What I am really looking for is a three-bedroom property that has a southeast view, and I really love skylights in the kitchen. It’s got to be near a train station because I need to get into work, and also, I have a five-year-old, so it needs to be somewhere near a nursery and then a primary school. Agentic AI will go away and find all of the properties that fulfill that criteria. Okay, it will take a few minutes. (View Highlight)
It is going to be something that I think is going to significantly change how people search for property, and therefore it will significantly change the landscape of portals, estate agents, and everything that we talk about and care about. (View Highlight)
You know, I really want to go on this particular journey. Um, so instead of being constrained by the filters that every website has had for 25 years, which is, you know, location, bedroom numbers, whatever, you just start with, you know, I really, really, really want a riverside setting or whatever. Um, So I was sitting with that significant large agent over here in the UK, um, on Wednesday, and we were doing this right. So yeah, this is actually live now; we can access it from the UK too, provided you pay $200 (View Highlight)
We said it would work, and then we had the meeting, and then at the end, it was kind of like a, “And here’s what we made earlier.” It cooked away, and then it came back, and it was brilliant. You know, essentially what it did was it put together properties from the portals. (View Highlight)
I think there were 14 overall in the results, and there was one from Rightmove, two from Zuper, one from OnTheMarket, but the rest of them were estate agent websites. So actually, what we’re looking at, in my view, is that eventually the aggregation function that has been convenient for consumers, you know, for the last 25 years, that the portals do so well, is now possible through this other medium. (View Highlight)
Because ChatGPT and all of these AIs are essentially using the same SEO rules. So the robots.txt files access this information. Now, if Rightmove, for example, and obviously others decide They want to try and block ChatGPT from accessing their data in order to block this kind of global meta search possibility. Then they’re going to start harming their own organic search results because Google will also then be blocked from the robots.txt file. So I think it’s a real challenge, and obviously a brand new one that they probably haven’t faced in decades in terms of how they actually do portals, particularly leading portals, battle away this particular ability for humans, us, to actually search the whole market. (View Highlight)
Everything you know, and even R has only got like 96%, saying it’s got like something like 96%. There will be other properties that are on estate agent websites that aren’t on Rightmove, that are now suddenly available. And you know, as long as they provided that they fulfill the criteria that I’m looking for, then they’re going to be discoverable. Interestingly, another one that was on this list was from a news article, and it was about the estate agent Dexter. (View Highlight)
And that was important because having all the listings in one database meant you could search the database. Now, the database is The internet and the search tool is a robot that’s run around, so this agent is finding the listings. I think if I’m a portal, I’m basically saying to myself, I would be, if I’m not, I should be, right? (View Highlight)
Because, uh, more and more people will start using these tools to find, uh, listings. What’s interesting is I was looking the other day at, uh, using um, SimilarWeb for a website, um, and I was just saying, oh, the referral traffic was like 8% or something, right? Then I went, I wonder where that’s coming from, and it was Chat GPT that was first in the referral. Now go back a year and that was never there. Okay, so we’re now starting to see this (View Highlight)
Okay, the consumer will adopt these tools much faster than we give them credit for, because it makes their life easier. People just want an easier life. This, this type of stuffing around. (View Highlight)
Mal, and I’ll be different again. So it allows us to search the way we want to search. But then it has the capacity, I think, if it doesn’t, it will. It’s not just searching text; it’s searching images. So you then go, “Oh, I want, I want ocean views.” Well, they may have not written “ocean view,” although if they haven’t, they’re a crappy real estate agent. Right, put it bluntly. But it’ll interrogate the pictures. Go away, there’s an ocean view in this one. I’ll put this in the solution. (View Highlight)
Do you think Rightmove should have sold to Rea? Now, you know all about agentic search. Wow, um, I think that they—I think their share prices are going to suffer, and I think that that was probably the top of the market. So, I think they should have done it. Um, I think that their business model that they are Insisting is going to continue to persist for the next three to four years, I think is under serious threat from this technology.
So yes, I would struggle to see them maintaining a 70% margin, and I think that they should have. (View Highlight)
I think you just made a couple of key points. One is that consumer adoption is going to be so much faster than anything before. Right? You know, it took a while for mobile to get going, it took a while for digital to get going. But because this is so useful, and like Simon says, you can use it in—you know, if you’re booking a flight, holiday, a car, you know, ordering your meals, whatever— you just go, “Look, just choose me something different.” You know, and it knows that you’ve had, I don’t know, pizza yesterday, so let’s have something different today. It’s going to know so much about you, and it’s going to be able to anticipate almost things that you don’t even know you really want. (View Highlight)
Doing things and saving themselves time, so I think adoption is going to be really really quick. Um, I think that the new battleground is not going to be aggregation; it’s not going to be volume, and I think deep research proves that. And interesting as well, um, Anthropic, which is one of the competitors to OpenAI, this morning has started to trail in the next couple of weeks. It’s going to release its own version of deep research, which obviously is going to be a chunk cheaper than OpenAI’s. (View Highlight)
Then, you know Google’s going to come out with one, and then one of them is going to be free. And we’re just back down at base cap, so this is happening, and this is going to happen really, really fast. The battle is not going to be aggregation; the battle is going to be experience. Okay, the battle is going to be how personal is this to me? How, when I go onto this website, and perhaps it’s an estate agent website, you know, like I said, my 14 results I could click off on Savill onto Hampstead, onto Winkworth (View Highlight)
I think what those guys are doing is amazing. You know, if you get onto a site and it has the ability for you to look at an image and then swipe and change that image into something that’s your own furniture or a really nice coastal or retro, whatever. Um I think that’s going to be the real thing that people are looking for. It is not just to find things now or discover. Um, I think it’s going to be, and we were talking about this years ago, so I’m about kind of telling people what they want. You know, actually understanding them and bringing them to the right site and then enabling
them to experience on that site something that is going to encourage their dwell; that’s going to make them want to stay and want to interact and want to know more. (View Highlight)
And it came back with descriptions like city, professional, or growing family, or arts of Fardo or something. And then we said, “Right, well actually can you then add on what, what’s the potential problems with this? What actually do you anticipate is going to be the least positive, fun, um, area of this particular property or feature of this particular property?” And it came back with things like, “This is on a main run,” or “You know, this is a grade two listed, you know,” so actual things that perhaps you wouldn’t otherwise, you know, certainly wouldn’t find out in an advert (View Highlight)
“Actually, this thing is coming like a train and I need to be wondering what to do about it,” I would absolutely be starting to look at some of the other, how my consumers, how my visitors, how my users can have a great, great experience when they get to me, because I don’t doubt that within the, you know, SEO as we’ve known it for the last 20 years, search engine optimization, that function is going to start to um, be superseded by this AI engine. (View Highlight)
Assignment says you know, having great photos that are easy for the system to read is going to be important. You know, for it to understand. Having more data, having as much information as possible within there, even if it’s not necessarily written but baked into the site. (View Highlight)
So, 7% of searches are being done by chat GPTs instead of Google and Bing. (View Highlight)
For example, just to be clear, we’re not talking just real estate, we’re talking all search. Yes, this is expected to double to about 14 to 15% by 2028, and then hit critical mass, where it starts becoming what you’d call a mainstream search by 2030. That’s about 15 to 17% (View Highlight)
Come on, well, that’s what I was going to say, because the end of Edmund’s research was that transactional searches—so buying something, basically—are circulating 3%, a fraction of searches overall, and that just seems to me like it’s ripe for just this explosion of absolute rocket ship growth. So what can we— I guess I sort of I want to start looking towards the immediate future here. When can we expect a meaningful change in this? I’m thinking of new products that are really going to be built around a transactional AI, a genetic search. What are your feelings on that, on that sort of avenue, shall we say? (View Highlight)
Yeah, sure. So I fundamentally agree that this is going to go—it’s going to go nor really, really fast. I think that one of the things that is going to change it and is going to supercharge it even more than it already is, is voice. So, you know, instead of, as Simon says, you know, you can kind of click on your phone and it brings up this; we’re all going to be talking to our phones and talking to our AIs, and our AIs are going to know things about us because they observe it. (View Highlight)
I’ve got a new AI; it’s called BBE AI, and it’s a personal AI. The basic system—my Apple Watch listens to stuff and summarizes stuff without me having to keep clicking on, you know, or any of that sort of stuff. It just literally, it and then it summarizes my day and stuff. I’m testing out at the moment, but this is learning all about and more. (View Highlight)
The more I think, the more people are going to become comfortable with it. The whole privacy issue is obviously a potential concern, but voice is going to be the way we communicate with these AIs and the way that we talk, ask questions, and interact with them. What I think we are going to see as we go through particularly this year and into next is an absolute explosion of tools and things that are able to understand voice in whatever language, and that will take action based on our instructions. (View Highlight)
That’s going to be a really powerful and important piece of the jigsaw. And I also think that, um, you know that the ability of, um, portals to respond to voice commands and to be able to do natural language searches, you know, it’s a real challenge to their business model because if I want a three-bedroom property with a CVU that’s not filtered, that’s available on the portal so far or historically, um, it completely blows my premium listings because, you know, if the actual fact is there are only six of those down on the south coast, for example, then there are not a lot of additional kind of lead generation opportunities on there (View Highlight)
I think we’re going to see this huge change in how these portals look at their business models. I think that’s going to take time; there’s going to be a lag there for sure (View Highlight)
ou know, we just spoke about R move, you know, I think that the 70% margin that those guys have is based almost—not almost, but a significant portion of it is their premium listic and their premium products, Optimizer PL, and so on. If those products no longer drive additional leads because essentially consumers are bypassing them, then that is a big hole in a previously cash-generative business model. That’s going to require a different approach, and I think that’s going to be a very big challenge for them. (View Highlight)
Simon, what would you do? What if you’re Rea right now, and you’re seeing these tools coming out? I mean, this is the million-dollar question, right? Is there any way around? I’d sell my shares. Do you really think that we’re getting to that stage of the life cycle where—I mean, I remember, I remember they’re Overvalued, they’re overvalued, right? (View Highlight)
There’s this art; I mean, to me, there’s a bigger issue. The art, we live in an artificial world where most of the people that go to these portals aren’t actually buyers. At the moment, they’re tire kickers. Anyone who’s a serious buyer is crawling through every listing in an area that they’re interested in, and they’ll spend three months hunting. So whether you’re the super premium, the premium, whatever, it doesn’t matter; you’re going to get the same level of response. So I’m not convinced that, um, there’s almost like a false economy that’s created around all these things, and AI just is going to blow it apart. (View Highlight)
I think it’s just going to blow it apart over time, and I think what’s going to really blow it apart — this is what I want to explore with you, Malcolm, as we’re talking about consumer AI agents. What about industry AI agents or agentic assistance for real estate agents? To me, the one that gets me most excited — M and I had lunch the other day, and we discussed this AI marketing assistant for As a real estate agent, do you want to talk about that? Yeah, sure. And so, essentially, when you are a real estate agent and you’re looking to take a property onto the market, the question is no longer—sorry, the conversation is no longer going to be, “Are you on Rightmove?” Yes, I’m on Rightmove. (View Highlight)
It’s more going to be about how you market this specific property with its specific attributes to the target audience. And again, this kind of comes back to the fact that when we were doing this, um, Jedi search—what’s the key type of customer? What’s the two-word summary that this property is perfect for? Now, you could do that essentially on the fly. So you’re in the property with the vendor, you’re sitting there, taking down the details, the AI is listening and hearing about all the properties, and then it’s coming back and saying, “Right, this property is perfect for young professional couples who work in London.” So then it goes off and goes, “Right, okay, so where can we find those people most effectively who are potentially house hunting?” On this website, you know, so they’re more likely For example, to use JY, they are more likely to use Rightmove. They’re more likely to be on TikTok than they are to be on Facebook, you know, and so on and so forth. (View Highlight)
So it builds essentially a bespoke marketing plan on the fly for this property whilst you are sitting chatting to the vendor, and then you present to the vendor and say, “Look, this is what we think is going to be the absolute best.” This is going to fulfill your desire, right? Your desire is to move within the next six months, but to maximize the price. (View Highlight)
Great, we can do that. We can dial that slider up to maximize price, rather than speed. Or if actually speed is the most important thing and price is less of a consideration, then actually this is probably going to be a better marketing plan for you. So I think that’s going to be some of the way. And, you know, of course, portals may and will form part of that potentially, depending on, you know, the target audience of that particular portal. (View Highlight)
Yeah, I think the interesting, you know, the way I view it is I take a picture of a house. I know the location. Um, I’ve got a price in mind. I upload that — the AI already Knows my preference for spending 20% of my commission in marketing it, so if it’s a half a million-pound place and I’m getting a massive 1% commission, right? I’m going to spend £5,000 marketing this.
At the moment it’s sort of a bit of a spray-and-pray approach. I’ve got to be everywhere based on, you know, my subscriptions, and I’ve got a feeling that each portal will end up with different segments of the market. That’s going to go afterward. (View Highlight)
because what I care more about is two.
Things winning a new listing and selling the property. If I can do that more efficiently and effectively—if I never had to be on a portal, I could be on Facebook 100% of the time, I would do that, as long as I tick those two boxes absolutely. T (View Highlight)
are we living in a post-aggregator world? Yes, so I fundamentally believe that the fragmentation of everybody’s experience is real and is happening. You know, if you go onto Netflix, you are presented with a very personal curation of things that you might like to watch, and that is going to play out right across everything that we look at. (View Highlight)
So, AI is going to, um, give data. It’s going to help us understand much more about what we ourselves like, and therefore what we want to look at. But also how that then comes back into us via various media. So, I think that the aggregation, as a, um, convenience factor that drove the portals and has driven and secured them all of their positions in our home searches, uh, property searches. (View Highlight)
Okay, and then secondly, they’ll be able to unearth information in a listing. You might say, “I need to have a kids’ playground in the back. A little jungle gym or something.” Right? It’ll look at all the pictures and go, “Oh, there’s one, there’s one. There’s a trampoline,” or they’ll even then go the next level of saying, “There is room to put a trampoline there because I’ve worked out the dimensions of the property and so on.” (View Highlight)
Now, if you’re going to invest half a million pounds or a million pounds, buying a property, you will waste your time, because you are scared that you’re missing out on something, and there won’t be that inherent frustration, and technology, at least not by older people like us. But the younger generation, they’ll blindly follow this, right? We also have to put ourselves in the mindset of that younger generation, and they just, the computer says jump, they jump. The computer says stand on one leg, they stand on one leg. The parents do ignore you, right? Okay, but they will follow what the computer tells them to do because they’re brought up in that world. So if the computer says, these are five homes that you should buy or you should rent, which is the important one, massive.
Segment, okay, I’ll rent one of them; I’m not buying it (View Highlight)
It solves my problem pretty quickly if I can press another button that says reserve. Here’s a $500 deposit to reserve this. I can then go and have a look at or whatever I need to do for renting it. Especially a short-term rental; it’ll just, you know, all these other intermediaries, okay, will vaporize. And I think the way we expressed it yesterday is at the moment it goes: Searcher, portal, agent, seller. Right? There are two inter medes in this game: the portal, which is the aggregator, and the agent who has their own site, and they’re the listings manager. They’re acting really on behalf of the salesperson. Well, AI just shoves someone in; it actually becomes the real estate agent for the buyer. If you’re a buyer’s agent, you’re dead, put it bluntly. Right? Okay, the industry, at least. (View Highlight)
Because that’s technology, it’s going to take that role. Well, then all you end up happening is the, uh, eventually the, this, the real estate agent’s marketing robot talking to my buying robot at a speed that none of us can imagine, and then it’ll all be negotiated. It’ll come down to “press this button for Doc, you sign. We’ve already taken the money out of your bank account. (View Highlight)
o I do think that while AI will replace a lot of the functions that are machine-learned or screen learned, I still think that you’re going to have vendors who are going to want to make sure that there are humans in the loop. And everything that I see indicates that this transaction
remains too huge to trust entirely to the machines. (View Highlight)
There were AVMs, yeah, right? So what was the price of the house? It was what an agent told you it was and what was negotiated. Now there’s an AVM. How often, unless there’s massive demand, is there almost like a flawed price that the AVM sets? And it might go above the floor price if there’s massive demand, and people are willing to make an irrational decision above a rational. (View Highlight)
The price is okay, but they never go, and they’ll go below the price when someone’s willing to make a compromise to get cash faster or for some other reason. But there’s a price, so in general, the market will clear at that price, or the market should clear. So that takes out one of the roles of the agent. Okay, if that’s one of the roles of the agent that has gone in this process, because the bank’s not going to loan to whatever, just because you the house is a million pounds and you’re paying 1.2 million for it. The bank’s not going to say, “Well, I’ll loan you up to 1.2 million because you decided to pay that money.” The bank’s going to say, “I’m loaning you at the million valuation; everything
above is your problem.” (View Highlight)
“The property portals will kill the agent.” No, right? Because all the property portals did was replace the newspaper. They killed the newspaper, but didn’t kill the agent. The question is, um, does the AI agent kill the portal? (View Highlight)
The answer will be real estate agents, not for all transactions, but for many. Okay, and that’s because, for example, you’ll have sophisticated AI. If you’re a professional investor in property, why are you dealing with an agent? Why are you paying a commission? You know what you’re looking for; you know the price you’re going to pay. If you’re someone who’s buying your third or fourth house, do you really need a real estate agent? I think for investors, it’s a big question. (View Highlight)
. So I think that there will be guidance, and the tech will help people to understand more about the properties they’re going to buy. It will help them to see their lifestyle much more clearly when they move into these homes. But I still think that at transaction time what you
are going to need as a seller particularly is, you’re going to need somebody to really make sure that you are not messing up this massive biggest transaction in your life, probably. (View Highlight)
They trust the machine. They turn up out in front of the house, done. Yeah, right? Risk is different. The risk is different. But what we’ve learned over time is that people are very fast adapters to risk. Okay, and we should never underestimate people’s ability to adapt. (View Highlight)
The bottom line is, things are going to get harder for portals, not easier for them. And I ask you, do you think the right choice? Absolutely, absolutely! Because I think the fundamental challenge for them is, you can’t just keep jacking up the prices. Okay? And if you can’t just keep jacking up the prices, then you’re going to have to sacrifice your even dar margin to do innovation (View Highlight)
