Back in 2008, the music industry faced an existential threat from illegal download sites like The Pirate Bay. Sales had fallen off a cliff, and nobody could see a way forward. When Spotify appeared, it looked like the final nail in the coffin.
The key players had a choice: fight to protect their intellectual property in court, or embrace the new world.
They chose the latter, taking equity stakes in Spotify while receiving income from every stream. That decision created a far more profitable model and kept them central to the revolution in consumer behaviour.
Today, the property market is at a similar crossroads.
More and more viewing requests are coming from AI search tools, bypassing platforms like Rightmove, and agents are rushing to exploit this new channel. Within months, not years, a property search module will emerge on ChatGPT that makes aggregation obsolete. Why pay for property portals when AI can gather everything directly from agents’ websites?
In the short-term, this seems like a huge win: cutting out expensive platforms, reducing overheads, and speeding up transactions.
But within a few years, the very data agents are now handing over will render them obsolete.
If you use AI as much as I do, it’s easy to picture how a “sell-my-home” module will work. In fact, here’s what I got from a quick “can you help me sell?” enquiry:
Absolutely, I can help you through the whole process of selling your home, but first I need to understand a bit more about your situation…
Then it asked me for: location, property type, agent status, goals, and timeline, and offered to:
– Decide whether to sell off-market or on the open market
– Prepare documents
– Choose the best agent (or contact buyers directly)
– Set a pricing strategy
– Build a marketing plan to reach serious buyers quickly
That’s today. But remember how useless 1st-gen mobile internet (WAP) was? Now look at it! Multiply that progress by a hundred. That’s the trajectory of AI.
Soon, it won’t say “let me help you choose the best agent.” It’ll say:
“Take photos and build a floor plan. I’ll create the perfect listing, set the optimum asking price from comparables and buyer demand (thanks to all that agent data), match it to buyers, book viewings, coach you on what to say, help negotiate the best price, and oversee the sale.”
For anyone thinking “they said this about Purplebricks” — this is different. AI isn’t another cut-price agent. AI is already your expert. Soon it’ll be your PA. Soon after, it’ll be your everything.
Disruption will come in two stages:
Stage 1 – Portals disrupted: Buyers move to AI search. Agents feed their data in, undermining costly portals like Rightmove.
Stage 2 – Agents disrupted: The very data agents gave away trains AI systems to replace them.
The rise of AI is inevitable. The world is about to change fast, and I’m not sure many of us will like it (unless you’re one of the world’s tech oligarchs).
We can’t stop the big picture, but we can protect our industry.
How? By building a closed platform where AI can’t go. Think Airbnb for property, with buyers and agents in a dedicated space.
Within that environment, AI can learn from the full picture of buyer–agent interactions, delivering smarter valuations, matches and strategies – enhancing agents’ expertise while protecting their data. Buyers will still have an AI-powered experience, but agents will remain the best choice for sellers seeking maximum price and efficiency.
AI + agent will trump AI alone – but only if we find a way to keep the data off-limits to Musk and Bezos’ grubby little hands.
Time is running out, and far faster than you think.
Mark Wells is founder and CEO of Invisible Homes.
Don’t worry they’ll be nothing to rent and nobody working.
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So as a seller/buyer who has not been active in the market for 15 years I am somewhat shocked that the market mechanics are mostly the same…
1. Rightmove still really the only portal I need to go to despite alternatives and choices out there.
2. Self selling through likes of Purplebricks has not really taken off
3. Conveyancing still slow/painfully
4. Lack of guarantees across the chain
There is however better data and nice aggregators (for a fee) so I can quickly get price per sqft, plot maps etc much more easily than before.
Would love to see some major disruption, would even help fund it!
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The analogy doesn’t hold – in Spotify’s case the artist creates the ‘listing’ and they don’t want (and do not allow) Spotify to be the only place for the track to be heard (it’s all over Apple Music, Radio One, YouTube, your local Co-Op …).
The seller is going to want similar wide distribution – so a closed platform will repel, not attract, sellers.
Also, Spotify relies on repeat downloads of tracks from millions of people who like to hear their favourite songs again and again. How many times is one buyer interested in a 3-bed in Didsbury going to download 12 Acacia Terrace?
AI +is+ going to change how people discover properties – but the above massively overplays that people will want machines to sell their homes for them rather than agents (it is exactly the ‘Purplebricks’ model of scaring everyone to drop commission rates by pretending everyone wants a sole tech solution). They don’t and they won’t.
I’m all for innovative ideas – but not for selling an inaccurate analogy hard on AI terror of disintermediation.
There are much, much better AI ways than this already.
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Sounds to me like someone has been drinking the AI “kool aid”!
All hypothetically possible until you start to think it through in a bit more detail:
1) “contact the buyers” – but how, exactly? Where is it going to get hold of email addresses of everyone who’s looking for a 3 bedroom house in town X?
2) “Build a marketing plan” – so, every potential vendor is going to fund their own independent social media campaign, are they?
3) “take photos and build a floorplan” – never mind the state of the house at the time or the decoration, no doubt the AI will offer to tidy up the images, getting rid of unwanted details such as the visible radiator pipes, the holes in the driveway and the pylon in the back garden… misdescriptions galore. It’ll only take a few instances of vendors trying to sue the AI owner for not having protected them, and the latter will likely lock their product down to prevent anyone else from trying to use it in the same way.
I don’t disagree with the ultimate conclusion that agents will still be needed, but the first half is scare-mongering.
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The Spotify comparison doesn’t work because selling homes isn’t like streaming music. A song is the same for everyone but every property and every move is different, full of legal, emotional and financial challenges that AI can’t handle on its own.
People want accountability, persuasion and trust when it comes to their biggest asset, not just data scraped together. Yes AI will help buyers and sellers and of course some will think doing it themselves is easy the same way we can all ask AI how to plaster a wall then try it ourselves.
Of course agents need to embrace it and evolve, yes AI will replace jobs but not every single job. We saw with Purplebricks that tech alone can’t get deals done.
The future is agents using AI to speed up the boring admin so they can focus on what matters, guiding people, solving problems and negotiating the best price. AI will enhance good agents, not replace them and I can’t wait to get rid of the abusive monopoly number 1 portal.
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I started my working life working in a recruitment agency back in the mid-90s. A thing called the Internet came along and the view was that on-line recruitment was going to replace recruitment agencies and people. Not sure that it actually did, but I could be wrong.
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Excellent piece Mark. Quite how AI will impact us all is yet to be fully comprehended and may be quite different from what we expect.
I’ve noticed in tech that the short-term impact is usually overestimated and the long-term effects underestimated. Who would have thought even 10 years ago that social media (then pretty much just a place for holiday snaps and showing off) might alter the outcome of a US election and drive division here in the UK?
The AI effect is going to be huge and we ain’t seen nothin’ yet!
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