This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Lorraine Schwarz, 70, a retiree who sold her two-bedroom condo in Westminster, Colorado, in October 2025 using Ridley, an AI-powered online platform, rather than a traditional agent. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
I've bought and sold real estate throughout my life.
My first real estate purchase was a co-op in Park Slope, Brooklyn. I sold that, then bought and sold two houses in Westchester, New York. Then I moved to Madison, Wisconsin, renovated that house, sold it, moved to Colorado to build a house, and then moved into a condo.
Through all that, I hated paying real estate commissions. I think I have a fairly good sense of how to price real estate, having bought and sold real estate, and understanding the way comps are used. So I wasn't intimidated by the process at all, to be honest.
I've owned my condo in Westminster, Colorado, for about seven or eight years.
I bought it after I got a divorce, and it wasn't going to be a permanent home. I found a brand new development where I could build a house that was perfectly set up for me as I age, because it's all on one level.
There was an article that came out about Ridley and the founder, Mike Chambers, and his experience in Boulder. Ridley is an AI-powered platform that helps homeowners sell their homes without paying traditional real estate commissions.
As soon as I read it, I went, "Oh my God, this is brilliant. This is exactly what I've been saying all along." So I became a fan of Ridley even before I had decided to sell my condo.
When it was time to sell my condo, I needed a platform that could list it on the MLS, the database that real estate agents use to market properties. I knew that if I were on the MLS, it would appear on platforms like Zillow and Redfin, which I believed would do most of the work of attracting buyers.
The technology in real estate hasn't caught up yet #
I come from the finance industry, where the cost of transactions has come down so dramatically.
It seems to me that real estate is probably the biggest transaction that we still go through in our lives, where technology and competition have not brought down commissions as much as I think they should have.
The internet has changed how you look for a house. It's made shopping and looking for a house much, much easier. You don't need to rely on a real estate agent to drive you around all day long just to be able to look at something.
You can look at a million houses online, narrow it down, and go, "Oh yeah, OK, I want to go and see this house."
There are lots of people, like me, who have been around the block and done this enough to know that we can handle this.
I didn't need the extra help selling my home, but other people still might #
I knew that I needed to get my place in front of as many eyeballs as possible. As far as pricing was concerned, I was already extremely comfortable with what my place was worth.
I had the advantage of being the president of our HOA, and I lived in a complex with 64 units. I knew every unit that had sold and what it sold for. I knew what was on the market currently, so I knew how to price my condo.
Ridley's pricing was pretty much spot on. It was exactly what I thought. At the time, I was already under contract to buy this new house that was being built. So I was not trying to get cute with pricing because I didn't want to wait two to three months for a sale.
I knew how to price my unit so it would get people in the door; I was dead on, and Ridley's pricing basically confirmed it.
I went live with that listing on a Wednesday morning, the first buyers came through that day, and I had a full-price offer of $425,000 that night.
Ridley really walks you through all the questions you need to answer to generate a listing. Some of the terminology gets a little technical, and a Ridley agent was able to answer a couple of questions I had in terms of just how the real estate industry wants certain things checked off before you get on the MLS. For the most part, though, I did 99% of it myself. I also used ChatGPT to help write the listing.
If I had done the traditional buyer-and-seller agent model and paid a 5% commission, my commission costs would've been $21,250. With Ridley, in total, I paid about $5,000 with the cost of the AI-powered service along with staging, photos, and all that. *[Editor's note: Schwarz paid $2,999 for Ridley's pro plan, which now costs $3,999.] *
If you want to add on having an agent hold your hand a little bit, you can pay for that service, which I did. It was good that I didn't have to communicate directly with the buyers — the agent acted as the intermediary — so it worked out having somebody in the middle. But in retrospect, I probably could have done without that, too.
Now, that's not to say that first-time homebuyers won't want to use a real estate agent because a lot of people just aren't comfortable or familiar enough with the process, and don't feel capable themselves of doing it.
My daughter and son-in-law just bought a house, and they worked with a real estate agent. They're new to this. They didn't know how to do any of this, and they certainly weren't going to ask Mom.
In the investing world, you have lots of different options. In the real estate world, up until now, you have not really had any options. It's always been that you have to use a real estate agent.
It makes sense given the technology that is out there. It makes sense given how many people have already bought and sold real estate over the course of their lifetime. You feel like, "I kind of know how to do this."