With my wife’s support, I decided to replace the agent entirely with A.I. I wish I could tell you that I vibecoded something sophisticated, but the truth is that I just started chatting with Gemini, the Google chatbot, because I already had an account set up through work. For anyone else, it costs $7.99 a month.

Once I started using A.I., I couldn’t stop. To get our house ready for sale, I asked hundreds of questions over three weeks. When I needed to hire a photographer, the chatbot offered a list of local businesses, then gave advice on staging. It told me how to organize the resulting photo gallery for maximum impact. (Exterior > kitchen > floor plan.) As I obsessively fine-tuned the listing language, it indulged my every request.

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It was now almost impossible for me to make a decision without getting A.I.’s opinion. By Friday evening, I was starting to worry that the interest in our house was a little too strong. We had nearly 20 viewings scheduled for the weekend. I confessed to the chatbot my anxiety that we had underpriced the home. It offered some needed reassurance, saying that by pricing low, I had stumbled into an “accidental strategy” that could result in multiple offers. “When you get 1,100 views and 91 saves, you haven’t just listed a house; you’ve started a localized ‘gold rush,’” it wrote.

My wife complained that I trusted a chatbot’s advice more than her own. She was right. That night, I tried to write a simple email thanking an agent, but I stumbled over words that suddenly felt awkward and jumbled, failing to strike the perfect balance of appreciation and confidence to which I had grown accustomed. I replaced what I wrote with the chatbot’s version.

[...]

In the end, using A.I. netted me more than $90,000. That includes the premium over the asking price, plus the roughly $36,000 in fees I didn’t pay.