Opinion: 5 Things I’d Like to See More of on Real Estate Portals

In the past, I've been critical of real estate portals and their slow adoption of new features. As my old boss would say though, don't talk about a problem unless you're proposing a solution.

So with that in mind, these are a few things I've seen that I would like to see become a bit more common on real estate portals around the world...

If you're going to do AI search, encourage people to actually use it

AI seems to be all everyone talks about when the industry gets together so we'll start there.

Whether the initial searching part of a user's interaction with a portal needs to be fixed at all is up for debate, but U.S. power buyer-turned-portal flyhomes' implementation of AI and LLMs into search is the best I've seen so far.

Two things set flyhomes' AI search apart from others.

Firstly, the call-to-action for the user to forego the traditional location+filter search is much more prominent than on other marketplace sites. Whereas other companies have built a ChatGPT plugin rather than anything for their own website (Zillow, Immobiliare), rolled out and then rolled back (Yandex Realty) or hidden the AI search away (OnTheMarket), flyhomes proudly nudges its users to start interacting with its AI interface on the homepage and above the fold.

I also like that once a user has clicked on one of the suggested prompts, they are taken to a well-thought-out interactive chat interface where the default interaction is clicking on pre-formed prompts or links rather than having to type out a question.

Whether this AI search implementation remains the best in the industry and whether it can make flyhomes a legitimate player in the increasingly competitive U.S. real estate portal space is frankly pretty doubtful. But hats off to the flyhomes team for producing a product update to be admired and copied.

Tell us what your data thinks!

Most big real estate portals around the world have an AVM (automated valuation model) these days. So that means they will have their data-backed opinion on what each of the listings on their site should cost.

Obviously, it would be great for the consumer if portals added a field estimating whether each listing was overpriced, underpriced or in the Goldilocks zone but it's just not going to happen.

Even Zillow with its 'consumers are our north star' company mantra and its agent-reviled Zestimate wouldn't dare go this far. The agent anger would be overwhelming if overnight half of the listings on the portal were marked as 'overpriced'.

There is one site in Mexico, however, that has a value for money field on its listings and even lets users filter results based on how overpriced it estimates listings to be.

Monopolio is a Mexican real estate marketplace site run by DD360, a development and home loan specialist. It doesn't monetise from agents and gets its listings in the same way that aggregators do (ie from scraping third-party sites) so it can focus on putting information in front of its users without worrying about what anyone else thinks.

According to Monopolio's CEO, Jorge Combe, his company's unique business model means that the marketplace's interests are aligned with those of the home searcher.

"Given that I'm not working for the agents and given that the agents are not paying me money, I think that I can be transparent, at least with the information around how much it [a listing] is worth.

"That is the main reason why the portals cannot do whatever we're doing, because if I am charging an agent for an advertisement or to be listed in my portal, and then all of a sudden I'm saying that the home that you're trying to sell is extremely expensive then the agent will boycott the portal.

"We couldn't care if there's pushback from the sellers because what we want to build here is something that is buyer friendly, not seller friendly."

Mixing up the author of listing descriptions (not just agents or ChatGPT)

What if it wasn't just the agent who wrote a listing description? What if the owner or even the portal itself left their own comments?

"We've had fifteen wonderful years in this house and we're downsizing now that the kids have moved out."

"We're moving away for work. We hope you enjoy the sunsets from the terrace as much as we did these past three years!"

As all good agents know, sometimes it's the little things and personal touches that calm the nerves of wide-eyed first-time buyers making the biggest financial decision of their lives.

In China, brokerage site Ke.com (which happens to be run by the most interesting real estate company in the world) features descriptions from owners alongside those written by the agents.

Admittedly most of the ones I've seen are a bit prosaic and perhaps lost in translation but comments from the person actually giving up their home are one of the few advantages that FSBO players and horizontal general classifieds ads sites have over vertical portals.

An innovative move might even be for a portal to add its own comments and opinions, especially if it employs people to go and look at some of the houses it lists—as is the case of the Japanese real estate marketplace Cowcamo.

Above: one of the great descriptions/comments on a Cowcamo listing

Now Cowcamo isn't strictly a portal, more of a brokerage with a renovations business attached, but the comments its employees attach to listings add value and are written with a personal touch that agent-written descriptions seldom achieve.

'Turning the screen around' can only be a good thing

Zillow founder Rich Barton famously said that when he was building travel marketplace Expedia (of which he was also a founder), his vision was to turn the screen around and empower the holidaymaker with all the information the travel agent had on their computer screen.

He used that same mindset when building his real estate portal but now it's one of Zillow's rivals which is arguably driving the concept further.

CoStar-owned Homes.com has been going all out to put as much information as possible on its listings and in its neighbourhood guides.

It's not just third-party or open-source data like flood risk or school ratings the company is displaying. CoStar started out in commercial real estate and has long employed a small army of people to go to buildings and collect data in person. Now the Washington-based company has employed the same strategy in the residential sector with Homes.com sending employees around neighbourhoods to gather first-hand information.

By our count, there are currently 24 different data overlays that users of Homes.com's map can play around with as well as tools for school zones, travel time commute, detailed neighbourhood guides and all the other portal tools that U.S. users have come to expect.

CoStar thinks that information depth is an area it can win against its rivals and, in theory, the average home hunting portal user is the beneficiary from a data layer arms race in the market.

While American portals scramble to outdo one another to win consumers, on the other side of the Atlantic things aren't moving so quickly.

I had assumed that U.S. portals have far more user-facing information than the ones I'm used to browsing in the UK because data is more readily available there. As it turns out though, British portals do have a wealth of data at their disposal but perhaps lack the inclination to use it...

I recently came across Addland, a British real estate vertical specialising in land sales. The portal has a myriad of data layers for its users to see everything from valuation and market activity to coastal erosion and power lines. As CPO Hannah Parker told us on a recent episode of the PPW Pod, her team have worked very hard to procure that data and put it in front of Addland's users, however Rightmove or Zoopla could put that same data in front of their users if they really wanted to.

The issue, Parker says, is a commercial one. Put simply, if Rightmove were to start putting more data in front of users, it might mean fewer leads being sent to the agencies paying the most to appear at the top of the portal's search results.

Not everyone needs to see agricultural land classification but surely everyone buying a house does want to see if the land it's on is subject to any restrictions or likely to be flooded. And surely they'd want to do so whilst in the shopping phase (i.e. on a portal and before the deal goes to a conveyancer)?

Affordability is better than price but 'pre-qualification' is even better

Just as the distance from your new home to your office is not the same as the time it will take to get to work every day, price is not the same thing as affordability. Real estate portals are beginning to catch on.

The biggest question on the mind of serious home buyers beginning their journey on a portal is how much they can afford and the biggest resource drain for a portal's agent customers is filtering and qualifying leads. So it makes a lot of sense for a portal to generate extra revenue by telling serious users what they can truly afford and in doing so help save their agent customers some time.

Above: Rightmove's 'Mortgage in Principle' product. Source: Rightmove CMD presentation November, 2023

Simple 'mortgage calculator' tools have been around on portals for a long time. These work on just two variables, the property's listing price and the user-specified down payment amount.

The next step up in complexity is the 'affordability calculator' which asks the user for things like their age, salary and if they are paying off other loans with some also taking into account factors like the property's use and location. These tools are often linked to lead generation forms which see users give the portal their details to be sold on to third-party brokers or lenders who will no doubt send plenty of follow-ups.

Recently though some portals have gone further still by taking that big figure that their tools generate from a number on a screen into something psychologically much more important without simply farming their users out as a lead to be bombarded by third parties.

Zillow's 'BuyAbility' and Rightmove's 'Mortgage In Principle' services are examples of marketplaces taking advantage of their trusted brands to collect a lot of information from their users in exchange for actually pre-qualifying them for a mortgage.

It might not appear that different from what came before, but there are some crucial differences to this approach compared to many other portal mortgage mouse traps that came before...

1. Users are never re-directed away from the comfort blanket of the portal's own website.
2. The outcome of the form being filled in is a user becoming pre-qualified to buy a home. It's not just a number calculated on the screen or a lead generated for a third-party partner but a number that has some meaning having been approved by a financial institution. It feels significant as the first real step a user takes towards actually owning a property.
3. Users who have filled in the form are not just monetised once as a lead. Pre-qualified users are monetised (in Zillow's case through its own mortgage brokerage division and in Rightmove's via Nationwide) as mortgage leads and are also now more valuable as sales leads to the portal which can use them to justify price increases. Rightmove has said that users who have filled in its Mortgage in Principle form are 45 times richer in data than regular leads.

So while portal users are invited to fill in a form to take their first non-intimidating, semi-official step towards home ownership and find out for sure what they can afford to pay, lenders and brokerages get qualified mortgage leads, agents get qualified sales leads from the portal and the portal makes a lot of extra money.

Portal pre-qualification sounds like a rare 'win-win-win-win' and I'm sure we'll see more of it.