According to The Wall Street Journal, real-estate developer John Nesbitt, 81, is trying to sell his 43,000-square-foot California estate for $70 million, a property he’s listed on and off since 2019. To find the most creative agents, he used an AI chatbot to compile and whittle down a list, landing on brothers Josh and Matthew Altman from Bravo’s “Million Dollar Listing.” The Altmans then commissioned a $25,000, AI-generated movie trailer in the style of “Game of Thrones,” featuring digital clones of themselves, knights in armor, and a dragon over the property’s polo field. The two-minute film was created by the No ID Agency, which used facial/body scans and voice cloning for the agents’ avatars. Despite the high-tech push, the agents also cut a traditional version of the video without any AI elements.
The Desperation Playbook
Here’s the thing about a $70 million house with 25 bathrooms and a helicopter hangar: your buyer pool is maybe five people on the entire planet. And after four years on the market, you’ve probably already called all of them. So what do you do? You create a spectacle. The Altmans are basically admitting that all the normal tools—virtual staging, drone footage—have failed. They need to break through the noise in a way that makes a billionaire think, “Huh, that’s different.” A medieval battle on the polo field is certainly different. It’s a Hail Mary pass, but when the listing commission is in the millions, a $25,000 video is a calculated risk. They’re not just selling square footage; they’re selling a fantasy of a lifestyle so epic it needs a dragon.
The Uncanny Valley of Trust
The most fascinating part of this whole stunt is the agents’ own awareness of the tightrope they’re walking. Josh Altman openly talks about the “delicate dance” with false advertising. You can’t show a movie theater that isn’t there. But can you show AI knights jousting in a room to “show how it feels when it’s full of people”? That’s a much grayer area. The Gartner analyst in the article nails it: success depends on “clear transparency.” But let’s be real. Is the average viewer of a slick, Hollywood-style trailer going to instinctively know what’s real footage and what’s a synthetic creation? Probably not. The risk is that the wow factor of the AI could backfire, making the whole property feel like a digital illusion rather than a tangible, buyable asset. It’s a massive bet on the audience’s sophistication.
AI as a Brutal Funnel
Before the dragon ever took flight, AI was already working behind the scenes in a more practical, and frankly, brutal way. Nesbitt used it to find his agents. Think about that. He didn’t ask friends or look at sales records. He had an AI compile a list of the “most creative” agents and then used more prompts to narrow it down. That’s a cold, algorithmic firing of the starting pistol. It shows a fundamental shift in how services are being sourced at the high end. Reputation is now data to be scraped and analyzed by a chatbot. For the agents who landed the gig, it’s a great story. For the hundreds it filtered out? It’s a quiet, automated rejection. AI isn’t just for creating content; it’s becoming the gatekeeper for opportunity itself.
Is This the Future or a Fad?
So, is this the beginning of a revolution in real estate marketing? The Altmans say yes. I’m skeptical. For a one-of-a-kind, nine-figure listing, a $25,000 bespoke AI film might become a niche tool. But the article notes that a typical video for a property this size costs around $3,500. That’s a huge gap. This isn’t a scalable model for your average $2 million condo. It’s a loss leader and a PR stunt for the agents as much as it is a sales tool. The real test won’t be whether the video gets views (it will), but whether it finds the single entity willing to write that $70 million check. If it does, every luxury agent will want an AI dragon. If it doesn’t, it’ll be a crazy story they tell at conferences. Either way, it perfectly captures this moment: we’re dazzled by AI’s potential, throwing expensive experiments at old problems, and waiting to see what sticks.
