1 in 3
Homebuyers who say a significant AI listing error would reduce their trust in the platform.
68%
The percentage of homebuyers who want clear notification when AI is involved in outputs.
44%
Buyers who would pay more for a human to verify AI outputs.
Tens of millions of buyers welcomed it in, fast and without much resistance. What they want from it next is the harder, more interesting question.
Fifty-five percent of homebuyers now use generative AI tools at least once a month. Three-quarters already assume AI is running somewhere inside the homebuying process — in property search, in valuations, in the rate quotes that appear on their screens. By those measures, the industry's AI moment has arrived in a big way.
But peel back the curtain to look beyond the surface-level acceptance, the numbers tell a different story.
Introduction
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Among prospective buyers in the United States, trust in AI tools to help find a home dropped nearly in half, from 30% in 2025 to 16% today. Preference for working with human professionals has risen across every major task: finding a mortgage, securing homeowners insurance, and navigating legal paperwork. Sixty-eight percent of buyers say they would manually verify every detail, or a significant amount, of anything an AI tool provides them in a housing context.
Buyers who once approached AI as a novelty now assess it the way they assess any other infrastructure: by whether its answers are accurate, transparent, and recoverable when it goes wrong. Familiarity, it turns out, creates standards rather than complacency.
The pattern holds across the four geographies in which we conducted our survey, though with meaningful variation. U.S. and Canadian buyers are more open to AI involvement in automated valuations and rate decisions than their United Kingdom and Australian counterparts. Millennials lead AI tool adoption and also lead willingness to pay for human verification of AI outputs. Gen Z is the most likely generation to gain confidence from AI's involvement in a transaction, and also among the most likely to invest in verifying what it produces. This finding comes on the heels of a Cotality survey last year that showed Gen Z losing confidence as they progressed into the buying journey. It appears AI can help ease that anxiety.
Although Baby Boomers report the most distrust of AI details, younger generations — especially Millennials — are more likely to invest in AI verification from expert professionals.
Generational reliance on human verification of AI outputs
Data source: Cotality survey, 2025
Technology has moved faster than trust in it has followed. AI adoption happened in the open; the trust deficit accumulated in missed moments. This Cotality report measures those gaps and opportunities precisely, by sector, by geography, and by generation.
The starting point is clear: AI is now being held to a higher standard, and closing the trust gap is now the defining market imperative entering 2026.
A 21-year-old recent buyer in the U.S. captured the sentiment plainly: she didn't want to take a risk when she had “in-person real individuals that have years of experience” to lean on. She was not so much dismissing AI as pricing the cost of being wrong.
What this report covers
Cotality's Q1 2026 housing trends research surveyed homebuyers in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and Australia between January 29 and February 9, 2026. The sample split between recent buyers (purchased within five years) and prospective buyers (planning to purchase within two to five years), with generational coverage across Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, and Baby Boomers.
The report is organized around six findings that have direct operational implications for lenders, brokers, insurers, regulators, and the wider property industry.
How is AI changing the housing market?
Overarching findings from a survey of recent and prospective homebuyers across the U.S., Canada, U.K., and Australia in Q1 2026.
- Lenders and brokers: Trust in AI tools is softening in a key segment — many ask about bias in automated valuation models. Your response affects customer retention measurably, and in a consistent direction.
- Insurers: You are already perceived as the heaviest users of invisible, background AI. That perception carries the largest share of the trust burden.
- Real estate professionals: Buyers are arriving better informed but less confident. The value of professional guidance when it comes to AI in real estate has shifted in terms of what it needs to deliver.
- Legal and compliance: Consumer expectation is pushing toward norms on disclosure and contestability. The data supports that direction with unusual clarity.
Disclosure starts here
How AI is reshaping the housing market
Industry implications
- Lenders and brokers: Standardize disclosure language across sites, broker portals, and customer communications. Inconsistency between channels reads as concealment.
- Insurers: Place disclosure at the precise moments when AI affects eligibility, coverage, or price. General statements about using data are not sufficient — buyers want to know when and how AI shaped the specific number in front of them.
- Legal and compliance: Draft disclosure language that works simultaneously as a consumer communication and as a defensible audit document — the two functions reinforce each other.
- Regulators: The data supports baseline rules and common definitions across the industry. One-off labeling approaches will produce a patchwork that satisfies no one, and older buyers are pushing for legal requirements — that pressure is measurable and growing.
- Real estate professionals: Align claims and disclosures in sales materials with buyer expectations that AI influence is flagged — particularly where AI-generated valuations or neighborhood assessments appear in listing materials.
Like most disruptive innovations, AI has shifted quickly from novelty to expectation. Three in four buyers say they think it is playing a role in the homebuying process, both through visible interactive tools and the invisible backend algorithms working underneath. And it is easy to see why. Property search sites now serve up precise recommendations in seconds, and 86% of buyers assume that is AI at work. Prequalification mortgage rates appear on the fly. Insurance quotes arrive at a speed once impossible through human underwriting alone.
It is little surprise, then, that more than 80% of buyers attribute this pace to artificial intelligence. Even government housing bodies, hardly known for cutting-edge automation, are assumed to use AI by 74% of buyers. The assumption that AI is already powering much of today’s real estate industry is broad, and shared across generations.
But the mental model buyers carry on AI involvement is more nuanced than a simple yes or no. They distinguish between two roles: foreground AI — tools they interact with directly for search, comparison, and valuation — and background AI that makes decisions about them, including insurance underwriting and lender risk scoring. Property websites score highest for visible, foreground use. Insurers take the top position for invisible, data-driven use, where algorithms act for consumers without their direct engagement.
That distinction carries real commercial weight. Being perceived as an AI-driven process but without clear insight into how it works places insurers at the sharpest end of disclosure scrutiny — and likely first in line should regulatory norms around transparency tighten.
A 32-year-old Millennial future buyer in the UK clearly described the overarching preference of survey respondents for visible AI involvement: she wanted to actively engage in research and decision-making, with the ability to explore different options, ask questions, and receive personalized insights — specifically because having that “sense of control” mattered when the stakes were this high.
"I prefer foreground AI for the homebuying process because it allows me to actively engage in research and decision-making," the 32-year-old Millennial future buyer in the UK said. "I'd feel more confident knowing I'm fully informed and have the ability to explore different options, ask questions, and get personalized insights. It's important for me to have that sense of control, especially for something as big as buying a home."
It is no longer enough to simply say AI is powering insights. Buyers assume AI is present, and 68% say clear notification whenever AI generates a listing, price, or mortgage recommendation is either very important or even a legal requirement. That figure rises sharply with age: 61% of Baby Boomers say it should be legally mandated. Among Gen Z — the cohort most comfortable with AI in every other context — that figure is 25%. But even younger generations are emphatic that notification matters; they simply express it through expectation rather than legislation.
Buyers know AI is in the system. They want to be told precisely when and how it is shaping the specific decision in front of them. Assumed presence and demanded transparency sit comfortably in the same mind — they are not contradictory impulses, they are sequential ones.
Some in the industry have been treating disclosure as a branding question — whether to mention AI as a feature. This misses the point. Buyers have moved on to a governance question: whether they can see, understand, and contest what AI is doing to their options. A 33-year-old Millennial future buyer in the UK put it succinctly: “I trust AI to an extent but would like to make the decisions myself. I think AI is still at the stage where its output needs to be checked manually.”
The geographic picture adds texture. U.S. and Canadian buyers show higher overall acceptance of AI involvement than their UK and Australian counterparts. UK buyers score higher on demanding human involvement across legal assistance and insurance tasks — a market where professional trust hierarchies remain strong. For companies operating across multiple markets, disclosure strategy needs to flex by geography, as well as by product.
