At the end of January, I wrote this post about what I've been learning about the latest generation of AI and Openclaw and said:

At that point, it is completely unclear to me why a seller would need to call a real estate agent to ask about the market, ask about selling the home, ask about whatever. The seller would simply ask his Moltbot to go find out, and make recommendations.

Well, yesterday, I ran across story on Twitter (X now? We're all calling it X?) that is making the rounds: a Florida man used ChatGPT to sell his home without involving a real estate agent at all.

If you go to the original NCB 6 news item, you can get more information:

As per the NBC 6 story, Mr. Levine had ChatGPT help him with every single stage of the home sale process (save one, which is the topic of this post) then listed and sold his home with 5 offers within 72 hours. He had ChatGPT draft the sales contract, but hired an attorney to review it before getting it signed.

Now, I can already see the responses are the typical ones one could expect: about how real estate agents are terrible, or how stupid this is. It's going to focus on whether buyers and sellers should save money by using AI, or whether that's penny wise and pound foolish and so on and so forth.

A typical response is something like this:

I don't see any agent promising to "beat the AI, or your money back" so maybe that's true and maybe it's not.

But frankly, I am profoundly uninterested in whether AI-assisted-FSBO sales are a good idea or bad idea and silly attacks by threatened agents won't change what's coming. FSBO sales are nothing new; having tools to make FSBO easier is nothing new. Some will, and most won't. For now.

So what's worth discussing here? The role of the MLS is worth discussing.

NBC 6 reported that ChatGPT helped Mr. Levine create the marketing materials, and the online listing then told him how to get his home listed on the MLS.

Turns out, the answer was Beycome.com, one of the many MLS-only flat-fee brokerages out there. This is not a new business model. Assist-2-Sell has been doing it since 1987, as far as I know. Every single market has at least one and probably more companies offering MLS access for a fee.

What is new is the addition of truly powerful and knowledgeable AI.

This represents a major challenge to the MLS and to portals. It might be, dare I say it, an existential threat.

Let's think through this together, shall we?