Can AI Sell Your Hamilton Home? What the $90K Headline Skips

There's a story going around right now that probably caught your eye if you own a home and have ever winced at the thought of paying commission. A New York Times reporter sold his house using Google's Gemini AI, skipped the agent, and walked away with about ninety thousand dollars more than he expected. Another seller in Florida used ChatGPT and closed near a million. The takeaway everyone is sharing: AI is going to replace your realtor, and you're a sucker if you pay commission.

I want to talk about that honestly, because the headline is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

Where the myth comes from, and why it makes sense

I get why this lands. Commission is real money. On a $750,000 Hamilton home, a standard 5% total comes to $37,500, and once you add Ontario's 13% HST on that, you're looking at more like $42,000. Nobody hands that over without feeling it. So when a smart tech reporter says he did the whole thing with a chatbot and a lawyer and saved a pile, of course it spreads. It taps into a feeling a lot of homeowners already have: what am I actually paying for?

That's a fair question. It deserves a real answer, not a defensive one.

What the data and the fine print actually show

Here's the part the headline skips. In both of those stories, the homes sold for well over what anyone predicted. The AI didn't create that. The market did. Buyers competed, multiple offers came in, and the price went up. The chatbot wrote a nice listing and helped organize the process, but the money came from demand, not from software.

Then there's the Canadian reality, which is different from the American one. Private sellers here cannot list on the MLS themselves. Realtor.ca and the MLS are where the vast majority of buyers and their agents are looking, and access runs through a licensed brokerage. There are flat-fee posting services that'll put you on there for a few hundred bucks, and those exist for a reason, but they don't price your home, stage it, field the calls, or negotiate. In Ontario you're also legally required to use a real estate lawyer to close, and our rules under TRESA are not the same as the U.S. rules those AI tools were mostly trained on. The reporter himself admitted Gemini gave him wrong advice on a commission question. That's a small mistake in his case. On your biggest asset, a wrong answer about disclosure or your agreement of purchase and sale is not small.

For more on why this market is moving, I broke down the recent numbers in is Hamilton's housing market turning and what the national jump in sales meant for local sellers in Canadian home sales just jumped.

The smarter move if you own in the $600K to $800K range

If you're sitting on a Hamilton home in that range and thinking about moving up, the commission is honestly not where this gets won or lost. It's pricing and negotiation. Homes in Hamilton have been selling faster again, and when you price it right and offers stack up, that's exactly the moment where a few thousand in commission can turn into tens of thousands in your pocket, or out of it. I went deeper on that speed shift in homes are selling faster in Hamilton again.

And remember the move-up trap: you're not just selling, you're buying too. Get one side wrong on timing or price and the commission you saved disappears fast.

Doug's Take

I'll be straight with you, because not being straight would be the easy thing here. Selling on your own works for some people. If you've got the time, the stomach for it, and a simple sale, more power to you. But the AI story is being sold as proof that the job is basically done by a robot now, and that's not what those articles actually say when you read them. Those sellers did all the legwork themselves, hired lawyers, and got lucky with hot demand. The Competition Bureau is looking hard at commission rules in Canada, and I think that's healthy, because the question of value is fair. My answer to it isn't trust me. It's that the money in your move is in the strategy, and that's the part I'd want to earn. If a chatbot ever does that better than me, I'll tell you myself.

If you're thinking about making a move in Hamilton, I'd love to help you figure out what that actually looks like for your situation. Give me a call, send an email at doug@muircorealty.ca, or reach out through my website and I'll get back to you.

Doug Muir | Hamilton Realtor | Muir Co Realty

doug@muircorealty.ca | www.muircorealty.ca/contact