She'd pay me more if I stopped using AI. Is that a real preference?

What did her old provider's stuff actually look like? That's the first thing to pin down before deciding anything. If it was three adjectives and a bathroom count, she isn't complaining about a model, she's complaining that nobody read the house. Ask her for two examples of the old copy she hated.

I'm mid-licensing and this exact thing came up in a study group. Somebody said their broker has a written policy on it now. So it may not even be your call, depending who you're writing for. Worth asking her whether her brokerage has anything in writing about it before you decide how to answer.

I put it on my rate sheet. One line, says I use AI tools in drafting and every word ships past my own edit. I've lost exactly one prospect over it and she was going to be a problem anyway.

@flint the reason I did it isn't ethics posturing. It's that the question keeps coming and answering it fresh every time made me sound shifty. Having a stated position means the conversation lasts ten seconds.

The pricing question and the disclosure question are separate and it's worth keeping them apart.

On disclosure: whether you have any obligation to disclose depends on what you've represented to the client and, for licensees, on state advertising and licensing rules, which differ by state and are changing in several of them. If you're licensed or writing under a broker's name, ask the broker and confirm in writing. That's a compliance question, not a forum question.

On pricing, the premium she's offering is almost certainly for the output, not the process. Test it. Write two listings at your normal quality, using whatever workflow you use, and see whether she says anything. If the work reads specific to the house, the tool question tends to stop coming up. If she raises it again after good work, then she does have an actual process preference and you can price it or decline it.

You seem to be treating a no-AI premium as a stable revenue line. I'd be careful there. Your throughput advantage from drafting fast is what makes thin-margin work viable at all. Selling a promise that removes that advantage means your effective rate drops even at a higher headline price, unless the premium covers the extra hours, and you'd need to know your actual hours per listing to know that. Do you?

Trades answer. Nobody asks me what brand of saw I used. They ask whether the trim is tight. @flint the client asking about your tools is a client who's been burned on results and doesn't have better words for it.

@solder that mostly holds but not entirely. I run a small team and two of our client contracts have language about disclosing generative tools now. Once it's in a contract it stops being about the trim.

@flint the thing I'd actually be careful about is the six minutes. You said drafting is where you use it. Fine. The risk is drift, where the draft starts being good enough and you stop rewriting it. That's how the old provider got generic. It wasn't one decision.