Dave:
2026 is shaping up to be the start of what Redfin calls the Great Housing Reset, a long, slow period where affordability improves and the market normalizes not a quick flip or a recession. I’m Dave Meyer and today I’m joined by Redfin’s Head of Economic Research, Chen Zhao. To unpack their new annual predictions report, we’ll dive into each of their 11 predictions and walk through the headline calls from rate cuts to sales, inching up rents, reaccelerating, and which markets are likely to heat up or Cool down. This is on the market. Let’s get into it. Jen, welcome back to On the Market. Thanks so much for joining us again.
Chen:
Thanks so much for having me, Dave.
Dave:
This is one of our favorite shows of the year, hearing what Redfin has for predictions. So maybe just start by telling us sort of like big headline, what are you seeing? What’s the big top level narrative about the market in 26?
Chen:
I’d say the headline is that we see the housing market taking a bit of a turn. I think it’s already starting a little bit this year, but we think it’s going to continue next year and it’s going to be a bit of a longer what we’re calling a reset of the housing market where we think affordability will start to slowly change. And affordability really has been the big challenge for the housing market as we all know. But there’s no silver Ebola, there’s no magical fix. It’s going to take a while and we think next year is the start of better affordability for home buyers.
Dave:
That is music to my ears. I think I saw something you all put out that affordability was the best it’s been in two or three years, just in the second half of 2025. So it seems like that trend is already emerging.
Chen:
Yes, I think we’re starting to see the beginnings of that trend in the second half of 2025. So namely the two important factors are mortgage rates and home prices. So we know that mortgage rates have come down a little bit. We expect them to stay lower, we can get into more of that. And then home prices. We know the home prices are not growing as fast as they were. This has to do with the shift from a seller’s market to a buyer’s market, and we can talk about how we’d expect that to continue for the next few years and what the underlying forces are.
Dave:
All right, great. Well, I tend to agree with the overall sort of thesis here. I think you guys called it the housing reset. I’ve called it sort of the great stall where I think prices are just kind of stay stagnant for a while. But let’s get into the specific predictions that you all have. So what is the first one?
Chen:
The first one is about mortgage rates. So right now mortgage rates are in the low sixes, 6.2, 6.3%. We think they’re staying here. I think another way of putting this is that we don’t expect mortgage rates to get into the fives, not for any sustained period of time. We know that mortgage rates fluctuates. Sometimes you get a little bounced down, but I don’t think it’ll stay there. We also don’t really expect mortgage rates to get back up to 7% either. I think the important thing they’re here to focus on is of course, always the Fed and what they’re thinking about, and they’re always balancing this dual mandate that they have. So is it preventing high inflation, just trying to keep inflation low and steady and also trying to keep unemployment from going up? So right now the economy is in a very delicate balance. We know that the higher tariff rates have slowed economic growth.
They also threatened to increase inflation even though we haven’t seen as much of that so far. But that means that the Fed has a really unique challenge on its hands. So even for the meeting that’s happening next Wednesday, it’s a bit of an open question, what are they going to be doing going forward? But because they’re in this delicate balance, there’s not much room for them to cut a lot, but we also don’t think they’re going to be hiking. So that means we’re sort of stuck here with where mortgage rates are. And then the other thing you have to keep in mind is that there’s this big transition happening next year with the Fed. The president will be nominating a new chair of the Federal Reserve. The chair is only one of 12 votes on the FOMC. So contrary to some of the stuff that you see in the press, the chair of the Federal Reserve does not set interest rate policy. He or she is one person on that committee, but it is a very important person and that transition is something that we also have to keep really close tabs on.
Dave:
Got it. Okay. So not expecting a lot of movement either way. It does seem kind of stuck. We have these dual, I guess you would call threats to the economy right now where inflation has been, we don’t have a lot of inflation data for the last couple of months, but inflation prior to the government shutdown had been ticking up a little bit and job losses, it seems like every print tells us a different story. So it’s just really hard to understand what’s going on there and until we get clear line of sight on one of those things and which one is really going to be the bigger issue or which one gets cleared up first. I agree with you that it’s not going to move much. I am curious, just the last couple of days the Fed stopped quantitative tightening. Do you think there’s any chance that the Fed does something more dramatic next year to impact mortgage rates, like maybe quantitative easing or something like that?
Chen:
I don’t think so. I think that the communications that we’ve gotten from the Fed is pretty clear on this, that they want to pivot away from mortgage backed securities and pivot towards a portfolio of treasury securities. And this idea that’s been floated a few times, I’ve seen some op-eds about it saying, Hey, look, higher mortgage rates is really killing the housing industry. Can we do something for housing? Maybe that means the Fed buys MBS. It’s really hard to imagine that they would choose to do something like that when you still have so much lingering inflation risk from higher tariff rates. Because you have to remember that housing is still the largest component of course CPI or PCE, whichever your favorite measure is. And so if you were to stoke the housing market right now, what you would see is that home prices would just shoot up and they really just after all the stars and PTSD from the last few years with high inflation, I just can’t imagine that they would really choose to do that.
And Chair Powell has been asked about this a few times in his press conferences and he has said each time very consistently, the problem in the housing market is that there needs to be more supply. We all know this very well. We say it all the time. That’s a very hard problem to solve. Put another way, I think another way to look at it is in the housing market, what we need is for prices to come down. We’re in a new economic era now after the pandemic where rates are just going to be sitting higher. I often like to talk about this in terms of people’s metabolisms. As you age, your metabolism changes, you need to change what you eat. And it’s a little bit like that for the housing market. So we actually do need to just see lower home prices. That’s the right way to get the housing market back to a healthy state.
Dave:
I agree with you there. So do you think that’s going to happen? Maybe I’m skipping ahead on your predictions, but do you think that will happen that we’ll see home prices decline?
Chen:
We’re already starting to see it this year. So we started the year with home prices increasing about 5% year over year. We’re down to about two three ish percent depending on exactly how you want to measure it, what specific metrics you want to look at. So it’s come down a lot and it came down a lot because the change of home buyers to home sellers has changed, right? So Redfin has this proprietary metric that we put out that we call active buyers and sellers. So sellers is really easy. It’s just the amount of inventory in the market, the number of buyers is something that we impute from some of our proprietary data where if we can see how many homes are selling and we know how long takes people to find homes and how long it takes to sell homes, we can put all that together in a model and say, this implies that there are this many buyers in the housing market actively looking right now.
And what we saw was that that gap got really large in the spring of this year. There was about 37% more home sellers than home buyers across the country. And most housing markets were tipping from being sellers markets to being buyers markets. So that ratio of sellers of buyers has a very close relationship to home price growth with a lead of about six months or so. So what we’re seeing is that that shift has led to home price appreciation really slowing down, and it’s hard to imagine as we continue to follow this metric and that gap continues to be historically large, that it’s hard to imagine that home price growth will accelerate again. And then especially if you layer on top of that, what we see happening with demographics. So we know that immigration into this country has for more or less halted. We also know that the underlying demographics of the country means that there’s going to be smaller populations going forward, that it’s really hard to imagine that home prices will actually be appreciating that rapidly in the near or medium term.
But on the other hand, it’s also difficult to imagine that home prices will really be falling dramatically because as we all know, people don’t have to sell their homes. You can choose to rent it out, you can choose to continue to live in it. And we actually put out a report, I believe it was last week, looking at Delists, and we saw that the fraction of homes that are being delisted in 2025 was about 5.5%. That was up from about 4.8% last year, which doesn’t sound like a huge increase, but that fraction has been very constant below 5% for the last eight to 10 years. So that means that that increase is actually meaningful. It doesn’t sound like a huge amount, but it’s a pretty meaningful increase. And what we saw was that the homes that are being delisted are people who bought more recently. They don’t want to sell where buyers are willing to pay right now. So buyers and sellers are just sort of far apart. And so as long as home sellers aren’t willing to go where buyers need them to go, it’s actually very hard for prices to also fall.
Dave:
Yeah, actually we did a whole show on that report about I think it’s super interesting and to me it just reflects that sellers are responding appropriately to the market because I think a lot of the crash narratives that you hear about are there’s going to be panic selling or there’s going to be this downward spiral of increasing inventory, but what you’re seeing is a normal reaction. People don’t want to sell at a loss, they don’t want to, and they don’t have to. There’s no forced selling going on, so they’re just choosing not to sell. I think it’s personally, I’m curious to see if they come back on in the spring because I have a lot of friends who are house flippers, a lot of ’em are pulling ’em off and we’ll do it in the spring. But I think that to me is a sign that you’re correct that it’s going to be sort of a boring year price wise for the housing market.
Chen:
Yeah, I mean we’re going to continue to publish this delisting data pretty regularly and we will also be publishing who is delisting and are they re-listing the home. So we should see that in the spring if they are coming back on the market. It is boring, I guess in some sense to say, look, home prices are going to maybe increasing 1% or 2%, something very low, but it’s actually a meaningful change for buyers because what that means is that home prices are growing slower than wages, and that is what buyers actually need. They need time for wages to catch up to where home prices are because home prices are not going to be falling. This is the only mechanism that we have in order to get to this place where we need to go, where homes are more affordable for people, where their incomes actually are, and that’s what we think will be happening next year.
Dave:
So that is your second prediction, right? For next year?
Chen:
Yes. Essentially at home prices are going to be growing slower than wages, and this is the step that you need for affordability. But importantly, this kind of progress is very slow. So it might not even be very noticeable to a lot of buyers after the first year. We don’t expect affordability to all of a sudden jump back to where it was before the pandemic. It’s going to be a slow process, maybe five to six years. It might take a while for buyers to actually notice, hey, affordability has gotten better.
Dave:
That makes sense. It’s just for everyone who is listening. We’ve been talking about this on the show recently, but what Chen is talking about also reflects the difference between nominal and real home prices because Chen said prices might go up one to 2%. That’s the price you see on Redfin if you were going to go look. But when you actually compare that increase to inflation to wages, they’re actually negative. And I know that sounds negative to some people, but that means affordability is improving. That’s how we’re actually getting affordability. And right now it’s baby steps towards affordability, but we can get back towards meaningful improvements in affordability over time. If real home prices stay kind of flat and wages keep growing, that’s a normal way that we get affordability back into the housing market. Alright, so we’ve gone through our first two predictions from you, which is first about mortgage rates dipping into the low sixes, but staying there. Prediction two, home buying affordability will improve as wages grow faster than prices. What’s the third one?
Chen:
The third one is about sales. So we think that sales will inch up just slightly next year. So we’re thinking about existing home sales very specifically. It’s been about 4.1 million. It’s going to be 4.1 million again this year-ish. Next year we’re forecasting 4.2 million. It’s not a lot historically, it’s very, very low actually. It’s only up about 3% from where we think we will end this year. I think that the increase affordability means you just get a little bit more activity in the market, but by and large, what we’re describing with buyers and sellers, really just being at the stalemate means that you’re not going to get this huge pickup in the housing market next year.
Dave:
I hope you’re wrong about this, but I agree with you. I just think for this whole industry, it would be great if we had more sales volume. It just feels like it’s been so sluggish and slow and for anyone who’s a lender agent, it’s been a tough slog and hopefully though at least this is a sign of the right direction, it’s got to bottom out at some point. And maybe this means that we’re moving towards better home sales volume. Maybe not in 2026, a little bit better, but maybe in the years after that we’ll start getting towards a more normal level of sales volume. All right. So those are your first three predictions. We do have to take a quick break, but we’ll be back with Chen Zhao from Redfin right after this. Welcome back to On the Market. We are going through Redfin’s housing predictions for 2026. So far we’ve talked about mortgage rates, home buyer affordability, home sales, Chen. What is the fourth prediction Redfin has this year?
Chen:
It’s about rents. So as we all know, rents have been really flagged to slightly declining for a number of years now. We think that next year rents will start to tick up just a little bit, probably towards the back half of the year. We know that multifamily construction has really slowed. There’s also increased demand from people not buying a home for renting. So the combination of those two things means that we would probably just get the smallest uptick in rents. It might mean that you were talking about this difference between nominal and real price growth. Right now, rents are falling on a real basis. Once you adjust for inflation by some metrics, they’re actually falling on a nominal basis. We think we might get to somewhere where it’s flat on a real basis. So rents are keeping up with inflation, in other words.
Dave:
And that’s based on mostly just the supply glut that we’ve sort of been in for multifamily, dissipating.
Chen:
Exactly. I think that’s the main motivation here, but we also think that this continued affordability challenge that’s just going to take a long time to work through on the purchase side means you just get higher demand still. We also know that the economy has gotten a lot weaker. The labor market’s weaker. We’re sort of on the edge of a recession, probably won’t fall into a recession, but that will keep enough people renting rather than buying.
Dave:
That’s interesting. I noticed the same thing. I saw some stat that the unemployment rate for people under 25 is like 9% right now. These kinds of numbers that I don’t know if we go into a recession or not, but it made me wonder if it will weigh on household formation. I think you’re right. We’ll have a higher percentage of people renting, but for rental demand to keep up, we need household growth. But I’m curious if you have any thoughts on that, if that’s going to slow down or where that will go?
Chen:
We do think that the slower economic growth will weigh on household formation a little bit, but the economy, there’s a lot of headlines right now about the negative jobs data that we’re seeing. The government shutdown means that we just haven’t gotten great official jobs data, so we still need to wait for that. And the reality of the labor market is that it has slowed down a lot, but it’s still staying afloat and the economy is still staying afloat. So that makes me think that we won’t get a huge impact yet on household formation, but housing costs remain high. So we do think there are going to be some impacts on things like household formation and also on things like people deciding to start a family. So our fifth prediction is that affordability means people have more roommates. We say fewer babies, meaning that maybe you want to get into a bigger home before you start to have kids, but you are finding it’s that to be really challenging. So you’re going to delay that for a little while. And as I was saying before, we do think housing affordability will improve, but it’s going to take a number of years. So that will weigh on some of these factors for families.
Dave:
Got it. Okay. I mean that makes sense to me. I do think people are stretched and it’s going to be hard for people to go out and form a new household just for everyone knows household formation, it’s a little bit different than population growth. It’s basically measuring the total demand for housing units. So for example, if two roommates are living together, then they each decide to go out and get their own apartment. Doesn’t change the population of a city or the country, but that adds one more household and that adds one more unit of demand that could happen when a young person moves out of their parents’ house or if they’re two people split up and they decide to have two homes. So that’s what we’re talking about and that’s just an ongoing question I have particularly as it relates to rents. So we actually, we got a twofer on that one. We did prediction four and five at the same time. So what is prediction six?
Chen:
Prediction six is about policy. So housing affordability has become the paramount issue in policy. I think what we saw in the last election cycle is that it is the decisive issue actually, or it will be in a lot of elections. And I think both parties know this and candidates who are running for office also know this. So our prediction is that there will be a lot of serious proposals brought forward. It is as is always the case in policy. Some of them will be useful and some of them may not be that useful. At the end of the day, we know that in order to really address housing affordability, you have to build more supply, but that is really, really hard to do because it’s controlled by thousands of local jurisdictions. A good portion of the population has a vested interest in not allowing there to be more supply. So this is a very tricky problem to solve and it’s going to require really innovative policy solutions because quite frankly, no one’s really solved this problem. And it’s been a problem for a long time. We know that the country is short, many millions housing units, but across the country when you’re looking at election results, you can see that this really is the main issue that’s on the minds of voters.
Dave:
Well, I hope you’re right. I do hope that we start to see some sensible policies here. I was getting interviewed the other day and I was saying I feel like the real hard thing here is that policies that actually help are not really well aligned with the election cycles in the United States because adding supply takes years. We could start now and it could take three years, it could take five years, it takes seven years and politicians both sides of the aisle, they’re trying to get reelected every two years or every four years. And so oftentimes I think what frustrates me is the solutions that get the most traction are the short-term ones that might maybe make a dent in the short run but aren’t really going after the supply issue. I’m curious if you have any thoughts on what’s some good policies or any examples of policies that could actually help here, because I totally agree this is a huge problem for the country. It needs to be
Chen:
Fixed. To me, I think there are local jurisdictions that have made some progress by making it easier, taking away red tape, maybe introducing a D or manufacture housing, all these different types of innovation to try to add some supply. It’s not a silver bullet and it’s not enough supply, although we shouldn’t discount that. There is some progress being made. I think in order for there to be a consolidated federal push, the difficulty is that the federal government is involved in the housing market, mostly on the financing side. It’s not on the supply side, but the federal government has a lot of sticks and carrots that it can use when talking to local jurisdictions because local governments get a lot of funding from the federal government. I think if there was a way to use these carrots and sticks and ties some funding to outcomes in local jurisdictions, that could be a really promising solution. I don’t know that this has been tried very much in a meaningful way, but that would be something to explore most of the proposals that get put forward or on the demand side. And as we all know, that’s not actually what is helpful. We just have to address what is actually happening on the supply side.
Dave:
That makes a lot of sense because just as an example, demand side policies, if you subsidize buyers or you lower mortgage rates to figure out some way to help people buy, that could be helpful for a minute, but then it just pushes the price of homes up and you still have the same long-term structural affordability challenges. Right,
Chen:
Exactly. It makes the problem actually worse in the long run. It’s very myopic and it’s really honestly the last thing that we need. I often do when I’m thinking about housing policy and the affordability issue, we have to take our medicine, you can’t have your cake and eat it at the same time. At some point you have to take your medicine. And I think that’s the really hard part because one really does because most people who own homes, the majority of their wealth is in their home.
Dave:
So it’s hard. I get that people want more affordability without making their home go down in value. That is a tricky thing to pull off. I’ve said this on the show a few times, I like your saying, take your medicine. We’re in an unhealthy place in the housing market and to get back to health, there’s going to be some pain somewhere. You don’t get a magic redo. And so I personally think the slow you guys are calling the great reset or call the great stall, I think that’s kind of a good balance personally, if we can add more supply gradually, if wages can go up, this is a tolerable way for affordability to get restored without the bottom falling out of the market and homeowners losing a ton of equity and wealth. And so I am encouraged by some of the market dynamics, but I do think the policy thing is still the missing piece. There’s no coherent policy from anyone. I’m not blaming one party or the other. There is no coherent policy from anyone about how we’re going to do better
Chen:
And it’s an incredibly tricky problem to solve.
Dave:
Alright, let’s move on to our seventh prediction. What do you got?
Chen:
So our seventh prediction is that more people will refi and remodel. So when we think about refi, I think we’re thinking about it in two different ways. One is simply that over the last few years actually a lot of people have bought homes at really high mortgage rates. So right now about 20% of people who have a mortgage have a rate above 6%. So as rates fall into that below sixes, you actually have a healthy number of people who will be in the money for a refi. So we do expect that refi volume will increase about 30% next year. Wow. So that is, it’s off a very small base, so we have to remember that. But that is meaningful, right? Because 6.3% mortgage rates sounds pretty high, but if you remember that we were at 6.8% and 6.8% and then six point, I think this year, 6.6% probably average for the year.
Like we’re coming down very, very slowly and it’s enough of a change that you will have people who are going to be in the money for a refi. The other is just that, as we all know, a lot of people have a lot of equity in their homes, but they’re also still stuck. They can’t afford to move on to a bigger house. So a lot of them probably will start to, if they haven’t already tap into that home equity, I think renovation will continue to be a hot topic where people are going to be trying to make the space that they have work for them.
Dave:
We do have to take one more quick break, but we’ll be back with Chen and the rest of redfin’s 2026 housing market predictions right after this. Welcome back to On the Market. I’m Dave Meyer here with Chen Zhao of Redfin, talking about redfin’s predictions for 2026. We’ve gone through the first seven. Let’s keep moving. Chen, what is prediction number eight?
Chen:
So prediction number eight is about different regions of the country. So we think that the markets that are going to be hot in 2026 are really a lot of these suburbs around New York City that right now are some of our strongest markets. Also some of the metros in the Midwest, which are among the more affordable places. On the flip side, we think that the places that we’re really seeing that are among our weaker markets in the Sunbelt in Florida and Texas, these are going to continue to be the weaker markets in 2026. So there is this back to office return to office trend that is just continuing to happen. It is I think going to be more of a trend in a weaker housing market because employers just have more of the upper hands right now. People who are looking for jobs are having a really difficult time finding jobs. So when they say three days is now four days, four days is now five days, or you just have to, I think there’s going to be more of that happening, but still some people will remain hybrid. So not everyone’s going to be looking to move to Manhattan, but a lot of people are going to be looking to move to Long Island and New Jersey or Westchester. And so these are the markets that are seller’s markets, even though most of the country is made up of buyer’s markets at this point.
Dave:
And how do you see the spread here Over the last couple of years? We’ve seen dramatic differences. If you looked at 24, 25, there are markets like Milwaukee were up seven 8%. There’s Austin down seven, 8%. That was a pretty big spread between the top and bottom performing markets. Do you see that consolidating a little bit?
Chen:
Yes. I mean there are places, especially Florida and Texas, these are your weakest markets right now. When you compare them to what’s happening on Long Island, they’re like worlds apart right now. But what we’re continuing to see in places like Florida and Texas is that a lot of these metros have a hundred, 150, sometimes 200% more sellers than there are buyers.
Dave:
Oh my god.
Chen:
And as I was saying, that metric tends to be forward looking by about six months. So that means that probably over the next six months to a year, if we continue to see the spread between buyers and sellers being so big, these markets are going to continue to be pretty weak.
Dave:
And what about the hotter markets? Is this modest growth two 3% or something higher than that?
Chen:
It feels like these markets, if anything, are actually heating up a little bit, not a ton, right? Demand is kind of slow in general. That’s an overarching thing kind of everywhere, but it’s still relatively speaking, they seem to be heating up. And a lot of these markets like Boston or Long Island around New York City, these are places where you’re still maintaining a healthy distance where there’s more buyers than sellers. And so that feels like it’s something to sustain the price growth that we’re seeing.
Dave:
Well, this will be an interesting one to watch because the market is, we talk on the show all the time about the national market, but clearly as Chen just pointed out, we have very different markets and is an investor or homeowner, you need to be looking at what’s going on in your individual market to formulate your strategy. Alright, let’s go to our ninth prediction. We’re flying through these. Which one’s that Chen?
Chen:
It’s about climate migration. So we think that this is going to be more of a local story than a cross metro story in 2026. So we know that with climate change that this has become more on the minds of buyers. So people are paying attention to climate data when they see it on real estate portals. We know that insurance has become a real issue when it comes to affordability and the housing market, but when buyers are thinking about where to live, they have so many different issues that they have to contend with. They got to think about where’s your family? Where are the jobs? So instead of saying people aren’t going to be living in Florida, maybe they need to be in Florida for some other reason, they might be thinking about, I need to live in this part of the city rather than this other part of the city, which might be more prone to disaster risk. So I think that feels, I think more realistic for home buyers who have to contend with a number of different factors when they’re thinking about where to buy a house.
Dave:
How do you measure that? How do you know people are, if you see someone move within a city, how do you know it’s because of climate risk?
Chen:
I think one really good way to do this, and it’s hard to have all the data in place in order to really do this analysis well, is to look at insurance costs. Because really when talking about climate risk, it’s manifested through insurance costs, right? So I think if you were able to look at insurance costs and then tie that to housing market activity, and we have a pretty good measure of demand in the housing market right now through our buyers and sellers metric, that could help you to see this relationship clearly even within a broader metro area. I think.
Dave:
And I’m curious, you said you see this happening just in 2026. Do you think there is potential for cross metro migration in the future? Do you not have that information?
Chen:
I think if you’re thinking further out when you’re thinking about disaster risk or insurance costs, this is I think one kind of lingering big risk for the housing market. It’s a little bit hard to know exactly where it goes many, many years from now though. I think it really depends on what we actually see happening in insurance markets, what mortgage companies decide to do in terms of thinking about the risk and who’s owning the risk for the properties that are mortgaged and have this disaster risk. So it’s a little bit harder to see, but certainly I think it wouldn’t be out of the question for there to be a cross metro migration.
Dave:
Thank you. Alright, we have two more predictions to go. What’s number 10?
Chen:
So number 10 is really about the industry. We think that with so many MLSs out there, the National Association of Realtors is going to sort of just take a little bit of a step back, let the MLSs set more of their own rules. This is something that’s really already starting to happen, so it’s more of a continuation prediction than a change. And NAR is really going to, for its part, actually spend more time on advocacy instead.
Dave:
Oh, okay. Interesting. Do you think it’s just given a lot of challenges NAR has faced in the last couple of years? They have to pick and choose where they’re going to spend their energy?
Chen:
Yes, I think so. I think it makes sense as a continuation of the turmoil in the industry that we’ve seen over these last few years.
Dave:
I think that makes sense. Just being a casual observer of how much, yeah, like you said, there’s been a lot of turmoil in the industry. That brings us to our last prediction, number 11. What do you got?
Chen:
Well, number 11 is about everyone’s favorite topic. AI can’t escape ai,
Dave:
Right? Yes. You got to talk about can’t go through a podcast without talking about ai.
Chen:
Of course. Yeah. So love the prediction is that AI will become a real estate matchmaker. We’re already starting to see this. AI is infiltrating basically every aspect of our lives. We think that AI is really increasingly going to help people decide where to live, which homes to buy. It’s just going to start to play a bigger role. Redfin has conversational search now on our website. We’ve seen that a lot of the users who are using it are really happy with the results because it means that instead of going through the search filters, you can have a conversation and describe what you want in your home search. And that’s very appealing to a lot of people. People are also going to use AI to just do research and look into which cities or which towns have the characteristics that our family is looking for. So this is still technology that’s very much in its early stages, even though it seems like it’s dominating the news all the time. But over the next few years, it’s hard to imagine that AI wouldn’t play a much bigger role in real estate search.
Dave:
I think so too. I think the search part really makes a lot of sense. That seems right up AI ally. I’ve seen some predictions that people are saying they’re going to help negotiations or coordinate transactions. What do you think about that side of things
Chen:
That feels like if that happens, it has to be further down the road? Right? Because when you bring AI into a role like that, I think there’s also a bit of a trust issue where people, when you’re thinking about what is the difference between AI and a human, most humans will probably say, well, I trust another human more than I trust ai. Like I was saying, the technology is still in its early days. There’s so much for us to learn about it right now. So the search component feels like the obvious place where it can really make a positive change right now. But a few years down the road, who knows?
Dave:
I agree with you. Long-term probably going to disrupt everything. But right now, I think a lot of people are sort of saying AI can do things. It can’t yet, at least not in a reliable way, but I think search, research, gathering data, those kinds of things, it is already pretty good at. And so this makes a lot of sense to me. Alright, well thank you so much, Chen, for being here. This is a lot of fun. It’s always fun talking through these predictions and seeing how they play out through the rest of the year. Thank you for being here and for all the amazing research you and your team at Redfin put out. We’re always talking about your work here on the market.
Chen:
Well, thanks so much. It’s always fun coming on here. So thank you for having us.
Dave:
Absolutely. And thank you all so much for listening to this episode on the market. We’ll see you next time.
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