‘Sounds like competition to me’: Sizing up Google’s real estate play at the AI Summit

The traditional path to homeownership — from portal search to real estate agent to loan officer — is being rapidly rewired by artificial intelligence (AI), and the industry’s biggest players want to be first through the new front door.That was the central theme of a packed session Tuesday at HousingWire‘s AI Summit in Dallas, where Diego Sanchez, president of HW Media, sat down with Dan Snyder, CEO of Lower, and Chris Rediger, CEO of HouseCanary. The trio explored how AI is reshaping discovery, lead generation and the mortgage process itself.Snyder’s company has been aggressively acquiring assets to build an end-to-end platform. He opened by describing the logic behind Lower’s recent purchases of Movoto, the fifth-largest real estate portal, and NeatLabs, a venture-backed point-of-sale loan operating system. “What we’re trying to do is form one path — search to close,” Snyder said. “Essentially, our consumer goes in the front door; Movoto, whether it’s to Movoto.com or through AI, we’ll see what happens there. Then, how do you embed the financing? How do you ultimately get the loan closed and make the human talent shine?” Snyder acknowledged that the industry is at an inflection po...