After an intense week of conferencing at the Proptech and Portal Watch event in Barcelona in October, the team at Online Marketplaces has taken some time to debrief on the ideas we think are worth a post-conference review.
In doing so, we have found a short list of themes and ideas foundational to how the industry changes direction in 2025 and beyond, from respecting customers to the importance of data.
In an (at-times) controversial on-stage interview with Simon Baker, CoStar Group CEO Andy Florance called out major players like Rightmove, Idealista and REA Group for "disrespectful" practices, likening market leaders to tax authorities that charge ever-higher levies on agents, just for operating in the market.
During a Q&A session—in response to the question: "Do you believe that an agent-friendly positioning is a winning strategy compared to the more aggressive approaches like Zillow's premier age, the flex program?" [sic]—Florance said:
"So, the question is: is it a good idea to treat your customer with respect and dignity? Gee, what a tough one!
"But it's a serious point. There are a number of companies operating on the premise that you can do whatever you want to the customer, and they will take it and they will be your victim, and you can just step on their face."
Florance pointed out that market leaders who consistently raise prices without added value will ultimately see their customers move towards their competitors.
We'll stick to CoStar for a moment.
In the final session of the conference, Jonathan Turpin, Principal at AIM Group, suggested that the stakes are high for CoStar's prospective European expansion. Should the American real estate giant succeed in its attempt to take on multiple market leaders across European borders under the Homes.com brand, the world's first global real estate marketplace will be born—pressuring incumbents like Idealista, SeLoger and Rightmove to defend their position against an upstart conglomerate.
But, should CoStar fail, does it mark the end of the challenger overtaking the leader? If CoStar can't do it, no one can...
As luck would have it, CoStar announced a major expansion to its UK headquarters days before we released this blog.
As Abdelrahman Zohairy, CEO at Property Sorted, says: "Right now, AI is the enabler, not the solution ."
As one of the named themes of the conference, artificial intelligence was a topic of conversation in the majority of presentations.
From AI-powered chatbots and virtual tours to dynamic pricing models based on real-time market analysis, AI is poised to impact every facet of the portal experience.
However, the reality is that AI is in its infancy. While we saw many AI solutions presented at the conference, no singular technology has shifted any paradigms quite yet.
Nevertheless, it was telling that AI in the context of imagery stands out as a strategic priority. Several presenters highlighted how data points hidden within images—historically a static element of a property listing—will be unlocked by AI solutions moving forward.
If you're going to dip a toe into the AI ocean, image recognition and dissemination should be a starting point.
One of the best examples of this is Proptexx, one of our sponsors at Proptech and Portal Watch. CEO Stefan Gunnarsson's widget is making waves in real estate virtual staging. Watch our podcast with him below...
Returning to CoStar one final time, Andy Florance noted that Matterport, the digital twin specialist that CoStar agreed to purchase for $1.6 billion earlier this year, will be rolled out to the industry as a whole and made readily available to competitors. He also implied that Matteport technology will be combined with drones to take aerial footage and images of developments and commercial buildings.
Meanwhile, are listings being optimised for marketing and decision-makers?
Simon Bray, president at REW in Canada, suggested that AI can play a big role in the 'entertainment' and brand value segments for portals worldwide, where repeated visits generated from a gamified experience become a priceless commodity. We'll let our readers work out how to do that best...
If you want to experience for yourself what Artificial Intelligence is capable of, why not listen to our first-ever AI-powered podcast, below:
More and more portals are integrating natural language search into their property search options. Ticking thirty Yes/No filters and hoping for a match is beginning to look increasingly old-school - if not obsolete (quite yet).
The reality is that a shortlist of nigh-on perfect search results is ultimately more appealing to time-poor property seekers who would rather strike gold in 10 seconds with a well-worded prompt than deal with scroll and click, scroll and click tedium that characterises the vast majority of marketplace search behaviours.
The bigger question remains unanswered (or maybe even unasked): Are property seekers necessarily ready for a natural language search experience? Or, to put it in other words, would a wider availability of natural language search solutions drive a meaningful increase in its popularity as a preferred method of search? Are we reinventing a wheel that looks pretty but nobody wants?
The real answer to these questions highly depends on what natural language search results 'spit out'. Over to you, marketplaces...
Portals can't stay old school forever. Following on from AI, it is about time for portals to fully embrace their data capabilities and evolve into a distributor of unique, high-quality content that empowers users and advertisers alike.
One such example is Addland—a UK-based marketplace that is set to shift entirely into a data platform. Addland has access to a complete set of complex and hard-to-find datasets for every property in the UK, from leasehold length to the risk of erosion. Another great podcast here...
Meanwhile, as Mal Macallion from ModelProp puts it, "the promiscuity of data" will only see it become more public and more accessible over time. Not building a great user experience around it will leave you behind.
Finally, another potentially industry-shifting business model is that of DD360, where founder Jorge Combe is using data and smart solutions to provide key insights and industry-specific tools to accompany developers at all stages in Latin America.
Find out more about this fascinating model by watching our podcast with Jorge, below:
There are 8.5 billion Google searches made every single day. Furthermore, market-leading portals like Zillow (38%), Rightmove (40%) and realestate.com.au (45%) get a hefty chunk of their traffic from organic search.
SEO is massive, and important, to real estate portals worldwide. SEO continues to be a go-to strategy for a business looking to attract buying eyes, yet this is a hypercompetitive space.
In short—while organic traffic is great, success isn't guaranteed and it doesn't come free.
If you're serious about using SEO to drive traffic to your listings as a real estate portal, understanding the true cost of your strategy (and by extension, your ROI) needs to be at the very top of your analytics. Meanwhile, technical SEO (how easy your website is for a search engine like Google to navigate) is an under-represented aspect of a solid SEO strategy. This also requires time, money and patience.
Mike van der Heijden from SEO specialist Portal Ventures, said:
"Despite what you're hearing, SEO is not dead, but it is changing in the AI generation, and you will need to adapt your strategies.
"For real estate portals, you need to find ways to supplement and enrich your listing data. In a world where agents are multi-homing listings, what additional data can you add to your listings? That will allow your customers to be able to drill down deeper into their wants and needs.
"For example, if a listing for a '2 bedroom apartment in Barcelona' is shown on two different portals, the one that can add information such as travel time to the local university or other POIs, with attributes it can detect in images, agents will then be able to segment that listing into more long tail searches—and can generate more search traffic from."
Are the days of pay-to-list portals numbered?
Two notable examples of a new generation of portals caught my eye during the conference; Jitty (UK) and Proppy (Belgium) access listings directly from real estate agents' websites/back ends, to legally (and ethically) capture vast amounts of supply in domestic markets at a lower cost.
The result: a massive listings ecosystem that bypasses traditional portals entirely while maintaining a heavy share of overall supply. As long as these new portals attract high-quality, high-quantity traffic, revenue models are likely to shift towards lead-selling models and services such as mortgages, renovations, and furnishings.
The complication for pseudo-portals like Jitty and Proppy is that a free-to-list model eliminates a key revenue stream. Can the new generation of portal businesses get by on adjacent revenue streams alone?
Graham Paterson, CEO at Jitty, predicted "the eventual rise of the digital homebuying agent". That sounds like a topic worth exploring more, and it's something we alluded to in an episode of the podcast earlier this year...
Real estate portals worldwide continue to be money-making machines, but the rise of AI and the inevitability of a new generation of business leaders and entrepreneurs mean the model faces more challenges than ever before.
There is a real opportunity for the industry to condense the search experience into a hyper-focused, user-centric process that directs traffic away from market-leading portals like Rightmove and Realestate.com.au and towards a Jitty, a Proppy, or something else entirely—that gives a potential buyer their perfect property without them needing to ever land on a traditional portal.
Should this happen (and one day it probably will), the advertising spaces that incumbents like your Rightmoves and REAs of the world provide (for a lot of money) will begin to make much less sense—representing a catalyst for change that, arguably, the industry has been crying out for since day one.
Real estate is an industry notorious for its glacial approach to embracing change. Perhaps it is time for that reputation to be challenged meaningfully...
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