Zillow's AI wants to help you find the dream home you didn't know you wanted

Zillow is boosting its AI search tool to end the tedious filtering of locations and other elements. Now you can just ask for a place within a travel distance of a location and it will handle the rest for you.

The upgraded AI tools, available on the Zillow mobile app, rely on casual language rather than drop-downs and other menus. The idea is that you won’t have to specify affordability, proximity to schools, commute time, and related matters. You can just explain what you want as though you are talking to a human.

For instance, Zillow described how you could ask for “homes 30 minutes from Millennium Park,” “3-bedroom houses near Roosevelt High School,” or “apartments near Denver Union Station” for properties within a certain distance to your office, a good school, or a park you like. The point is to make it more intuitive to find your ideal home. It’s a linguistic upgrade to Zillow’s current AI features, which currently perform tasks such as estimating a home’s value and sharing AI-powered Showcase listings that tour within a house.

“From streamlining the home search to personalizing the user experience, Zillow applies AI in practical ways to help people get home,” said Zillow senior vice president of AI Josh Weisberg. “Search is one of the bedrocks of our platform, and we’re always improving it to make it easier for users to find homes that meet their unique needs.”

AI Realty

As AI becomes increasingly integrated into platforms like Zillow, the home search process could become less painful, even if the idea of home-buying being easy seems more like a hallucination than anything an AI has produced.

Zillow’s AI will also use the conversations and requests people submit for further training. Zillow claims that as more people use the platform, the AI will be better at pinpointing the places people might actually want to buy or rent.

There’s no telling if real estate agents will consider Zillow’s AI upgrade a win because it could shorten the home search process or a problem because it might undercut the relationship they’re trying to build with potential home buyers.

“The rise of AI in the real estate sector signals a broader shift in how people will search for homes in the future,” Weisberg said. AI could ultimately make the home search process more personalized and efficient. But don’t expect it to do anything about your down payment.