How AI Agents Will Use ChatMLS — Nearby Homes and What’s Next

In our first note we introduced ChatMLS as “ChatGPT for the MLS” — an assistant you talk to in plain English. This one is about the part we’re most excited about, and it has two audiences: you, the agent, and your AI.

Because here’s where the industry is actually heading. The next few years won’t just be about humans typing into a chat box. They’ll be about agents talking to agents — your AI assistant, a buyer’s ChatGPT, a brokerage’s automation — all needing a trustworthy way to ask the MLS a question and get a real answer back. ChatMLS is built to be that doorway, on your terms.

It’s an agent, not a chatbot

The difference between a chatbot and an agent is simple: a chatbot answers, an agent acts. Under the hood, ChatMLS gives the AI a couple dozen real tools it can choose to use on your behalf — search the latest homes, pull full listing detail and photos, compare properties side by side, fetch market stats, school ratings and neighborhood data, generate a home-value report, run a seller-equity estimate, find buyers in your CRM that match a listing, save a buyer’s criteria, set a reminder, draft and send a listing video, spin up a marketing campaign, and write up a session summary.

You never see the machinery. You ask for something, and the agent quietly picks the right tools, in the right order, and comes back with the result. That’s what makes “make a video of me showing 123 Oak St to the Chens and email it to them” a single sentence instead of a forty-minute afternoon.

On the horizon: an MLS your AI can talk to

Here’s where we think this goes next. Picture asking your own AI assistant, “what 4-bed homes are available in Torrance under $1.2M?” — and getting back real property cards drawn from the latest listings, not a hallucinated guess. We’re building ChatMLS so that other AI can query listings through a clean, structured interface (think a ChatGPT-style integration), and we expect that doorway to open as MLSes come onboard with conversational access. It’s a near-future possibility — and a big part of why we’re building now.

This matters more than it sounds. Generic AI can write you a beautiful listing description, but it has no idea what’s actually available today — and a confidently wrong “still available” answer on a pending home destroys client trust instantly. The vision for ChatMLS is to be the layer that makes an AI property-accurate: the latest homes, the right status, gated behind your IDX agreement so listings stay under your control instead of leaking onto someone else’s platform. Getting there depends on MLSes choosing to support it — and we think the forward-looking ones will.

Built today: Nearby Homes

Some of what follows is still on the workbench — but not this one. Nearby Homes is built and working right now. It turns “what’s around me?” into a single tap: ChatMLS reads your location, works out the ZIP and city you’re standing in, and pulls the latest homes right there — instantly.

Think about how wild that is. You can park outside a house, pull it up by address, and fan out to the latest homes around it — without typing a single filter. At an open house, a visitor loves the street but not the floor plan; one tap and you’re showing them three more a few doors down before they drive off to find them on a portal. Driving a buyer through a neighborhood they like? “Show me everything for sale around here,” keyed to exactly where you’re standing.

What’s next on the roadmap

We’re building in the open with the agents who are trying it. A few of the things on our list:

• Saved-search alerts & the morning briefing — ChatMLS watches the market overnight and hands you (and the right buyers) the fresh matches with your coffee.
• The concierge that talks back — a live, face-to-face AI video call for hands-free buyer consults, plus personalized listing videos in your own likeness and voice.
• Two-way client comms — an SMS inbox where the AI fields the easy questions and you flip a switch to take over the moment it matters.
• Deeper CRM and agent-directory connections — tighter Followup Boss sync today, with a real agent-lookup endpoint on the way.
• Campaign generation — take a new listing and get a full marketing package (email, social, a video script, matched buyers) drafted for your review.

Some of this is shipped, some is in testing, and some is still a sketch on the whiteboard. We’re sharing it because the agents who tell us what they need now are the ones who’ll shape what ships.

Future product ideas: agents you can see and hear

Now let us paint where this goes once the consumer version arrives. The technology we’re most excited about is live, real-time avatars — an on-screen agent your clients can actually talk to, face to face, that looks and sounds human and answers in the moment.

Picture the public, MLS-compliant version of ChatMLS — a consumer-safe slice of the far more powerful agent app — greeting your clients with an avatar that carries the entire current market in memory, plus a couple of years of solds. It can field a buyer’s question at midnight and never get a price or a status wrong.

And here’s the part that makes it unmistakably yours: voice and likeness clones of you. We’re working toward rapidly cloning our agents’ faces and voices, so that when a client talks to the public version of ChatMLS, they see and hear your agent — not a generic bot. Your face. Your voice. Your market knowledge, on call around the clock.

To be clear, this is forward-looking — part of the consumer-facing future that depends on MLS approval. But the building blocks are real today: real-time avatars, fast voice and likeness cloning, and a model that knows your market cold. We intend to be ready the moment that door opens.

Our hope

I think the most valuable thing an agent can own in the AI era is the interface to their own market — and the relationship that runs through it. Portals are racing to make home search a conversation on their domains, keep your buyer, and sell that buyer back to you as a lead. Our hope for ChatMLS is the opposite: that your co-pilot today — and, once the MLSes are ready, your clients’ search tomorrow — runs on your site, behind your MLS agreement, and answers to you.

Want the honest comparison to everything else out there? Read how ChatMLS stacks up against the field. Or start at the beginning with the introduction.