” he added. “We are taking that foundation and building the best AI tools in the industry. That means more informed buyers and sellers, and agents who can have better conversations with every client. RealAssist AI is what that looks like today, and there is much more to come.”
Homebuyers can access RealAssist AI through several special banners prominently displayed on Realtor.com. The banners invite homebuyers to test a handful of suggested prompts, which opens the RealAssist AI chatbox. As homebuyers communicate with RealAssist, it learns their needs and wants and offers a rotating list of suggested questions that gently guide them through the search process.
In a Tuesday afternoon demo, Realtor.com Principal Product Manager Matt Holihan tested the feature, creating a profile of a homebuyer who valued a timely commute that allowed them to take their child to school, get coffee and get to work in less than 45 minutes. RealAssist AI zeroed in on several listings that met the buyers’ needs, leveraging Google Gemini and Cloud information to create several routes.
“You can map out your commute, you can see over time what a street looks like after dark, whether there is street lighting on the commute home, and what’s going on in the neighborhood,” he said. “And honestly, all these things just really help a user get better educated for when they do get connected with an agent, so that they have a lot more confidence and knowledge about a specific area or set of interests.”
The portal’s SVP of Consumer Product Dave Herman said RealAssist AI will operate alongside Realtor.com’s natural language search feature, but it will eventually be integrated into RealAssist AI.
“RealAssist was really born out of the evolution of what we started to see with conversational search last year,” Herman said. “The conversational search that we spoke with Mickey about back in October was within the search box. Through that, we’ve seen a tremendous shift towards longer-form questions and answers. But it’s still, you type something in, you get a set of results.”
“RealAssist is built on the premise that you will continue to have a dialogue, and we can guide you in terms of what makes the most sense for you as a user who’s using the site. What you’re really seeing with RealAssist is an evolution,” he added. “Over time, those will blend. But right now, we’re very focused on keeping the conversation alive and really helping drive answers to questions that you might have in a very conversational way.”
Herman said his team is excited to see how RealAssist will impact homebuyer engagement, as the chat tracks users’ preferences to provide personalized answers and support. However, buyers can delete their chat history to start another search with a clean slate.
RealAssist AI is the latest in a wave of AI-powered home search features from Realtor.com and its competitors, Zillow, Homes.com and Redfin. While some of those competitors have expressed the goal of eliminating filters altogether, Herman said that’s not a priority for Realtor.com, which believes there’s still enormous value in offering that kind of experience, especially given the demand for Realtor.com’s dynamic map overlays.
“Look at Google, for instance, they have Gemini, and they have Google search. Some users will use one, some will use another,” he said. “I think what we really want to do is provide flexibility and choice. We don’t want to take something away that today is still very heavily used across our audience.”
