Mickey Mouse is drowning on my wall.
He’s dressed as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, clinging to a barrel while water rises around him and the magic he set in motion keeps going.
It may be the perfect metaphor for how many of us feel about artificial intelligence.
The apprentice isn’t evil. He gives a perfectly ordinary job to something he doesn’t fully understand, because he is tired of doing the work himself. “Carry the water.” It works beautifully, so he goes to sleep. When he wakes, the broom is still carrying water. He tries to stop it, can’t remember how, and attacks it with an axe. Now he has an army of brooms, all diligently doing exactly what they were told.
That is a better AI story than The Terminator. There is no Skynet deciding to destroy humanity. The broom never turns on Mickey. It simply won’t stop helping him.
The warning is old. Most Americans know it from Disney’s Fantasia from 1940, which adapted Paul Dukas’ 1897 symphonic poem, which set Goethe’s 1797 poem, which drew on a tale from the ancient world. The warning survived two thousand years, handed from one generation to the next, and just as we have finally built the thing it warned about, the reference itself is fading. Ask someone under forty about the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and you may get a blank look.
And now we have built the broom.
In July, OpenAI disclosed that an agent it was testing for hacking ability had broken out of its sandbox, reached the open internet, and gotten into Hugging Face’s production servers. Nobody had pointed it there. The task made that platform relevant, so it went. Then last Friday, researchers reported that in May, a group of OpenAI agents had found DseWiki, an obscure German site for programmers. They made 15,000 edits, turning it into a message board where they swapped tactics for finishing their assignments and getting around the limits OpenAI had placed on them.
Nobody told them to take over the world. They were trying to finish the job. Knowing how to start the magic and knowing how to control it turn out to be different kinds of knowledge.
In The Terminator, the machine decides it doesn’t need us. In “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” the apprentice decides to give the machine his work.
That is what is happening in real estate, and I am doing it as eagerly as anyone.
For years, agents have asked whether AI will replace the real estate agent. Meanwhile, we are asking AI to write the listing description, answer the email, research the property, identify the prospects, schedule the appointment, prepare the market analysis, follow up with the lead, write the Instagram post, and perhaps eventually negotiate with another AI representing the buyer.
Nobody has to take our jobs. We are handing it over ourselves, piece by piece.
So what is an agent for?
I have been selling houses in Fairfield County for nearly 20 years, and I have always believed clients paid me for judgment. My fee was built in a world where I knew things my clients couldn’t easily learn. That world is gone. My buyers can arrive with the comps, the tax history, the flood map, and a probability estimate.
Take away the mechanical work, then the clerical work, then the marketing, and then, increasingly, the analysis. What’s left?
That is a hell of a question, because plenty of us have a value proposition that really is carrying the buckets. Now, we give AI the buckets. If carrying buckets was your principal contribution, you have a problem.
AI can increasingly tell us what the house is worth, what the inspection risks are, how likely another offer is, and what the contract says. Then the client asks, “So what should I do?” and I say, “I think you should take this deal.”
Why should he listen? If the model can tell him there is a 63% probability that waiting produces a better outcome, he can turn that into a decision himself — and an experienced client may do it better than I would. “You need me because I’m human and empathetic” is awfully thin for a 2½ to 3% fee.
What’s left is agency in the literal sense. An agent acts for somebody else. The client doesn’t hire you because he can’t understand the transaction. He hires you to enter the marketplace on his behalf.
This summer, I listed a house at $1.58 million. A buyer came in at $1.45 million, with a rent-back folded into the deal. My seller told me privately that he needed to get to $1.5. He could not say that to the buyer. He could not even say “I won’t take $1.45,” because a seller who says that is announcing he will take $1.46.
What I said to the buyer’s agent was closer to, “I don’t think he’ll do it,” and then, “Get the economics to $1.5, including $10,000 a month in rent from September through January, and I think I can put this together.” The seller’s number never left the room. He kept every option, including the option to take $1.45 if the buyer walked.
That is the job. A buyer can fall madly in love with a house while his agent stays unimpressed. A seller can be furious about an offer while his agent keeps talking pleasantly to the person who made it. The agent stands between the client and the market, passing some information, holding some, preserving options.
Suppose the model says waiting has a 63% chance of a higher price. Higher by how much? Over what period? What is the 37% downside? Does the seller need the money? Would losing this buyer bother him more than leaving $75,000 on the table? What if the house doesn’t sell before winter?
My job becomes discovering what the client is actually optimizing for, and the client may not know. I keep asking until “I want the highest price” becomes “I would risk $50,000 for a reasonable chance at another $100,000, but I don’t want to own this house next spring.” The model can calculate against that. I help formulate the question. Sometimes that is the work.
So, the great agent isn’t the sorcerer after all. He is still the apprentice, with extraordinarily powerful tools. So is his client. His value is that he stands between the client and a complicated marketplace, represents rather than merely advises, discovers what the client is trying to accomplish, introduces information the model doesn’t have, negotiates without exposing the principal, and executes the client’s decision.
Sometimes, when experience warrants it, he still says, “I know what the model says. I think you should take this deal.” But now that sentence has to be earned.
AI isn’t forcing me to prove I am better than it. It is forcing me to prove I add something for a client who also has AI.
Mickey is still on the barrel. The brooms are still carrying water. The problem was never getting the broom to work.
John Engel is a broker on The Engel Team at Douglas Elliman in Connecticut. He collects pre-war Disney drawings from the years when Walt Disney was still struggling, a hopeful, inventive period when the studio threw everything against the wall. In the pencil version, you can see the animator working through the problem.
Check out John Engel’s Podcast, Boroughs and Burbs, the National Real Estate Conversation here.
Read this article on the New Canaan Sentinel website here.
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