Three separate surveys released within months of each other in 2026, from Veterans United, NerdWallet, and Cotality, describe the same shape when laid side by side: AI usage among homebuyers keeps climbing every time someone measures it, while trust in what that AI actually produces stays flat or falls. No single survey makes that case on its own. Together, they describe a pattern rather than a one-time finding.
Usage climbs every quarter
Veterans United tracks AI adoption among prospective buyers through its quarterly AI Homebuying Survey, and its most recent release found 45% of prospective buyers have used AI tools in their homebuying process, up eight points from the same quarter a year earlier. The growth isn't concentrated in one use case. Buyers are turning to AI to search for homes (52%, up five points), estimate monthly mortgage payments (43%), and check property values (39%), each figure higher than the quarter before it.
That growth comes with a boundary buyers are drawing for themselves. A separate Veterans United product, its quarterly State of Mind Survey, independently arrived at the same 45% usage figure (up from 40% the prior quarter, its fourth straight quarter of growth) and found that 77% of respondents agreed AI should function as a supporting tool rather than the primary decision-maker in a home purchase. Two different survey instruments landing on the same adoption number, while also capturing that guardrail, is a stronger signal than either finding alone. Usage is expanding into more parts of the process, but the buyers doing the expanding aren't handing over the actual decision.
Forward-looking buyers expect the same pattern to continue
NerdWallet's 2026 Home Buyer Report was conducted with The Harris Poll as a nationally representative survey. It found that 48% of Americans who plan to buy a home in the next 12 months expect to use AI tools somewhere in the process. Twenty-seven percent said they'd use AI specifically to estimate housing costs, and 26% said they'd use it for general guidance through the homebuying process. The survey captures intent rather than retrospective behavior, prospective buyers describing what they plan to do before they've started, which suggests the usage climb Veterans United is measuring in real time has more room to run.
Confidence hasn't kept pace
Set next to those adoption numbers, Cotality's AI in Housing 2026 report supplies the other half of the picture. Overall buyer confidence in navigating the homebuying process fell from 83% to 72% year over year, and trust in AI specifically to help find or evaluate a home dropped from 30% to 16% over the same period, even as three in four buyers now assume AI touches their transaction somewhere. Adoption climbs in every survey that tracks it, a trend Cotality's own confidence data doesn't share.
The pattern underneath three separate surveys
Read together, the three surveys describe buyers outsourcing the early, research-heavy parts of homebuying, search, cost estimation, general guidance, to AI at a steadily increasing rate, while reserving the actual financial and legal decisions for a person they trust. That's a more specific claim than "buyers like AI" or "buyers don't trust AI." It's a structural split between the research phase and the decision phase, and it lines up closely with the specific complaint first-time buyers keep raising about arriving at a closing table confidently informed by a chatbot and still needing someone to explain what any of it actually means for their situation.
None of the three surveys was designed with the others in mind, which is part of why the agreement matters. A quarterly lender survey, an annual consumer-finance survey, and a national property-data survey rarely measure the same thing the same way. When all three point toward the same widening gap between how often buyers use AI and how much they trust what it tells them, that's a harder pattern to dismiss as one report's framing, and a stronger anchor for whatever survey on this topic breaks next.
