The Selzer Group

  How AI Is Changing the Home Search — and How to Make It Work for You For most of the internet era, searching for a home meant the same ritual: set your price cap, pick a number of bedrooms, check a few boxes, and scroll. Then the real work started — sifting through pages of results, opening listing after listing, digging for the details that actually mattered. That ritual is quietly starting to give way. Today, a fast-growing share of home searches begin as a conversation: someone typing "find me a home where my mom could live with us, near a park, under our budget" into an AI assistant and getting real answers back. Nearly half of prospective buyers now say they're using AI tools somewhere in the homebuying process.¹ And this isn't happening off in a corner of the tech world. In late 2025, Zillow became the first real estate app built directly into ChatGPT. Actual listings, with photos, maps, and prices, now surface inside the chat itself.² The other major portals ...

2026 Mid-Year Market Check-In: What the First Half of the Year Tells Us About Your Next Move For the past two years, a lot of people have been waiting on the housing market to do one specific thing: drop rates dramatically and "unfreeze." That was the plan for buyers and sellers alike. I'll move when rates come down. That big drop never fully arrived. And the market changed anyway. It didn't unfreeze. It thawed. Slowly. Halfway through 2026, buyers in many markets have more homes to choose from, more time to decide, and more room to negotiate than they've had in years. Sellers are adjusting to a slower, more selective market. It's not a perfectly balanced market everywhere. But compared to the pandemic-era bidding wars, and the frozen, locked-up market that followed them, it looks a lot more balanced. Nobody rings a bell when a market becomes more negotiable. Booms and crashes make headlines; a market quietly returning to normal doesn't. So conside...

When most people picture negotiating on a home, they picture one number: the list price. You offer somewhere under the asking price, the seller counters, you settle in the middle, and whoever gives up the most ground "loses." For a lot of buyers, that back-and-forth over the sale price is the negotiation. It's only a fraction of it. The price is the headline. The real negotiation happens in the terms underneath it, and right now, those terms are where the money is. Buyers have more room to ask than they've had in years. The market has tilted in their favor, and it's showing up at the closing table: in 2025, 62.2% of buyers paid below the list price, and the typical below-list buyer saved 7.9%, about $31,592, the biggest discount in over a decade.¹ So here's what actually separates the buyers who come out ahead. It isn't the ones who push hardest on the price. It's the ones who understand everything that's on the table and know which things are ...

  2026 Home Design Trends: What's In, What's Out, and What Buyers Are Responding To After a decade of cool grays, crisp whites, and spaces that looked more like showrooms than homes, buyers have changed what they're looking for. Call it quiet luxury — the idea that richness comes from depth, craft, and intention rather than flash and excess. It's not maximalism. It's a shift toward spaces that feel like somewhere you'd actually want to live. That shift is showing up in buyer data, listing descriptions, and design reports across the board. Here's what it looks like in practice — and what it means if you're thinking about selling your home. What's In Color Is Back — And It's Warmer Than You Think Photo by Bummer Lamb Design & Fine Furnishings The all-gray interior isn't just tired. Buyers have moved on. The biggest shift in Zillow listing descriptions over the last year has been a surge in "color drenching" — coating walls,...