AI will provide a great opportunity for agents and developers to win back their audience

With the growing prevalence of AI, there is absolutely no reason why property professionals can't take back ownership of their audience.

Since the emergence of the internet disrupted the way in which properties are advertised for sale there has been very little further disruption. The typical path for the last 20 years has been that you advertise your listing on the online portals and your own website but most of the traffic comes from the major listing portals.

The listings portals then capture that data, feed some of it back to you whilst the only data you can really capture yourself is from people that turn up to open for inspections or to display homes or from those people that actually make an offer.

I believe that real estate agents, developers and builders should be excited about the emergence of AI and the ability to win-back a significant chunk of that audience.

AI search already is, and will continue to be able to be, much more specific about the types of properties people are looking for than what is currently easily doable on the listing portal.

In fact, if you already go to an AI engine you can input very specific search parameters, much more specific than you typically would on a listing portal, for the type of properties you are looking for and it will return you results with links to those property advertisements.

You can ask AI to search across several suburbs, specify lot size, whether the house is highset or lowest and dictate number of bedrooms and bathrooms and have appropriate results returned to you.

Admittedly, every time I have done this it has provided links to either Domain or REA and it may be missing properties which aren’t listed on those portals (I haven’t spent the time to dig into that). Furthermore, an individual real estate agency or franchise group is unlikely to have the resources to spend on search engine optimisation (SEO) that the big portals do. In saying all that, there is clearly an opportunity here for the individual agent or agency group over the coming years.

If you try the search again and ask it to show you results but show you results that aren’t from Domain or REA it will refer you to other smaller listing portals. You can see though that over time as these search models improve and there should be a significant opportunity for those advertising properties for sale to claw back their audience and drive it directly to their websites.

If AI is eventually able to find properties for sale anywhere on the internet rather than just having to go to the listings portals to find properties for sale, then does the usefulness of a listing portal start to diminish over time? I think it will. People will start to second-guess the cost to list and whether the value of the audience that these listings portals have is worthwhile when AI search can bring those interested parties direct to the agent website.

An investigation from The Guardian last year found that both of the major listing portals have increased prices by around 30% over the three years to 2024. The same article states that listing costs on realestate.com.au have increased by more than 5,000% since 2009. The listing portals can lift prices like this because what they do works, because they have created a moat around their businesses and the search engines to-date have not seriously attempted to disrupt their business model. AI provides a huge opportunity to disrupt these business models, to lower the cost of listing properties for sale and for agents to wrestle back their audience.

Reducing the cost to list also reduces the cost of failure for those trying to determine whether to advertise a property for sale or not. As it stands currently if you klisty your property for sale and aren’t successful in selling the property, there has been a significant financial outlay for no return and you will incur this outlay again in the future when you try to sell. If the initial outlay to list a property for sale is much smaller, then you are likely to have a much greater preparedness for property owners to attempt to sell their property and more choice for buyers is a good thing (although it can make it harder to actually sell).

We’re obviously not at this stage yet but I think what AI can currently do and what it has the potential to do for real estate advertising in the future is something that anyone that sells property in Australia (or anywhere around the world) should be thinking long and hard about. Proptech businesses should also be thinking about how they can cater to this changing world and be driving more traffic directly to the agent website and lowering the cost of bringing properties to the market for sale which is a win-win for sellers and for agents trying to transact properties.

I’d love to hear your thoughts.