"Data Intelligence Is The Only Variable"—Real Estate Portal AI Plays, Put Simply

Since 2023, AI has shifted from 'cool new thing' to 'strategic pillar' for real estate marketplace businesses, so much so that it is a live product at almost every major property portal on the planet and a core piece of comms to investors and the market.

If you're really keen on getting to the core of the argument, the revenue opportunity for real estate marketplace businesses is hidden somewhere within internally built, proprietary, intelligent, closed-loop ecosystems, fuelled by unique, useful data that is packaged for resale (to agents and consumers) further down the line.

But in case you want some extra context on how and why the industry is doing this, this article rounds up the key moves we've spotted from around the world in the past two years or so. We'll highlight the big players, and then move on to some discussion about what the silent majority could and perhaps should look to do next.

The Big Players (and what they did)

Rightmove — November 2025

The UK number one portal told investors in November 2025 that it was funding a step-change in AI investment that would limit operating profit growth to between three and five per cent in 2026, down from nine per cent the year before, and its shares fell 28% on the day. Rightmove has opted for a large suite of live AI initiatives (43 during its latest presentation to the market), including conversational search built with Google Cloud, virtual staging, and smarter search prompts, all of it sitting on four petabytes of data, 90% of which is proprietary. Rightmove appears to be focusing on top-quality infrastructure, rather than product.

"Artificial intelligence played an increasingly important role in delivering these solutions... We refreshed our strategy to lay the foundations for the next stage of growth, positioning us to stay ahead of shifts in technology, AI, and consumer behaviour." — Andrew Fisher, Chair, Rightmove

Realestate.com.au — December 2025

REA Group's flagship portal, realestate.com.au, announced realAssist, an AI-powered conversational companion, saying it is a partner of, not a replacement for, search. REA Group joined Zillow in launching a partnership with OpenAI in February, which was rolled out after a 12-month pilot. The Group continues to feature heavily in our Product Roundups, and recently announced that property walkthrough reels and lifestyle listing videos will be introduced to the video hub on the realestate.com.au app home screen this July.

"Realestate.com.au’s unparalleled audience, coupled with our proprietary data, places us in a strong position to harness AI and deliver unique and valuable insights and experiences for consumers and customers. We will continue to iterate the features we are currently deploying by adding capability." — Jonathan Swift, CPO, REA Group

Homes.com (CoStar Group) — February 2026

Homes AI, a speech-to-speech search experience built with Microsoft Azure, launched in February 2026. Homes AI is embedded directly into the site architecture, so the AI and the user interface stay in sync in real time. While the Microsoft partnership is a catchy headline, the genuine differentiator is CoStar's proprietary data: neighbourhood intelligence, Matterport, pricing history, school data—a lot of which is integrated into a truly speech-to-speech interface for deep-dive property searches, with more to come and rollout on other platforms, including Domain. At the time of writing, Homes AI has been supplemented by Apartments AI, now live on Apartments.com.

"We realised that with all the proprietary data that we create at CoStar Group about neighbourhoods, home price trends, sales comparisons, Matterport, that's when we knew we had the tools to create an experience that feels like it's from the future." — Andy Ventura, Head of Applied AI, CoStar Group

Zillow — March 2026

Zillow launched AI Mode on 25 March 2026, a conversational search tool that draws on natural language capabilities the company has been building since 2023, and a ChatGPT integration it added in October 2025. Zillow says its structural advantage is not the AI; it is the audience: 70% of US buyers and sellers are already on the platform, giving it a training feedback loop that nobody else in the market can match in the short term. Similarly to Rightmove, Jeremy Wacksman frames AI as a predominantly platform play, not a product. Interestingly, early testing showed users asked about affordability, neighbourhood insights and comparing homes by specific features.

"We're connecting the entire housing journey with AI in a way that hasn't been possible before. Because Zillow operates across search, touring, financing, connections to professionals, transacting and closing, we can turn insight and data into real-world action." — Jeremy Wacksman, CEO, Zillow

Scout24 — May 2026

Scout24 used its Capital Markets Day on 12 May 2026 to present the most explicit data-first AI argument in the industry: the "Agentic OS for Real Estate," an autonomous agent platform built on immo.ai, an intelligence layer fed by €400 million of data investment, including acquisitions of Sprengetter and Bulwiengesa. The company has 36 AI features live and is already monetising AI usage through ImmoPunkte, a digital currency running at roughly 60% uptake in B2B memberships. Scout24 was the only AI-focused announcement to notch a notable share price hike, with shares up 3.11% when Scout24 published its Capital Markets Day presentation.

"With immo.ai and specialised AI agents at its core, the Agentic OS moves us beyond ecosystem connectivity towards seamless execution across the entire real estate journey, helping customers make better decisions faster." — Ralf Weitz, CEO, Scout24

Vend — May 2026

Vend, the Nordic marketplace operator, announced a small, independent AI unit in May 2026, deliberately separated from its existing product organisation to allow rapid experimentation without roadmap constraints. In Vend's case, an agile team that researches more aggressively, more vigorously, without having a material impact on the parent's top and bottom lines. Meanwhile, Vend announced a partnership with Roomvo for virtual staging on its Norwegian platform, Finn. Is the play bold, or cautious? It's too early to say, says the CEO...

"This work is centred on developing entirely new types of user experiences, rather than incrementally improving existing ones. The ambition is to move towards more intuitive, agentic journeys, where users can express needs in natural language. I see this [autonomous AI unit] as a bet among a number of bets." — Christian Printzell Halvorsen, CEO, Vend

Realtor.com — June 2026

RealAssist AI arrived last among the US big three, launching on 2 June 2026 in partnership with Google, which provides a mapping and visual layer, including street-level night views, seasonal imagery, and exterior visualisation, that goes beyond what Zillow or Homes.com currently offer at scale. Realtor.com is making a specific bet: that thirty years of buyer behaviour data, combined with live MLS access and a high-intent media audience from News Corp assets, gives it a data foundation the others cannot fully replicate. The Google partnership is a nice differentiator; the question is whether a lack of ownership of the data being shown will cause headaches down the line.

"Our collaboration with News Corp and deep industry roots give us an authority in this space that others simply cannot replicate." — Damian Eales, CEO, Realtor.com

Huispedia — June 2026

The Dutch marketplace operator Huispedia says its new 'Collective AI' solution is built totally in-house to capture user behaviour data that guides better decision-making when searching for a home. Additionally, Huispedia wants this Collective AI to target what it calls 'emotional overspending'—overpaying on a property that the consumer has been misled into thinking is the perfect fit. The end goal, the company says, is to save consumers money if and when they fall into the trap of outbidding rival buyers when the juice isn't worth the squeeze.

"The most expensive problem in the housing market today is no longer in the information; it's in human behaviour under pressure. You must use AI proactively at every decision point to prevent human errors during the buying process." — Maxim Bours, CEO, Huispedia

Traffic Wars are a red herring. Portals will focus on the Consideration Phase

This is somewhat of a bolt-on, but the numbers being shared by publicly listed operators are more or less putting to bed the idea that LLMs are the future source of traffic. Any business getting more than 1% of traffic direct from the likes of ChatGPT or Gemini is an outlier.

Nevertheless, that's not stopping vast swathes of the industry from entering partnerships with OpenAI. As a reminder, ChatGPT integrations and app launches are a dime a dozen right now, but that does not necessarily translate into high-quality traffic.

(This table is updated regularly and may already be obsolete)

Meanwhile, Online Marketplaces editor Edmund Keith suggests that the 'Consideration Phase' (the period within which a would-be buyer engages with technology to determine whether a particular property is the right pick for them) is the next major hurdle for portal operators.

Keeping users on-platform in such a way that new data stays in-house, and lead attribution confidence stays high as a point of interest when it's time for an agent to renew their subscription ("Mrs Agent, the fact that I can show you that Mr Buyer found this property on Rightmove and decided it was the right property for them thanks to Rightmove, means you should stay with us next year.") is a problem worth solving well.
 

So, how might challenger portals and proptech startups operate in an AI-first, data-hungry environment?

The vast majority of readers of this article don't have a perfect combination of billion-dollar marketing budgets, M&A muscle and three decades of market-leading data under lock and key.

A good place to start is capturing and defragmenting hyperlocal data that big portals don't have the time or energy to compile themselves. A regional or specialist portal that has been accumulating that kind of granular, market-specific intelligence for a few years has something that a general model fed on national data cannot replicate. Alternatively, if the data doesn't exist yet, these are the businesses that make it exist.

Agents (and portals themselves) are open to paying for better information in less time. Market-leading AI agents and copilots will increasingly become internally built, efficient ecosystems fuelled by unique, intelligent data that is packaged for resale to professionals and consumers further down the line.

The next option is winning the hearts and minds of agents. Rather than trying to build a consumer-facing AI journey that competes with Zillow, build leaner, high-impact AI tools for the agents already on your platform—and turn them into dedicated users and proponents of your products. Scout24 is a great example of this, as the German market leader is already doing this with Propstack and Proppi.

Seeing these innovations side by side reveals several tactics, but the core strategy is using AI+Intelligent Data to create a new benchmark in user experience for marketplace businesses, industry professionals, and everyday consumers.