Buyers risk ‘mistaking AI information’ for sound judgement
Buying agent Rob Fanshawe suggests AI is giving buyers more information but that makes expert advice more important.
Homebuyers could cost themselves thousands of pounds by relying on artificial intelligence (AI) for their purchasing decisions, a buying agent has warned.
Amid warnings about the rapid rise of AI, Rob Fanshawe (pictured), partner at Property Vision, says the technology has given buyers one eye “remarkably quickly” but he warns that “the trouble starts when they convince themselves they have two.”
Fanshawe highlights that a homebuyer considering a house in Paris, London or the Cotswolds can now ask an AI platform almost anything about a property and receive a confident answer in seconds.
The explosion of readily available information may actually make experienced advice more valuable, not less.”
He says: “Take a hypothetical example. A buyer considering a £6million house in The Cotswolds asks an AI platform whether the asking price is justified. The answer comes back confidently: the property looks expensive against three nearby homes, all apparently supporting a lower price per square foot.
“On closer inspection, one of those ‘comparables’ is an asking price rather than a completed sale, another required a full refurbishment, and the third sits on a busy road.
“Meanwhile, the genuinely relevant transaction – a similar house sold privately two streets away – never appeared on a portal at all. The analysis looks impressive. The conclusion is misleading.”
He says this is the challenge faced by agents.
AI confusion
Fanshawe adds: “Buyers arrive armed with pages of AI-generated research and treat it as a substitute for market knowledge. Sometimes it is useful, sometimes out of date, sometimes based on a flawed comparison, sometimes simply wrong or ‘hallucinated.’”
Much of the problem is that the underlying information AI interprets was imperfect to begin with, Fanshawe says.
He explains: “AI can confuse asking prices with achieved prices, recycle old commentary as though it describes today’s market, or draw sweeping conclusions from postcode-level data that bear little relation to a particular street or house.
“Worse, it can make weak information sound extraordinarily convincing. In the past, a buyer generally knew when they did not know something. Today they can receive a beautifully structured answer in under 10 seconds and assume the uncertainty has disappeared. It hasn’t.
“None of this is an argument against buyers being well informed, or against AI, we use it ourselves. But the explosion of readily available information may actually make experienced advice more valuable, not less.”
While AI is good at supplying information, Fanshawe says experienced agents are paid to exercise judgement.
He adds: “AI can interrogate large quantities of information, summarise documents, research planning histories and flag questions worth investigating further. Used intelligently, it can make an already sophisticated buyer considerably more informed.
“In the coming years, the advantage in property will not belong to whoever has access to the most information, everyone will have more than they know what to do with. It will belong to whoever can distinguish intelligence from noise: who knows what to trust, what is missing and what actually matters based on years of experience in the market. For the foreseeable future, that remains a very human skill.”
