Portal Standards Report 2025: The Machiavelli Effect is Holding Back Property Search

Innovation on real estate portals is being held back by their business models. Until now, many in and around the industry suspected that this was the case; now we have the data to prove it.

The Online Marketplaces Portal Standards Report 2025 is the most comprehensive we've ever produced. It looked at 797 portals around the world to see which features they have and, importantly, do not have, and how the picture has changed over time.

No map? No excuse.

Let’s start with the basics. In 2025, 30% of real estate marketplaces still don’t show listings on a map. Even in mature, exclusive-mandate markets like the UK, Switzerland, and the US, some users are still being asked to search for homes without knowing where they actually are.

Only 40% of portals let users scroll listing photos from the results page, and less than 5% offer commute-time search.

Excuses like not having the expertise in-house or not having the development budget to build basic features are wearing thin.

Innovation That Hurts Revenue Isn’t Welcome

The elephant in the room when it comes to portal features is, of course, monetisation. Every feature that gives the user control of their search — scrollable photos, advanced filters, rich search options — threatens to reduce pageviews or challenge the visibility of premium listings.

The report's data shows that market-leading portals consistently offer fewer search filters than their challengers. Not because they are forced to due to the paucity of their data, but because they don’t want to offer more filters. More user control means fewer upsell opportunities.

AI is Ubiquitous in Press Releases but Rare on Homepages

Portals are using AI for things like listing descriptions, image enhancement and matching systems (this last one is probably machine learning disguised as AI). But true AI-powered search—the kind that replaces filters with prompts—is practically non-existent. Only eight portals in our entire dataset offered anything close to that.

AI can be hard to implement well, and there are some bad examples out there. But most of the big real estate portals have the talent or can afford to go and get the talent that mitigates the risk of doing it badly.

As one of the experts interviewed in the report pointed out, smaller portals like UK-based Jitty are proving that you don't need the listings data coming from agents to be super rich. You can use AI to identify property features, tag listings and create taxonomies for users to search with.

Seemingly, the only thing missing for some of these big companies is the will to prioritise real innovation over performative announcements.

Shop Window Businesses Need to Invest in User Experience

At some point in the future, real estate portals will not only be competing with other websites that look and work like theirs but also with some form of AI search. The form this new search will ultimately take and the time it will take to compete are up for debate, but the competition when it comes will not be based on brand but on experience.

Yes, it will take time for the zeitgeist to fully shift that way. And yes, AI search will come for segments like rentals and commercial real estate before residential sales.

We don't know when the rain will come, but there will be a flood. Given the pace of innovation shown in the report, portals are reluctantly cladding their roofs and stocking sandbags when they should be thinking about transitioning from a house to a boat.

Portal companies saying they deliver 'innovative technology' and 'next-gen search experiences' are like the media companies in the early 2000s who thought they were being innovative by just putting their content on a website.

While those in charge of real estate marketplaces today could rightly point to the fact that rarely has one portal prevailed over another purely because it has a better user experience, they would be missing the point.

If you disagree, come and debate me and join me and 350+ real estate portal leaders at Property Portal Watch in Madrid from the 15th to the 17th of October.