EP 131: How AI Is Changing the Way Consumers Search for Homes

Welcome to Real Estate AI Flash, the podcast that helps you understand how AI is changing real estate and the strategies you can use to win. I'm your host, Rajiv Sajja. In today's episode, we take a closer look at how AI is transforming the home search experience and what that means for both consumers and real estate professionals. I'm joined by Matthew Walker, sales coach at Homes.com, who shares how Homes AI is making home search more conversational, personalized and intuitive by allowing buyers to search the way they naturally think and speak. If you've been wondering how AI is reshaping real estate search and why natural language could become the new standard for finding a home, this conversation offers an inside look at where one of the industry's largest portals is headed.

Let's get to this episode with Matthew.

Welcome to Real Estate AI Flash. And today I have Matthew Walker with homes.com. And when we first connected and I felt like Real Estate AI Flash was all about agents leveraging AI tools, which is still the main purpose, making AI approachable and actionable for real estate professionals. I just felt this was a natural transition because portals where Matthew works for homes.com, they're doing some cool stuff with AI, which we're gonna dig into today and how it can benefit agents using the platform and also consumers that they support. So I was really looking forward to this. Matthew, welcome to the podcast.

Rajiv, thank you so much. I am incredibly excited to be a part of this.

Yeah, looking forward to it. So to kick off. Well, I meant 128. It's actually 131. We're like flying. And we're recording this, obviously, in early June and it will release in the middle of July. And that's a lifetime when it comes to AI, but we'll talk about tried and true stuff, as you know, Matthew, tried and true stuff that homes.com is doing that I'm sure will add a tremendous amount of value. So for the listening audience or people that are watching us on YouTube, I'd love for them to get to know you, Matthew, in terms of how did you get into real estate and bring this to today?

Yeah, absolutely. This is a, my story is definitely more of a, the industry found me as opposed to me finding the industry. I grew up as a baseball fan, fanatic. I played ball all growing up. I had the classic little kid dream of being a pro baseball player and have always loved the sport. But in high school, realized very quickly I would not be one of the top prospects. And so I had to make the pivot. We grew up in the Hampton Roads area, Virginia Beach, part of Virginia. and ended up actually getting a job with Lifetouch and Olin Mills. There's a flashback for anyone who remembers that company,

the

photography company for school portraits and directories. And I worked with them. That was my first introduction to sales and ended up actually photographing a recruiter for a very small, at the time, very small marketing firm called homes.com. based in Norfolk, Virginia, and immediately fell in love with the idea, the vision that they had to be in the real estate industry as a platform, as a portal to help consumers get connected with agents. And so in 2015, I started as a frontline