Inman News  created an experiment that put a buyer’s agent against a robot (bot for short).

The bot won – hands down; or did she?

The bot was better at picking out a property the buyer would like than the buyer’s agent was.  If this is really true, we can be replaced by technology, but Iman’s experiment had some deep flaws that made me even more sure that great real estate professionals matter!

With science in my background I thought I had better take a deep look at Inman’s scientific method since these results are very important to the real estate industry.

Here’s what I found:  Inman designed an experiment that excluded all the value a human being brings to a real estate transaction.

The bot and the buyer’s agent were merely given an MLS # of a home that the buyer liked and asked to find three other homes that would likely suit that buyer.

So this was really an experiment to see whether the buyer’s agent or the bot could search a database more effectively given finite information.  Duh – nothing new here; we all know that technology is awesome for stuff like this.

Are buyer’s agents needed? What technology can’t do is have a conversation and understand the nuances of a human being.

If real estate is just searching databases and filling in blanks on forms, we are done. Luckily, for us that’s not even the tip of the iceberg.

It really makes me wonder why Brad Inman, founder of Inman News and renowned internet entrepreneur, wasn’t interested featuring the value that a real estate agent brings to the transaction.

The details and results of the Inman News experiment can be found here.