Here is a number that should get your attention. According to the National Association of Realtors' 2026 Technology Report, AI now writes 75% of the listing descriptions you read online. Nearly half of all Realtors use AI daily or weekly. Chatbots answer buyer questions at 2 AM. Algorithms price homes, schedule showings, review documents, and follow up on leads.
So let us ask the question plainly, because a lot of people are asking it: if the machines can do all that, do you still need a Realtor?
AI is not a press release anymore. It is a line item in the jobs data. Challenger, Gray & Christmas counted 120,136 U.S. job cuts in the first nine months of 2026 where employers named AI as the reason, the leading cause they gave, and more than double the AI-attributed cuts in all of 2025. The CEO of Anthropic, one of the biggest AI companies on earth, has predicted AI could eliminate half of entry-level white-collar jobs and drive unemployment to 10 or even 20 percent within five years. The head of the IMF called AI a slow-moving tsunami headed for the labor market just this week.
Those are predictions, not facts, and we will label them that way. But think about what even a mild version means for housing. A mortgage is approved on documented income. A household carrying a home on two incomes is one layoff away from a hard conversation. When jobs wobble, buyers hesitate, sellers get stranded, and the people who navigate it best are the ones who have navigated it before.
We have. Harlow Realtors sold homes through the 2008 to 2010 collapse, when the phones stopped ringing nationwide. We sold homes after hurricanes, when half the battle was insurance, contractors, and closings that fell apart for reasons no algorithm saw coming. We are selling homes now through Louisiana's insurance crisis, which is finally calming in speed even if prices have not come back down. Scary markets are not new to us. They are where experience stops being a slogan and starts being money.
Now here is the other set of numbers, and they are just as real.
Trust in AI to find a home fell from 30% of buyers to 16% in a single year (Cotality, 2026). Nearly two-thirds of buyers worry that AI passes along information nobody verified, and 46% do not want an AI valuation used on their home without their approval first. Asked who they trust to set the price of an offer, 25% of buyers said their agent and 9% said AI. And 44% of buyers said they would pay extra for a human being to verify the decisions an AI made.
The market is voting the same way. In NAR's latest buyer and seller profile, 88% of buyers and 91% of sellers used a real estate agent, and for-sale-by-owner dropped to a record low 5%. After twenty years of portals, apps, discount models, and now AI, more people are hiring a human than ever.
Why? Because an algorithm has no license to lose. It has never sat across a kitchen table from a family whose financing just collapsed. It does not know which Metairie street floods, which insurer is quietly leaving St. Charles Parish, or which listing looks perfect online and smells like a money pit in person. A home purchase is the largest, most emotional, most legally exposed transaction of most people's lives. That is exactly the kind of transaction where a person you can call, and who answers, is not a luxury. It is the product.
We use AI at Harlow Realtors. It drafts, it organizes, it saves our clients and our agents hours of routine work every week, and pretending otherwise would be silly. The machines are excellent at paperwork. They are not excellent at judgment, negotiation, local knowledge, or trust, and the data above says buyers and sellers know it.
Will there be fewer agents in ten years? Probably. The ones who only ever unlocked doors and forwarded listings are in real trouble, and frankly, they should be. The ones who know their market street by street, who have closed deals in collapses and hurricanes and insurance crises, will be more valuable than they have ever been.
If you are buying or selling into this market, with rates at three-year highs and the economy sending mixed signals by the week, do not hand the biggest decision of your life to a chatbot. Talk to someone who has been through the hard years and is still standing.
Talk to Harlow Realtors.
Book a 15-minute call: https://calendly.com/christianharlow/meeting-with-harlow