Agents that remain effective amid the rise of AI are those that help clients understand how to make decisions before the answers matter, writes broker Deb Siefkin.
Buyers and sellers alike now have access to more information than ever before. What they lack is clarity as to what that actually means.
There are growing concerns in the real estate industry that AI tools like ChatGPT are disrupting transactions. Agents are seeing buyers ask questions about the asking price after consulting with AI, and sellers second-guessing pricing strategies based on what they read in the chatbot responses.
In some cases, trades that were thought to be solid may suddenly resume. It’s easy to see this as a technology issue because it’s new and seems outside of the agent’s control, but what’s happening here isn’t new at all. What is changing is the speed and visibility of what has always existed in the real estate industry.
The problem isn’t AI. This is how decisions are made
Buyers and sellers have always brought questions into transactions. What has changed is how quickly that suspicion is reinforced. Questions that once sat quietly in the back of someone’s mind can now be answered immediately, and often with such confidence that they feel trustworthy.
So when a buyer asks ChatGPT what to offer, or a seller asks how to price a home, this tool creates no uncertainty. That’s coming to the surface. And if the trade starts to wobble after that moment, it’s almost never because the AI came up with a better answer. That’s because the initial decision wasn’t completely settled in the first place.
This is where many agents start to feel the pressure, even if they haven’t fully named it yet. Your instinct is to protect your work by showing more comps, restating your pricing strategy, or pushing back on what your client finds online.
But the moment that happens, the conversation shifts to comparing answers, and by the time it becomes agent versus algorithm, the agent has already lost ground.
For clients, AI feels like a neutral entity. There seems to be nothing to be gained, and even if it’s imperfect or wrong, it can still sound confident. That confidence without context is often enough to cause hesitation.
Future direction
The way forward is not to compete on information. Because that advantage is already shrinking. Consumers have access to their own data and increasingly rely on tools to interpret it for them. What they don’t have yet is context.
They don’t understand the big picture of a particular property, negotiation, or market moment. They don’t understand how one decision impacts the next, or how the trade-offs actually play out once the contract begins. So the role of agents is quietly but fundamentally changing.
The agents that can remain effective in this environment are not the ones that provide better answers. They help clients understand how to make decisions before the answers matter.
When buyers and sellers understand how decisions are structured, they are much less likely to be thrown off course by conflicting opinions because there is clarity, not because they are persuaded. They know what factors are important, how to weigh them, and what trade-offs to choose. Such clarity cannot be gained from more data. It comes from interpretation.
When that interpretation happens early in the process, something important changes. The decision becomes entrenched. And if you can make a decision based on understanding, it’s much harder to be destabilized by a second opinion, whether it’s from a friend, a headline, or a chatbot. There is no need to defend this conversation because it was never built on a weak foundation.
Agents need to clarify things for clients
AI is not disrupting real estate because it is smarter than agents. Uncertainty is accelerating where clarity was not fully established. In doing so, the line between agents who rely on information and those who guide through interpretation becomes clearer.
The problem isn’t that buyers and sellers are asking better questions. That means you often get answers without context.
And in a market where the answers are everywhere, what matters most is not the agent who has the answers. They ensure that clients don’t have to search twice.
Deb Siefkin is a practicing broker and founder of RightSize Realty Associates. Connect with Deb on LinkedIn and Instagram.
