Zillow Enhances AI-Powered Home Search with Natural Language Queries and Commute Considerations

Zillow's AI wants to help you find the dream home you didn't know you wanted

Pick a spot you want to live near and the AI will handle the rest Zillow is boosting its AI search tool to end the tedious filtering of locations and other elements. Now you can just ask for a place within a travel distance of a location and it will handle the rest for you. The upgraded AI tools, available on the Zillow mobile app, rely on casual language rather than drop-downs and other menus. The idea is that you won't have to specify affordability, proximity to schools, commute time, and related matters. You can just explain what you want as though you are talking to a human. For instance, Zillow described how you could ask for "homes 30 minutes from Millennium Park," "3-bedroom houses near Roosevelt High School," or "apartments near Denver Union Station" for properties within a certain distance to your office, a good school, or a park you like. The point is to make it more intuitive to find your ideal home. It's a linguistic upgrade to Zillow's current AI features, which currently perform tasks such as estimating a home's value and sharing AI-powered Showcase listings that tour within a house. "From streamlining the home search to personalizing the user experience, Zillow applies AI in practical ways to help people get home," said Zillow senior vice president of AI Josh Weisberg. "Search is one of the bedrocks of our platform, and we're always improving it to make it easier for users to find homes that meet their unique needs." As AI becomes increasingly integrated into platforms like Zillow, the home search process could become less painful, even if the idea of home-buying being easy seems more like a hallucination than anything an AI has produced. Zillow's AI will also use the conversations and requests people submit for further training. Zillow claims that as more people use the platform, the AI will be better at pinpointing the places people might actually want to buy or rent. There's no telling if real estate agents will consider Zillow's AI upgrade a win because it could shorten the home search process or a problem because it might undercut the relationship they're trying to build with potential home buyers. "The rise of AI in the real estate sector signals a broader shift in how people will search for homes in the future," Weisberg said. AI could ultimately make the home search process more personalized and efficient. But don't expect it to do anything about your down payment.

Zillow's upgraded AI search will show you more homes you can't afford

Zillow is upgrading its AI search feature with the ability to find homes or rentals based on how far away they are from your office, school, or other points of interest. Instead of narrowing your search by selecting specific locations or filters, you can now simply enter, "Homes 30 min drive from Millennium Park." This will be very handy for people like me. I'm always searching for dream homes in spots that I'm not familiar with. Now, I'll be able to search for "homes near Disney World" rather than casting a huge net over the entirety of Orlando. Zillow will also let you search for homes to buy or rent based on affordability, such as "Seattle homes under $4,000 monthly." Zillow first rolled out AI search last year, allowing you to look for homes by describing their layout, location, style, condition, and more. But this update gives you more specific ways to peruse listings based on proximity to certain locations and pricing. Zillow says its enhanced search feature "takes users' queries and scans millions of listing details to bring relevant results to the surface" while also training AI models to "better respond to search queries that use natural, human-like sentences." It's rolling out to Zillow's iOS and Android apps now, with support on Zillow's website coming soon.

Zillow enhanced its AI search feature, so now you can sadly stare at even more overpriced homes

The American dream used to involve purchasing a home. As huge corporations buy up residential stock and wages lay stagnant, the new American dream is to scroll through Zillow and salivate at what could have been, if only we had been born into one of those families with money. To that end, Zillow just upped its AI game to make it easier to find a dream home that you'll never be able to afford. The popular real estate marketplace integrated some AI tools into its search feature last year, but it just released a fairly substantial software update that brings in more options. Users can now use natural language to find homes or rentals based on commute times or how far they are from schools or other points of interest. Before conversational AI, people would have to use filters to come up with a list of appropriate domiciles. Now, you can just write "homes 20 min drive from Red Hook" and get some good listings. This should also be useful for areas with popular destinations. For instance, you could write "homes near Mall of America" instead of combing through every Minneapolis-adjacent listing. Today's update also lets the AI algorithm search by cost, so you can add preferred pricing into the query. The AI-enhanced search already included the option to look for homes by ideal layout, location, style and condition. It's the money and commute stuff that's new. As with all things AI, Zillow's tool is still a work in progress. It'll be training itself as it's being used so as to "better respond to search queries that use natural, human-like sentences." You should also be on the lookout for hallucinations. If it seems too good to be true, it likely is. In any event, the update's rolling out now to the iOS and Android apps, with website support coming soon. The platform has never been shy about incorporating tech into its feature set. It introduced 3D virtual home tours a few years back. More recently, the company integrated with FaceTime's SharePlay feature to allow for cooperative browsing.