Yesterday’s story announcing that more than 4,000 estate agency branches have signed up to Homesearch’s AI Listings Optimiser (HAILO) sparked some interesting comments and questions.
Chief among them: What exactly is the product? How does it work? And is the recent surge in adoption down to paying customers, or a free trial offer?
We went back to Homesearch for clarification.
Here’s what they told us:
What is the service?
HAILO is the UK’s first AI-native listings optimiser. It makes agents own property listings more likely to be found when someone is searching for a home using an AI search engine such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini or CoPilot. More and more people are switching to AI to search the web, and HAILO puts agents details directly into the hands of the consumer.
How does it work?
HAILO takes the real-time listing feeds agents already send via their CRM to the portals, so there is no technical integration needed by agents, and no extra workload. Those feeds are then put through our proprietary AI engine, that uses our own Homesearch’s data set including billions of data points.
We recalibrate the outputs specifically for AI-style natural language search (or ‘prompts’), as well as improving the depth of associated information with the listing. The whole process is specifically targeted at AI engines, and the way they seek, store and share information.
The more listings that are fed through HAILO, the better the outcome for agents and buyers. The result is that agents’ own property listings are optimised for AI, and are more likely to be found directly by home searchers who increasingly expect specific, appropriate, well-matched answers to their search query.
How many users are on paid subscriptions versus free trials?
It isn’t appropriate for us to reveal commercially sensitive information. However, if you are an estate agent who has missed out on one of our launch offers, right now we are offering HAILO free for 3-months – please see our website for details (https://hailo.homesearch.co.uk/).
HAILO is £80 per branch per month after the trial period is over. And we are so confident in our product, there is no commitment or tie-in for agents that sign-up during our launch phase.
Over 4,000 estate agency branches adopt AI listings optimisation tool
I would suggest that anyone signing up for this looks very closely at the small print on the contract to make sure there isn’t a clause in there to say that Homesearch can scrape all your precious property address detail and feed it into their database which they use for generating Prospecting letters on behalf of your competitors…
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Dear Hairy JellyBean, we also encourage everybody to read our Ts & Cs very closely. You can find the FAQs which deal directly with the question you seem to be raising here: HAILO.Homesearch.co.uk, where you can also join the 1000s of agents who have already joined. In the meantime, feel free to contact us with your name, company and flavour. Could it be Sour Grape? 🙂
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Fair enough, if I’m doing you a disservice then I apologise… I don’t have an axe to grind about the service which you’re offering, I’m just a cynic of all things dripping with AI hype which are so difficult to put a finger on as to the tangible benefits; having worked in IT for the better part of forty years, I’ve had plenty of experience of marketing depts and their “predicted” benefits of various enhancement requests, which always proved so elusive when it came to trying to quantify them. There are always far too many other variables – seasonal variations, interest rates, tax rates & holidays, new competitors popping out of the woodwork & so on.
“Could it be Sour Grape?”… nah, I’m definitely a Fermented Grape kinda guy 🙂
But on a side-note, I moved house about 4 years ago and was bemused to be swamped with prospecting letters from more than half a dozen of my employer’s local competitors, some of whom hadn’t even bothered to change the default wording of their introduction letters so the wording was near-as-dammit identical; I even hung onto the envelopes for a while, and determined that most of them had the same non-local return address. (I don’t recall what it was now, but Halifax rings a vague bell.) I’m well aware of the measures that the portals go to to protect against unauthorised scraping, and the considerable lengths that one would hypothetically have to go to to disguise this sort of activity, which makes me naturally suspicious of anyone offering a service that would require us to hand over such valuable data in bulk.
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Interesting idea, what is there to stop the portals doing this with ease?
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What indeed? My former boss was certain you can buy a datafeed from Rightmove, but I’m not convinced…
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