Borrowers trust AI more than they trust you

Last month, Claude (AI) told me to get to an emergency room immediately. It wasn’t the first time the two of us had an “emergency” on our hands. This time it was a dissected artery in my neck. In reality, I’d probably just slept wrong.

So no, I don’t think AI is always right, and the two of us do tend to overreact. But it has changed how I approach my own healthcare, and it’s doing the same thing to housing.

A few months ago I met Dr. Charlotte Blease, a philosopher of medicine and the author of Dr. Bot, a book about what AI is doing to healthcare that read to me like a diagnosis of housing. Doctors and loan officers find themselves in an identity crisis where they are trusted less and are more replaceable than they realize.

They’re already choosing AI

As I walked through my own journey with a chronic illness, I faced years of dismissals and misdiagnoses. Nearly three in ten women report feeling similarly dismissed by their doctor, but our research on housing exposes even more skeptical consumers. Six in ten NextGen feel the housing system will work against them, and the vast majority worry they’ll be taken advantage of by a housing professional.

Until now, that distrust allowed us two options: We either take the leap of faith that our housing (or medical) professional will have our backs, or we don’t. 

Today, consumers don’t need faith to get started. 

In the same FirstHome IQ study, half said they trust AI as much or more than humans to make a personalized homebuying plan. Would-be buyers are taking their questions to the machine, or they’re asking no one at all. That’s the slow leak in our industry, and it keeps draining as long as we ignore the one tool buyers already trust.

AI as a trust-builder

Before I worked in housing, I trained in social work, where the first principle for any distrusting population is safety. AI has become that first step in creating safety for buyers and patients alike.

Most people reading this have at least once asked an embarrassing question of ChatGPT or let their dumb ideas run free of judgment with an AI conversation they’d never share with anyone else. 

This phenomenon of ‘machine confession’ began long before the emergence of AI. In the 1960s, with the first confessional computer system, researchers found patients disclosing much more openly, reporting a preference for the computer over the physicians. Sixty years later, a Gallup survey found nearly one in five American AI users consulted AI because they were too embarrassed to talk to a person.

Some patients, Blease writes, are “quite literally, dying of embarrassment.”

Money carries that same shame. A recent poll found 62% of Americans don’t talk about money at all, and that people are more comfortable discussing politics, even death, than their own finances. Buyers aren’t dying of embarrassment. But plenty of them are renting for another year because of it.

I’ve spent my career teaching loan officers to create exactly this kind of safety, and the best of them are remarkable at it. But no human can offer what the machine offers here, which is the freedom of being no one in particular.

AI is the bridge we need

“The correct comparison,” Blease writes, “is not telemedicine versus in-person care. It is telemedicine versus no care.”

In housing, the comparison isn’t AI versus a great loan officer. It’s AI versus no one at all. 

For the woman asking ChatGPT whether she should give up renting her luxury apartment for a fixer-upper, her alternative to AI wasn’t your guidance. It was another year of avoiding the conversation. 

AI isn’t taking that buyer from you. Nobody had her to begin with. 

In the same Gallup survey, nearly half of the people who used AI said it made them more confident talking to a provider. The machine isn’t the end of the conversation. It’s how the conversation starts.

A friend of mine bought a home recently, and after a couple glasses of wine, she admitted her real fear about buying was that she was giving up on finding a husband. She’d spent years with a great income, too afraid to ask anyone to run the numbers with her fears in mind—until she ran them with ChatGPT. 

AI is changing the way buyers approach experts, and it’s capturing a new market that was previously too afraid to ask questions. But it doesn’t end with a midnight confessional. You’re the specialist she trusts to walk her home. 

Consumers and patients are tired of walking this path alone. We need the experts to guide us. We just need the machines to help us get in the door.

Five questions before you deploy AI

I built our nonprofit’s consumer experience on a framework adapted from trauma-informed care (created for the most distrusting populations), and it maps directly onto how a housing professional should deploy AI today. As you add AI to your buyer’s path, ask yourself:

1. Safety. Do you give the buyer a judgment-free place to explore scenarios and education, before or after they talk to someone?

2. Transparency. Does the buyer have full transparency into your pricing and your process?

3. Choice. Can the buyer set the pace, or does every path funnel them to a sales call?

4. Collaboration. Does the tool hand the buyer to a human at the moment the decision gets real, with their context intact?

5. Empowerment. Does the buyer leave more capable of deciding for themselves, or more dependent on you?

Pass all five, and AI becomes proof of your motives.

The tool you’re most tempted to fear is the one that can finally earn you the trust this industry lost. Your buyers are already at the door. The only question is whether you’re there to meet them.

Kristin Messerli is the founder and executive director of FirstHome IQ, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit closing the homeownership gap through trust-based education. She is also a keynote speaker on trust and the author of the annual NextGen Homebuyer Report.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of HousingWire’s editorial department and its owners. To contact the editor responsible for this piece: [email protected].