Selling one’s home is an arduous process — setting a competitive price, promoting the property online and managing all the legal paperwork & negotiations that come with it can drive anyone mad.
In this current day and age where AI is being used in all facets of life, home sellers are tapping into the tools that are specifically made to help homeowners with their real estate affairs. Most AI deniers would scoff at the thought of injecting AI into their home selling situations. But there’s an abundance of companies, like Zillow, Redfin and Realtor.com, that are tapping into the popular tech to optimize everything that goes into marketing and selling homes.
The question of “can AI sell your home?” has already been answered with a resounding “yes!” now that Ridley, an AI home selling platform, has emerged. Simply pay a visit to the Ridley YouTube channel to watch testimonials from people who’ve successfully used it (one woman told her story of saving $10,000 while selling her home).
Mike Chambers, the CEO behind that clever creation, spoke with us to provide the backstory on Ridley’s creation and the way it's transformed the way families sell their homes and eliminated the need for an agent to assist them.
Chambers gives his thoughts on the inspiration behind Ridley, the future of AI in real estate and more
Tom’s Guide: What inspired the creation of Ridley?
Mike Chambers: Ridley grew out of my own experience trying to sell a home in Colorado in late 2024. I was facing more than $140,000 in commissions and could not reconcile that cost with the value I expected to receive.
I decided to sell the home myself and document the process on social media. The story went viral, and I heard from thousands of homeowners across the country who shared the same basic frustration: the traditional process was extraordinarily expensive, needlessly opaque, and difficult to navigate without surrendering a significant portion of the home’s value.
It seemed crazy that in the age of AI there was still no centralized platform capable of helping consumers understand the process, coordinate the work, and make informed decisions from beginning to end. So I decided to build it.
Tom’s Guide: What do you think is the single biggest misconception people have about using AI to sell a home?
Chambers: The biggest misconception is that using AI means handing an important financial transaction over to an unpredictable chatbot.
Many people’s mental model of AI was formed by their earliest experiences with general-purpose models, when hallucinations were more common and the systems had very little context about the user or the task. But a purpose-built real estate system is fundamentally different.
The goal is not to let AI make consequential decisions without oversight. It is to give consumers a system that understands their transaction, organizes the relevant information, explains their options, identifies what needs attention, and helps them execute each step. The homeowner remains in control; the AI makes the process far more manageable.
Tom’s Guide: What’s one part of the home-selling process that you think AI does dramatically better than humans today? And what is one part you think it still struggles with?
Chambers: AI is exceptionally good at coordination and information synthesis.
A home sale generates a ton of fragmented information: contracts, disclosures, inspection findings, deadlines, offers, contingencies, communications, and financial calculations. AI can process all of it continuously, maintain awareness of the full transaction, and explain what matters without losing context from one step to the next.
What it does less well is provide emotional reassurance. Selling a home can be stressful, deeply personal, and occasionally adversarial. A skilled human can recognize hesitation, navigate a sensitive negotiation, and understand the emotional weight of a decision in ways AI still cannot fully replicate.
That is part of the reason Ridley offers a plan with a human in the loop. The goal is not to pretend AI is equally good at everything. It is to let AI handle the complexity, coordination, and information processing, while making human judgment and support available at the moments when they are genuinely valuable.
Tom’s Guide: If someone were to give ChatGPT and Ridley’s AI the same home-selling scenario, what would Ridley know that a general AI chatbot wouldn’t?
Chambers: ChatGPT is an extraordinarily capable general-purpose model, but it does not inherently know the complete state of a particular real estate transaction.
Ridley Intelligence maintains persistent transaction-state awareness. It understands the property, the participants, the contracts, the deadlines, the disclosures, the inspection findings, the communications, the decisions that have already been made, and what needs to happen next.
That continuity is critical. Ridley is not responding to each question as though it were the beginning of a new conversation. It carries the full history of the transaction forward, reasons from that context, and can take actions on the consumer’s behalf such as preparing documents, coordinating next steps, tracking deadlines, and communicating with the relevant parties.
The difference is similar to stopping a lawyer on the street and asking for general advice about your case versus working with the lawyer who has read every document, followed every conversation, understands what has already happened, and knows exactly where the matter stands today.
Tom’s Guide: What’s something AI has taught you and your team about how people actually buy and sell homes that surprised you?
Chambers: We learned that the greatest source of anxiety is often not the complexity of any individual step. It is the uncertainty created by not knowing what is happening, what comes next, or whether something important is being missed.
The industry tends to assume that consumers primarily need expertise delivered through a person. What many consumers actually need is persistent context: a clear explanation of where they are in the process, what each decision means, and what action is required next.
When people have that visibility, they are capable of doing far more themselves than the traditional industry gives them credit for.
Tom’s Guide: If you were selling your own home tomorrow, what's one AI-powered strategy you'd use that most homeowners aren't taking advantage of yet?
Chambers: If I were selling my home tomorrow, I’d use Ridley. That’s the obvious founder answer, but it’s also why I built it.
There are a few places where it can really improve the outcome: pricing the home, deciding what is actually worth fixing before it goes to market, using our AI marketing engine to reach more qualified buyers, and understanding which offer is genuinely the strongest.
Once the sale is underway, Ridley maintains awareness of the entire transaction. It knows what has happened, what has been agreed to, which deadlines are approaching, and what decisions still need to be made. That means its guidance is grounded in the reality of your specific sale, rather than generic advice.
It also handles much of the transaction coordination, making sure the right documents, information, and next steps reach the right people at the right time.
That is the real promise of AI in real estate. Not a chatbot sitting on the sidelines, but an intelligent system helping run the sale from beginning to end.
Tom’s Guide: Looking ahead five years from now, what parts of today's real estate process do you think will completely disappear because of AI?
Chambers: When you strip it down, a real estate agent typically plays two primary roles: transaction coordinator and strategic advisor.
Over the next five years, I think most of the coordination work will disappear into the software. Tracking deadlines, moving documents between parties, scheduling inspections, following up with lenders and title companies, and making sure everyone knows what happens next are all things AI can do extremely well.
The strategic advisory role will remain, but it will change. There will still be moments when sellers want an experienced person to help with pricing, negotiation, or a difficult judgment call. The difference is that consumers will be able to access that expertise when they need it, rather than paying a percentage of their home’s value for it to be bundled with a large amount of administrative work.
I do not think real estate agents disappear. I think the traditional job gets unbundled, and the parts that remain become more specialized, more transparent, and far less expensive.
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