From property search to AI discovery: what does it mean for estate agents?
Buyers used to find homes in the local paper, then came the portals and online search. Now, they're starting to ask AI.
Instead of entering a postcode, price bracket and number of bedrooms, a buyer could simply describe the life they want to live, perhaps a family home close to a good school, with a short commute to the station and a great pub within walking distance, and ask AI to find the properties that fit.
It raises an important question for estate and letting agents: as the way people discover property changes, how do you make sure your listings - and your agency - continue to be found?
It's a topic explored in episode two of The Property Stack, presented by Hannah Parker of Inoki and iovox Chief Commercial Officer Matt Gayleard, alongside portal veteran, podcaster and founder Mal McCallion.
Mal has spent more than 25 years in property technology, from the property pages of print media to being part of the original PrimeLocation team and helping to launch Zoopla. Now, following a 40-location tour speaking to agents across the UK, he has launched AI-native UK property portal MyPorta.
Together, Hannah, Matt and Mal explore how AI could change property discovery, what that means for the established portal model and why understanding where enquiries come from – and what happens to them – could become even more important for agents.
From property search to property discovery
The way consumers find property has already been through several major shifts. Newspaper property pages gave way to portals, which brought huge volumes of listings together and allowed buyers and tenants to search the market themselves.
Mal believes AI could represent the beginning of another shift, moving consumers from search towards discovery. Rather than working through conventional filters, buyers can increasingly articulate their lifestyle, aspirations and what their dream home looks like, leaving AI to find properties that match those much more specific requirements.
For Mal, that makes this an exciting moment for the industry because consumers could ultimately get much closer to finding the homes they actually want, rather than simply the properties that match a predetermined set of filters.
Matt also sees parallels with previous changes in consumer behaviour. While the direction of travel is becoming clearer, he doesn't expect established search habits or the current portal model to disappear overnight.
Some buyers, sellers, landlords and tenants will embrace AI-powered discovery quickly, while others will continue using the portals and agency websites they already know and trust. For agents, the result could be a more fragmented customer journey, with more routes to an enquiry rather than one channel simply replacing another.
Do you really know which leads are delivering value?
That changing journey makes understanding attribution even more important. If prospective customers can discover properties through portals, agency websites, digital advertising and, increasingly, AI-powered platforms, simply counting the number of leads each channel generates only tells part of the story.
The more useful question is what happens next. Which enquiries result in meaningful conversations, which lead to viewings or valuations, which become instructions and where are potentially valuable opportunities being missed?
This is an area Matt believes agents need to examine much more closely, particularly when deciding where to reinvest marketing budget and where spend may need to be reduced.
Historically, answering those questions could involve hours spent pulling information together and working through spreadsheets at the end of the month. Technology can now give property businesses much greater visibility in real time, allowing them to understand which sources are generating valuable conversations and make faster decisions about their marketing investment.
This is central to iovox for Real Estate, helping estate and letting agents understand where enquiries and calls originate, what happens during those conversations and which marketing activity is contributing to commercial outcomes.
Who controls how your property gets found next?
AI-led property discovery also raises some interesting questions about where agents advertise their stock and how reliant they should be on individual channels.
One of Mal's key observations is that AI only needs to know about a listing once. If it can discover that property online, does the same listing need to appear across multiple destinations in the way it does today?
Mal doesn't expect the major portals to disappear, but he believes AI could encourage agents to look more closely at how and where their properties are marketed, particularly as new ways of discovering homes emerge.
For Matt, this again comes back to understanding the data rather than making assumptions about which channels are working.
Instead of judging a portal or campaign solely on the volume of leads it generates, agents can look more closely at what those leads actually deliver. Which listings are driving calls and viewing requests? Which enquiries convert? Where are opportunities not being followed up?
Having that visibility gives agents a much stronger basis for deciding where the next pound of marketing budget should go.
Giving agents more time to be agents
While AI could change how consumers discover property, the discussion also highlighted the continued importance of the people at the heart of estate agency.
Buying, selling, renting or letting a home remains a highly personal experience, where expertise, judgement and trust matter. The opportunity isn't necessarily to automate those important interactions, but to use technology to take care of more of the repetitive work around them.
AI can process information, help capture and understand enquiries and support businesses to work more efficiently, giving agents more time to advise clients, build relationships, negotiate and have the conversations where their experience adds the most value.
As Mal describes it, it's about allowing machines to take care of the machine jobs and giving people more time to do the human ones.
For estate and letting agents, that's an important distinction. The value of AI isn't simply in doing more with technology; it's in using technology in the right places so your people can focus on the areas where they make the biggest difference.
Start with the customer journey
For agents wondering where to begin with AI, Matt's advice is practical: start using it and approach tools such as large language models as something you can have a dialogue with, rather than treating them like a traditional search engine.
Give AI context about your business and the problem you're trying to solve, continue the conversation and refine its responses, while still applying your own expertise and judgement to the output.
The same principle applies more broadly to the customer journey. As new ways of discovering property emerge, agents need to understand how customers find them, what happens when those enquiries arrive and which interactions ultimately contribute to commercial outcomes.
The route to a property may be changing once again. For estate and letting agents, staying visible, understanding where demand comes from and making the most of every customer conversation will be key.
Hear the conversation on The Property Stack
Hear more about the future of property search and what AI-powered discovery could mean for agents in episode two of The Property Stack, presented by Hannah Parker of Inoki and iovox Chief Commercial Officer Matt Gayleard. Joined by MyPorta founder Mal McCallion, they explore how property discovery is changing and what agents can do now to stay visible.
Watch or listen to The Property Stack on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts, or discover how iovox for Real Estate helps estate agents, letting agents and property businesses capture, understand and act on more customer conversations.