‘Sounds like competition to me’: Sizing up Google’s real estate play at the AI Summit

The traditional path to homeownership — from portal search to real estate agent to loan officer — is being rapidly rewired by artificial intelligence (AI), and the industry’s biggest players want to be first through the new front door.

That was the central theme of a packed session Tuesday at HousingWire‘s AI Summit in Dallas, where Diego Sanchez, president of HW Media, sat down with Dan Snyder, CEO of Lower, and Chris Rediger, CEO of HouseCanary. The trio explored how AI is reshaping discovery, lead generation and the mortgage process itself.

Snyder’s company has been aggressively acquiring assets to build an end-to-end platform. He opened by describing the logic behind Lower’s recent purchases of Movoto, the fifth-largest real estate portal, and NeatLabs, a venture-backed point-of-sale loan operating system.

“What we’re trying to do is form one path — search to close,” Snyder said. “Essentially, our consumer goes in the front door; Movoto, whether it’s to Movoto.com or through AI, we’ll see what happens there. Then, how do you embed the financing? How do you ultimately get the loan closed and make the human talent shine?”

Snyder acknowledged that the industry is at an inflection point, with AI accelerating development cycles and product refinement in ways that were unimaginable just a few years ago.

“It’s the most exciting time I can remember,” he said. “Just the speed of the engineers going faster. It’s the speed of where product managers themselves can iterate and ship code, which is super exciting.”

He also emphasized the strategic advantage of owning underlying technology rather than relying on third parties.  

“I’m fairly impatient,” Snyder said. “And so now we have [the question], what can we do to reinvent the way a consumer searches? What can you do to make it easier so you can just get your loan with a maybe a screenshot? These things would have taken years and years. Now with AI, I think it’s going to come a lot faster than we think.”

Google’s play for top of the funnel

Rediger, whose company has been quietly working with Google for three years, detailed a partnership that places home listings directly inside Google search results.

“It started with a real simple problem, which was, how do we actually show listings in Google?” he said. “And then they engaged us to help navigate those waters. So there’s a lot of regulatory and compliance items around displaying home listings, and HouseCanary is a 50-state broker. So we worked with Google to just show it, and it’s been pretty well adopted. It’s on mobile only right now, and it’s still in pilot, but it’s growing very quickly.

“[It’s] getting a lot of participation from MLSs and data providers, and we’re getting a lot of feedback from brokers and consumers that they really like it. It’s a different approach than the typical portal search, and it’s very top of funnel.”

The feature, currently in pilot, is rolling out gradually, and Rediger was careful to explain certain limitations.

“Google requires us to work with the MLSs to be the data provider,” he said. “So in areas where an MLS is not participating, we might have limited data. Therefore, it wouldn’t show. We are live nationally, so every market’s eligible. There might not be appropriate data in that market, and also there might not be data that’s relevant to your search query.”

When asked whether this partnership positions Google as direct competition to portals like Movoto, Zillow and Realtor.com, Rediger pushed back.

“Is what was designed by Google meant to replace a portal? The answer is no,” he said. “It is top of funnel. It’s a pretty quick and unique and elegant experience that’s not a research-driving process. You do a quick search — homes near me, homes in an area. Then you see some homes in the area. You see some agents that are local to that area that actually do business in that area, and you’re done, right?

“Google still links to portals. Portals are having drip campaigns and a lot of cool, whiz-bangy things that really attract the customer over time. This is very much a single-shot hit, like very Google. You type in what you want. You get instant gratification and then you move on.”

Snyder, whose company owns a portal that competes directly for that traffic, was more blunt.

“Sounds like competition to me,” he said. “Now, they’ve talked about it a long time. You know, it keeps popping up. But we’ll see.”

He suggested that Google’s ambitions could extend far beyond a simple carousel of listings.

“[If] they really wanted to build a full real estate, mortgage and valuation killer, they probably could, right?” he said. “So what we do is just try not to worry about the competition as much as possible. Like, how can you lean in?”

LLMs as the next frontier

Both executives agreed that the real disruption lies beyond traditional search engines.

Rediger predicted that large language models (LLMs) will become the dominant method of discovery within five years.

“There’s still a lot that has to happen between here and now,” he said. “Right now, we have prohibited use in the data, so they cannot use it in LLMs. They cannot train LLMs with it. It cannot be fed into that LLM at all. It’s truly for that search experience.”

Snyder echoed that sentiment, describing a future where consumers delegate the entire search process to AI agents.

“I think people are going to ask their AI agent, and everyone will have an AI agent and then the AI agent will find the best way,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s by Google or otherwise. I think the patience is going to wane and the attention is going to wane. People still want to go see and go tour the homes. So, that means you’ll still need great buyer agents and you’ll need great listing agents to sell your house.”

Despite the rapid automation of discovery and loan processing, both CEOs emphasized that human talent — particularly top-performing agents and loan officers — will become more valuable, not less.

“It’s not going to necessarily disrupt the originator,” Snyder said. “I get that asked all the time. It’ll disrupt the originator that can’t get any loans. If you’ve got a value proposition, if you’re a great Realtor, I think the AI will amplify talent more than ever, from engineering to origination.”

When Sanchez asked directly whether agents and loan officers would be replaced, Snyder was characteristically direct.

“I think the winners will win and the mediocre will go find a different industry because it’ll be a lot easier to make money somewhere else than in mortgage or real estate,” Snyder said.

Rediger agreed.

“I think AI is a tool that’ll elevate the high performers to a different echelon, and I think it’s going to reduce the number of total originators and total real estate agents,” he said.

Ground game still matters

While the discovery layer is being upended, the relationship between agents and loan officers remains critical.

“We’ve fully integrated hundreds of these real estate teams across the country,” Snyder said. “One of our [main questions] is, can we win the ground game? We’re seeing a three-times conversion [increase] when distributing a lead to the local originator, believe it or not. And then with the capture, it’s working with that real estate team locally, and it’s working really well.”

Rediger, meanwhile, is focused on a different operational challenge by attempting to understand the economics of AI itself.

“What we’re building is really observability — understanding how we’re actually using AI and how our engineers are using AI and how we’re going to continue to not spend too much on those tokens,” he said. “I think [it’s about] understanding how you’re actually implementing it — and then you can start translating on a per-token basis to the products you’re actually pushing to market.

“There are not really any products out there that have that. I know this is an operation answer, but it’s pretty cool to see this many tokens translated to this revenue increase with this product.”