Cab Drivers breathe a little deeper. Those autonomous vehicles may not replace you as quickly as you thought. WAYMO cars piling up on suburban cul-de-sacs is not necessarily the best argument for driverless cars and this week's article about how a writer for The New York Times sold his home using A.I. comes with a little twist not mentioned in the article.

Yes, a tech writer for The New York Times wrote a detailed article about how he ran an experiment to sell his home using multiple A.I tools. It worked!  He did it!  He explained how using A.I tools answered almost every question he had about the process, listing, pricing, writing listing descriptions, photography, scheduling showings, e-mail correspondence, negotiating tactics, finding and hiring a real estate lawyer, the works! He spent many, many hours doing all of this successfully and achieved a price that he calculated was a bit lower than what he might have achieved without a LISTING agent. Yes, he also had to learn all about the new laws around disclosures and paying commissions. And a buyer's agent helped seal the deal. He lamented not having someone to hold his hand to guide him, to help manage nerves, anxieties, bumps in the road, etc. See, your days are numbered real estate agents! Not so fast.

After re-reading the article, I noticed one thing that was missing, a critical item, perhaps? This very tech-savvy home seller did not clock all the hours he spent doing all this research and work. He did not clock the hours doing showings, negotiations, inspections, appraisals, staging, preparing, and showing appointments, etc. None of that. And why?  He was being paid as a writer by The New York Times? Now, some may argue that the cost of this time for someone to do all that he did should be no more than $30/hour. I disagree, but let's assume that's an acceptable income. What he did not think about is how much most people could be earning while doing all this home-selling-stuff, those not being paid by The New York Times.

A minor detail, but maybe the most important one?  Time is the last luxury. Time is also money. Time spent working doing what you do to make a living usually delivers more dollars than the potential A.I savings a do-it-yourself sale delivers. Penny-wise, pound-foolish perhaps? Now I'm going to write an article about how to sell real estate using A.I so I don't have to pay for a subscription to the New York Times. Those pesky writers, they earn too much, and I too can write for myself!