The first stop on the road to a new home used to be a listing portal. In 2026, for a growing share of buyers, it is a chat window. More than 60 percent of buyer-side real estate searches now begin through AI interfaces, according to a recent analysis cited by the National Association of REALTORS, and Bank of America’s latest Homebuyer Insights Report found buyers leaning on tools like ChatGPT and Gemini to estimate affordability, learn the process, and research neighborhoods before they ever contact an agent.
Doug Hoven Jr., a REALTOR® with The Ron Sawyer Team at RE/MAX Prime in Hampton Roads, is watching it happen in real time. Clients now arrive at first meetings with AI-generated affordability estimates, neighborhood summaries, and even draft offer strategies.
“I love an informed buyer,” Hoven says. “If a chatbot taught you what a rate buydown is before we met, that saves us both an hour. The problem starts when people treat a general answer like a local one.”
Where AI Genuinely Helps
Hoven tells clients the tools shine at exactly what the surveys show people using them for. Explaining loan types in plain language. Running rough monthly payment math. Demystifying the closing process for first-time buyers. Veterans United found that 39 percent of prospective buyers are now using AI tools in their search, a number that jumped five points in a single quarter, with military-connected buyers among the most active adopters. In a market driven by relocating service members, that trend hits Hampton Roads early and hard.
Where It Quietly Fails
The gaps show up where money actually changes hands. AI models price homes off broad data and stale comps, and they cannot see what Doug Hoven sees weekly: which streets flood after a nor’easter, which neighborhoods are turning before the data reflects it, which listings are priced for negotiation and which are priced to move. Industry leaders have warned publicly about AI-generated valuations nearly derailing major deals, and national brokerages caution that chatbots miss the anecdotal knowledge agents aggregate through daily conversations.
“An AI tool will tell you what a house in a zip code is worth on average,” Hoven Jr. says. “It will not tell you the seller already turned down two offers, or that the HOA is about to vote on a special assessment. Averages do not buy houses. Specifics do.”
The Smart Way to Use Both
His advice is not to put the tools down. It is to assign them the right job. Use AI to get educated, build a question list, and arrive prepared. Then pressure-test everything local against someone who works the market daily. Buyers who do both are moving faster and negotiating better than either the pure researchers or the pure delegators.
The technology is not replacing the agent, Doug Hoven Jr. argues. It is raising the bar for what an agent has to know. In Hampton Roads, that suits him fine.
Doug Hoven Jr. is a REALTOR with The Ron Sawyer Team at RE/MAX Prime, licensed in Virginia and North Carolina. Reach him at (757) 434-0915, douglashoven.com, TheRonSawyerTeam.com, or on LinkedIn.
