Latest thought

Can House Hunting Be Left to AI?

6th May 2025

AI can crunch numbers, automate tasks, and generate data, but it can’t empathise. It can’t build the trust or rapport that seals the deal. Real estate is a people-first industry, and that won’t change anytime soon.

The short answer is yes and no. Yes, you can enter some carefully thought-through criteria into an online portal like Rightmove or Zoopla, and up will pop a selection. You can then just plump for whichever is cheapest, or closest to a station, or has the most chandeliers. Job done.

But should you then feel satisfied that you have found the ideal home for your money? No, you shouldn’t.

There are several reasons why you could have done better. For a start, an online search relies on publicly available data. If data is missing, the search is incomplete. Off market properties, for example, will not show up so most buyers are only seeing a proportion of what is actually out there. Why are estate agents keeping some of their properties in the bottom drawer and off the public portals? It could be a client’s instruction to not reveal to an ex-husband or wife the sale of a property which should have been included in the divorce settlement. More often, it is about the estate agents’ own agenda. Placing properties online costs the estate agent both time and money. Floorplans and professional photography all have a cost as does the recent Trading Standards requirement, introduced in November 2023, that property particulars must contain certain items of information such as the lease length, council tax or even the asking price. Estate agents do not like any unnecessary delays in a sale as their business model relies heavily on turnover. The perfect sale for the estate agent is the “quick sale”…..the minimum possible time between launch and completion when their fee is due. They also don’t like launching a home only to change the price after a few fruitless viewings, where the property can too easily go stale. So why bother printing those brochures only to find when the price changes, (as “price on application” is no longer allowed), they all end up in the bin. The off market only gets bigger as regulation increases.

So if these properties are being sold, without everyone knowing about it, who are they being sold to? Answer, many are being sold to buyers who are represented by buying agents. The relationship between buying agents and estate agents is key. Buying agents bring vetted buyers (whose proof of funding has been checked, for example) to the estate agents’ doorstep and negotiate on the buyer’s behalf. A lot of the work and hassle involved in finding a suitable buyer for a given property is already done for the estate agent. Less risk and more certainty the deal will not fall through. No wonder estate agents love buying agents.

Another reason why househunting cannot be left to AI is the way the portals are run, which has reduced the number of properties advertised online. For example, Onthemarket used to be owned and run by the estate agents themselves. One of the main reasons why Onthemarket was dreamt up was to avoid the higher subscription costs of rivals like Rightmove. Initially Onthemarket’s costs for placing properties online were manageable, but this all changed when CoStar Group acquired the portal for £99 million in 2023 and the costs soared. The site’s founders may have made a lot of money from the sale, but its core subscribers are faced with either higher costs or drifting back to the portals they abandoned. The incentive to advertise clients’ properties online just got smaller.

Third is what the property portals can’t include, much that is unmeasureable or invisible to a search engine, such as unslightly views from the back garden or noisy neighbours. Just as online dating helps to sift out the “non-starters”, property portals can be a useful filter, but there will always be someone or something we were not aware of. Quality, unlike quantity, is subjective and so very difficult to measure through an algorithm. We are all different thankfully, and not all robots. At least not yet.