Ed 
I connected Claude to the live Austin MLS feed through my own server, and the free version will pull up to 25 active listings from the last 30 days for you right now, for nothing. These are the five prompts I actually run against it. Not a list of clever things you could ask. The five I paste in almost every week, because they save me real time.
Lets get one thing out of the way first. When I say Claude is looking at the MLS, I mean the actual active listings, the same feed I see as a broker, not whatever Zillow decided to show you three days late. I built the connector because I got tired of AI confidently making up prices (I wrote a whole rant about why I use Claude instead of ChatGPT for real estate if you want the long version). The free tier is honest about its limits, and I am going to be honest about them too, because half of getting value out of this is knowing what it can and cannot do.
So here is the plan. Five prompts, copy and paste ready. For each one I will show you the prompt, then tell you what comes back and why it actually matters. At the end I will tell you the stuff it flat out cannot do, because that part matters just as much.
First, the two minute setup
You need Claude Pro or Max (or ChatGPT Plus, the connector works there too). Open Settings, go to Connectors, click Add Custom Connector, and paste in the connector from the Austin MLS MCP page. Complete the free sign up with your name, email, and phone and you are done. Takes about two minutes, and I promise that is the hardest part of this whole post.
The free tier gives you live active listings from the last 30 days, full detail on any of them, and up to 25 results per search. You get 10 searches an hour, 100 a month. That is plenty for a buyer, plenty for a nosy neighbor, and enough for an agent to test drive before deciding if the paid stuff is worth it. If you want the full walkthrough of building this into a daily routine, I put together a complete guide to running a realtor daily brief with Claude.
Prompt 1: The buyer search triage
Search the Austin MLS for active listings in Leander with 3 or more bedrooms under $600,000. Show me the ones that have been on the market the longest first, with address, price, beds, baths, square footage, and days on market. Skip anything that has only been listed a few days.
What comes back is a clean, ranked list of homes that fit the box, oldest listings on top. And that ordering is the whole trick. The house that has been sitting for 70 days is telling you something the fresh listing is not. Maybe it is priced wrong, maybe the photos are bad, maybe there is a real problem, or maybe the seller is just now getting motivated. I do not know which one yet, but that is exactly the house I want to go look at first, right. When a buyer sends me a Zillow link to the shiny new listing everyone is fighting over, I run this instead and we usually find two or three homes nobody else is paying attention to. That is where the deal is.
Prompt 2: The market temperature check before a listing appointment
Pull every active listing in ZIP 78641 right now. Tell me how many there are, the range from lowest to highest asking price, and roughly how long the typical one has been sitting. Group them by price band if it helps.
Now, I need to be straight with you here, because this is where people get the free tier wrong. It will not hand you a tidy “median list price is $X” number. Computed market stats like medians and inventory trends live on the paid tier. But you do not actually need a median to read the room. What you need is the raw picture, and the free tier gives you that. How many homes are competing, how wide the price spread is, and whether they are moving or stacking up. I glance at this before a listing appointment so I walk in already knowing if the seller is in a crowded lane or has the block to themselves. It is the difference between “here is what the market is doing” and “I think the market is probably doing something.” Sellers can tell which one you are.
Prompt 3: The address deep dive before a showing
Give me the full listing detail for 1234 Example Trail in Austin. Everything you have: price, beds, baths, square footage, lot, year built, HOA, taxes, listing remarks, and how long it has been on the market.
This one only works if the home is currently listed (free tier is active listings only, remember), but when it is, you get the whole record in one shot instead of scrolling three different apps. I read the listing remarks out loud in the car on the way to a showing. The remarks are where the listing agent either oversells or accidentally tells on the house. “Cozy” means small. “Motivated seller” means exactly what you hope it means. “As is” means bring a contractor and your imagination. Claude will not read between those lines for you, that part is still my job, but having every fact in front of me before I open the front door means I am not standing in the kitchen fumbling for the square footage while my buyer stares at me.
Prompt 4: Comparing two suburbs for a relocation buyer
Pull the active listings in Leander and in Georgetown, both with 4 bedrooms between $450,000 and $650,000. For each town show me how many there are, the price range, and what the square footage looks like. I want to compare what my money buys in each place.
Half my relocation buyers have never set foot in Texas and think Austin is one thing. It is not, it is a couple dozen very different towns wearing a trench coat. This prompt is how I show a family from California, in about 20 seconds, that the same $550,000 buys them a noticeably bigger house and yard 15 minutes further out. I do not tell them where to live. I show them the actual inventory in both places and let them react to it, because people believe what they can see way more than what an agent tells them. Daniel Kahneman’s whole thing is that we trust a vivid concrete example over an abstract number every time, and man is that true when someone is picking where their kids grow up. If you want to go deeper on this, I wrote a separate piece on searching Austin homes with Claude using real MLS data.
Prompt 5: Finding negotiation leverage
Show me active listings in Dripping Springs, 3 plus bedrooms, that have been on the market 60 days or longer. Sort by days on market, longest first, and include price and address.
A house that has been sitting for 60, 90, 120 days is a seller who is running out of patience, and patience is leverage. That is not complicated right. This is the prompt I run when a buyer wants to make an aggressive offer and needs a reason to believe it might actually land. The long sitting listings are where a lowball is not insulting, it is a rescue. Now, the free tier will show you how long each one has been listed, which is the signal that matters most, but it will not give you the full price cut timeline or what similar homes actually sold for. For that you need sold data, and sold data is not free (more on that in a second). Still, just knowing which homes are tired tells you where to point the offer. And honestly, half of negotiation is just showing up to the right house.
The honest part: what this cannot do
I would be doing you a disservice if I stopped at the fun stuff, so here is where the free tier taps out.
No sold comps. The free version sees what is for sale, not what sold. And what sold is how you actually price a home or defend an offer. If a listing agent tells you three identical houses closed at $610,000 last month, the free tier cannot confirm or deny that. That is the single biggest limit, and it is the reason the paid tier exists.
It is not a valuation. Claude reading you a list of active prices is not an appraisal and it is not a CMA. Asking prices are opinions, sold prices are facts, and this free tool only shows you the opinions. Do not let anyone (including a very confident chatbot) tell you your house is worth a number based on what the neighbors are asking.
It cannot walk the property. No AI can smell the crawlspace, notice the foundation crack the photos hid, or feel how the light hits the back bedroom at 4pm. That is the whole job, actually. The data gets you to the right front door. A human still has to open it and know what they are looking at.
None of that is a knock on the tool. It is the opposite. I built it to do a specific thing extremely well (put real active MLS data in front of your AI instead of guesses) and I would rather tell you exactly where the edges are than pretend it does everything. If you want the fuller list of prompts to try, I keep 10 more Austin real estate prompts for Claude and my 7 prompts I run before every listing appointment in a couple other posts.
Frequently Asked Questions
Try it, then come find me for the rest
Go set up the free Austin MLS connector and run these five prompts this week. Seriously, it takes two minutes and it will change how you look at listings. Then when you hit the wall (what actually sold, what a home is really worth, whether that 90 day listing is a deal or a dud) that is the part where you want a person who has the sold data and has walked a few thousand of these houses. That is me. Reach out to Ed Neuhaus and lets figure out what the free tier could not tell you.
