How are Property Portals Fighting Back?

In our last post, we explored how AI-native platforms and autonomous agents are poised to rewire the property search and discovery funnel. While past threats attacked the portals’ business model, AI agents and AI-native platforms attack their very essence. This is not a traditional spend-more-to-win traffic share onslaught (think homes.com vs. Zillow); it is about new entrants aiming to re-engineer the entire user journey, threatening to relegate portals from consumer destinations to back-end databases.

This sets up a critical question echoing Clayton Christensen's "Innovator's Dilemma": are the established giants, rationally focused on serving their existing customers, adapting quickly enough to survive a disruptive technology that redefines the market itself? This week, we examine the defensive strategies portals are deploying to fight back. Incumbent portals have fought off previous challenges from new entrants. But this time will it be different?

The Incumbents’ AI Playbook: From Filters to Conversation

While AI-native challengers start with a blank slate, incumbents are retrofitting their powerful engines with AI capabilities. The last 12 months have seen a marked acceleration in this technological arms race, with portals focusing on evolving the user experience from a static, filter-based model to something more dynamic, conversational, and intelligent.

Key advancements include:

• Natural Language Search: Moving beyond dropdown menus, portals are integrating conversational search that allows users to type queries like, “Find a three-bedroom house near a park with good transport links for under £500,000.”

• Enhanced Property Visualization: AI-powered virtual staging is becoming commonplace, allowing users to visualize unfurnished properties as lived-in homes. This is often coupled with sophisticated 3D tours that offer a more immersive viewing experience.

• Intelligent Location-Based Search: Instead of just drawing a circle on a map, portals are using AI to allow searches based on commute times to specific locations, factoring in transport options and time of day.

• AI-Generated Content: Portals are leveraging generative AI to create compelling, data-rich descriptions of local areas, highlighting amenities, school ratings, and even neighborhood "personality" profiles.

AI Advancements in Property Portals

Leaders on the Offensive: A Spectrum of Strategies

These aren't just theoretical upgrades. A fascinating spectrum of strategic responses is emerging among market leaders.

A deep dive into the UK’s Rightmove reveals a deliberate, multi-faceted strategy that is both defensive and cautiously experimental, clearly prioritizing its core business-to-business relationships. 

Rightmove's strategy can be understood in three layers. The first and most telling is its agent-centric core. The most significant initiative, ‘Property Signature’, uses AI to create dynamically branded listings for agents. However, this feature sparked industry debate when Rightmove made it available only to agents on higher-tier, subscription packages. This reveals a clear playbook: AI is being used as a powerful lever to drive Average Revenue Per Advertiser (ARPA) and create premium, monetizable tools that reinforce its B2B value proposition. This is further supported by testing of other agent-focused tools, such as AI-powered property description generators, designed to improve agent efficiency.

The second layer consists of consumer-facing experiments. Rightmove is cautiously exploring how AI can enhance the user journey without disrupting its core model. It is testing an AI-powered location tool, built on Google's Gemini, to provide rich, contextual guides on local areas. It has also experimented with more conceptual features, like a personality-based matching tool to connect users with neighborhoods that fit their lifestyle ("vibrant," "peaceful") and the "That Rightmove Filter" concept, which allows users to search with emotive, nuanced phrases like "a kitchen to dance in." These initiatives are designed to stay relevant to a younger “early AI-adopter” audience, deepen user engagement and explore future search paradigms.

The third, foundational layer is internal capability and operational efficiency. The company has confirmed that AI is a "massive area of focus," with numerous "AI-enabled product teams" and a strong data science foundation being built.

This internal investment is not just about product development; Rightmove has also used generative AI to create marketing campaigns for products like its Mortgage Toolkit. This is an example of  an adoption of AI to improve operational efficiency at the marketing layer (on top of the more usual product- and tech-productivity enhancing adoptions of coding and testing tools).

This three-tiered approach reveals a strategy that is fundamentally defensive: using AI to fortify its relationship with its paying customers (real estate agents) while cautiously exploring consumer-facing innovations to keep the user experience fresh. It is a strategy of optimization, not revolution.

Germany’s ImmoScout24, appears to be undergoing an ambitious transformation. It is executing a deliberate, multi-year pivot from a listings marketplace into a "networked, data-rich ecosystem." This strategy is built on the concept of "interconnectivity", deeply embedding itself into the workflows of agents, owners, and seekers with an AI-supported, data-driven product portfolio.

ImmoScout24's approach is a sophisticated dual strategy. Defensively, it is building tools to protect its ownership of the user interface. It has announced an "innovative and improved search based on artificial intelligence" and is developing "HeyImmo," a conversational AI search tool designed to provide a compelling native experience and prevent users from migrating to third-party agents. 

Defensively, it is building a virtually unassailable data moat. Recognizing that exclusive data is the most critical asset in an AI world, its acquisition of Bulwiengesa, a leading provider of real estate data and analysis, was a landmark move. This strategy creates a powerful hedge: even if external AI agents become the dominant interface, they will need access to ImmoScout24's indispensable dataset to be effective in the German market, establishing a new and lucrative data licensing revenue stream. This "AI-first approach" is being driven from the top down, with the company implementing AI models from Anthropic across the organization to accelerate integration and foster a culture of data-centric innovation.

Finally, Sweden's Hemnet is fighting back against the AI threat but by making its existing fortress seemingly impregnable. It would appear that its strategy is a bet that business model supremacy can serve as a powerful shield against technological disruption. This is not to say Hemnet is technologically inert or is ignoring the impact of AI on their business. Rather, it represents a calculated choice of strategic sequencing. With its highly profitable, seller-paid monetization engine, the most rational use of R&D capital today is to double down on what works. The launch of "Hemnet Max," a new premium advertising package, is the perfect example. It's not a generative AI tool, but AI powered to maximize relevant exposure for premium listings; it's a high-margin product tier designed to extract maximum value from sellers within the existing paradigm. This is a potent defense: by making its platform so indispensable today, Hemnet raises the bar for any AI-native challenger. A disruptor can't just be slightly better; it must be revolutionary enough to overcome Hemnet's near-total market dominance - which translates into enormous lead generation power. With Average Revenue Per Listing (ARPL) soaring 34.7% in a single quarter, Hemnet's current strategy is to fortify its economic moat, giving it the time and resources to adapt when the technological path becomes clearer.

This European focus on inventory and monetization stands in stark contrast to the path of Zillow in the US, whose aggressive AI strategy is a direct consequence of its market structure. In the U.S., the Multiple Listing Service (MLS) makes property listings broadly accessible to any licensed player. This means Zillow cannot build a moat based on exclusive inventory like its European counterparts. Its battle must be won in a different field: creating a superior product and data experience. Zillow’s defense against AI is to become the leading AI-powered real estate platform.

Their strategy is to own the end-to-end consumer journey, from a first rental to a final home sale. They see AI as the critical enabler for this vision. One can expect to see Zillow embed AI across every touchpoint: hyper-personalized search and alerts, richer neighborhood insights, constant improvements to its "Zestimate" AVM, AI-powered guidance for sellers and buyers, and workflow automation for its agent partners. Initiatives like its ChatGPT integration and advanced virtual staging are not just features; they are essential moves in a market where the best product, not the biggest database of listings, wins the consumer. For European portals, Zillow offers a fascinating, if not directly transferable, glimpse into a future where the competitive advantage shifts from inventory control to user experience.

Strategic Defense Strategies of Property Portals

From these examples, a clear set of defensive strategies emerges. Incumbents are betting on a multi-pronged approach to secure their market position.

1. Enhancing the User Experience: The primary goal is to make property search more intuitive, personalized and conversational. By evolving from a listings navigation tool to a consultative experience, portals aim to deepen user engagement and prove their value beyond just listings.

2. Leveraging the Data Moat: Incumbents hold a powerful and often underestimated advantage: decades of proprietary data. Millions of listings descriptions and photos, prices asked for and adjusted, clickstream data, leads data etc. Like ImmoScout24, they are using AI to unlock this value, offering predictive insights and market trends that new entrants cannot match. The strategy is to become the top recommendation, and data source for any AI in their market, including third-party agents.

3. Strengthening Agent Relationships: Portals are positioning themselves as indispensable technology partners to real estate agents. Rightmove's strategy exemplifies this: offering premium AI-powered tools for marketing and lead generation embeds the portal deeper into the professional workflow, adding value via integration while simultaneously increasing switching costs.

4. Integrating, Not Just Building: Rather than building all capabilities from scratch, many portals are using APIs and partnering with specialized tech / AL native companies. This allows them to innovate faster and integrate cutting-edge technology without the massive overhead of in-house development.

The Billion-Dollar Question

The incumbents are not standing still. But are these innovations sufficient to fend off a truly disruptive threat? Will leading portals receive free referral traffic from LLMs in the same volumes as they have hitherto from Google SEO? Will the adding of a chat interface to a 20 year-old classifieds platform offer a comparable user experience to a 2025 AI-native app? Are agent-focused tools a sufficient defense against a consumer-first paradigm shift? And what about the second-tier players? Will they be faster to disrupt themselves by aggressively re-engineering their businesses to unleash the potential of AI, or will they be hesitant later adopters, held back by fewer product and tech resources?

Let’s continue the discussion at the Property Portal Watch conference in Madrid on 15th October.