🏡 REAL ESTATE

How to search Zillow by what the filters can’t see with Jev

Zillow lets you filter by price and bedrooms. It can’t filter for “a Victorian with updated interiors, close to a freeway”. An a16z partner built a search that can: Jev read every listing and checked it against the whole wish list. Here’s how she built it and a prompt to build the same search for your city.

Written September 28, 2026 · By Ben Broch
listings checked
699
for Jev to judge them
17.6s
total cost
18¢

From @venturetwins’s public demo

The code: not published

There’s no repo and no app to try. Justine Moore (a partner at a16z) built it for herself. Her replies give the whole recipe, though, and it’s three off-the-shelf pieces:

The prompt below rebuilds that stack.

01

What the demo did

She typed one request: “2+ bedroom Victorian with updated interiors in SF with a fenced yard, close to freeways.” Four homes came back with green check tags, and clicking through lands on the real Zillow listing.

The bottom of the screen gives the honest breakdown: 699 listings checked, fetched in 236.7 seconds, matched in 17.64 seconds. The cost was 18 cents to classify every listing across five categories and check which homes met all of them.

02

The slow part is the scraping

Getting the listings took about four minutes. Jev’s part took under 18 seconds. In her words, the scraper was “by far the slowest part”.

The same pattern with Jev

One call per listing:

Splitting the list is the whole trick. One question with four things in it gets you a mushy answer. Four questions tell you exactly which feature a near-miss is missing. It’s the same shape as the prospecting guide, with a listing in place of a post.

New to Jev? Start with the setup guide: key, first call, working response. Then come back.

Let an agent build it

Paste this at Claude Code or Codex. It separates the hard filters from the wish list and reports the scrape time and the Jev time separately, so you can see where the time goes. The 0.60 bar is a starting point I haven’t run yet.

Paste at Claude Code / Codex
Build me a home search that filters on things Zillow can't, using Jev through the Vercel AI Gateway.

1. Ask me for the city or neighbourhood, my hard filters (price, bedrooms), and what I actually want in plain words, for example: "a Victorian with updated interiors and a fenced yard, close to a freeway".
2. Pull the listings with a Zillow scraper (Apify has one; ask me for my Apify token and warn me about its cost first). Apply the hard filters there, not with the model. Keep each listing's description, price, beds, address and photo captions if there are any.
3. Split what I want into separate yes/no statements, one per feature: "This home is a Victorian." "The interior has been updated or renovated." "The property has a fenced yard." "The home is close to a freeway."
4. For every listing make ONE call: experimental_evaluate from the ai package, model typesafe-ai/jev, the listing text as the state, and all of those statements as boolean questions together.
5. A home matches only if every statement is at least 0.60. Show matches first, then "almost" homes that missed on exactly one feature, with which one.
6. Run 3 calls at a time; bursts get rate-limited. Time the scraping and the Jev part separately and report both, plus the total cost.

Give me a table with links. Never contact an agent or book a viewing yourself.

The honest part

I haven’t run this one. The numbers are from @venturetwins’ post and replies, September 19, 2026. There’s no code here because I only publish code I’ve run.

This prompt sends Jev the listing text only, not the photos, so a listing that doesn’t say “renovated” won’t score as renovated. And scraping has its own rules and costs: check the scraper’s pricing and the site’s terms before you run it at scale.

Don’t have Jev running yet?

The setup guide is one key and a few lines of code, and you’ll have a working response in a few minutes.

Get started with Jev →

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