Breaking Property News 6/7/26
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Property portals are sales tools, what buyers need are truth tools
Thought leadership by Oliver Januiax Founder of NestLink
‘The UK property market has an access not a search problem. For two decades, property portals solved the obvious question of where are the homes? They did it well enough that the industry mistook solving discovery for speeding the property transaction. Now those two things are coming apart at the seams, and the gap between them is where the government, regulators, and a new generation of PropTech are all converging on the issue, whether the big fish are ready or not.
Consider what a serious buyer actually does today. They find a property on a portal, then spend several days reconstructing information that often already exists somewhere: cross-referencing the EPC against energy bills someone mentioned on a forum, checking the planning portal for nearby applications, screenshotting the lease length, pasting the address into a crime map. Most of the time, they do not really know why they are doing this.
They are going through motions their auntie (a buy-to-let developer with an astounding portfolio of two whole flats) has assured them are fundamental. These days Auntie is likely backed up by Dr. Google, Prof. ChatGPT, and assorted AI assistants, none of whom have read the title register.
Then they call the agent, who has a different mental model of the same property. An offer gets negotiated. A solicitor gets instructed and starts almost from scratch. Weeks in, they discover something that should have been visible on day one.
The property portals are losing the room
Here is what the portal traffic numbers obscure: a significant and growing share of that audience is not there with serious purchase intent, they are just browsing. Running a simple calculation based on the number of transactions per year against the number of viewers on the portals, less than 0.72% of viewers on these platforms have genuine intention to purchase at the time they are searching. Property portals have become the nation’s most popular form of aspirational interior design content but for their clients, this is a lower click-through-rate than their email campaigns.
Meanwhile, property discovery is quietly migrating. Social media channels like Instagram, TikTok, Facebook groups, YouTube walk-throughs are where a growing proportion of buyers, particularly younger ones, are first encountering properties. Agents who have built audiences on these platforms are generating inquiry volumes that compete with, and in some cases exceed, their portal leads. AI search is accelerating this further: buyers increasingly ask ChatGPT or Perplexity to describe a neighbourhood, compare two streets, or identify where their budget goes furthest. The portal is no longer the guaranteed first call.
The portals’ response has been to apply AI to the discovery surface. Rightmove has launched AI keyword search, allowing buyers to search using emotional nuance rather than fixed filters. Zoopla has leaned into smart tags. OnTheMarket, under CoStar’s ownership, has announced over 100 AI initiatives for 2026. These are reasonable product improvements. They are not a response to the deeper redundancy problem portals are facing.
Rightmove’s structural challenge is legible: when you have promised investors a 70%+ profit margin, bold transformative bets look unattractive from a City perspective. Zoopla, meanwhile, faces its own strategic uncertainties, with a possible sale circling and no clear direction. The portal that once positioned itself as the innovation-led challenger has not produced a credible answer to what the post-discovery transaction should look like.
The honest industry consensus is that portals are sales tools. Not truth tools, consumers are beginning to reach the same conclusion, the law has already moved. What makes this moment genuinely different from the last decade of commentary about “broken home-moving” is that the regulatory ground has shifted underneath the market.
The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act (DMCC 2024) came into force in April 2025, transferring enforcement from Trading Standards to the Competition and Markets Authority, which can fine companies, without going to court, up to £300,000 or 10% of global turnover. The NTSELAT material information guidance that defined Parts A, B and C, has been withdrawn, leaving agents in the difficult position of having a clear legal obligation and no updated sector-specific guidance on how to meet it.
Simultaneously, the government’s October 2025 consultation proposed mandatory upfront information at the point of listing: title details, leasehold terms, building safety data, standard searches, flood risk, planning consents, chain status, and property condition assessments. A roadmap is expected in 2026, although we are already half-way through the year and yet to get feedback on the consultation.
The estimated saving is £1.5 billion annually in failed transactions which gives some indication of how much value the current system cheerfully destroys, and how much CGT this government feels like it is missing out on. Yet, the industry is still debating whether change is really necessary. Do we really hate change that much?
Consumers already assume this exists
The OPDA and Cherry research makes the structural failure vivid. 64% percent of buyers believe that most property information is already digital and accessible. The actual figure of available legally usable digital information sits below 1%. Buyers are not asking for technology they have never seen. They assume the basics exist. They are wrong, and nobody has found a particularly elegant way to tell them. The follow-on figures matter: 82% think Digital Property Packs are an innovative idea and 77% say they would use one. This is not speculative demand for a hypothetical product. It is a clear appetite waiting for delivery infrastructure to catch up with what legislation is now beginning to require.
The category that does not yet have a name
The companies now competing in this digital transactional space are building toward something that does not sit cleanly inside existing definitions. It is not a portal, because search is one moment in a journey that lasts months. It is not an agent CRM, because the agent does not represent the full transaction. It is not conveyancing software, because legal workflow starts too late to solve the buyer’s information gap. It is not a data product, because data without interpretation creates anxiety rather than confidence.
Buyers do not want a dashboard full of risk scores. They want to know whether to make an offer and what happens next. New products are appearing all over approaching the problem from different angles. One of the more recent examples is NestLink, promising one of the more expansive bets in this space. They are positioning themselves around the transaction as a whole: property intelligence, legal status, document readiness, and communication visible to buyers, sellers, agents, solicitors and lenders within a single environment.
The underlying argument is that the information problem and the coordination problem are actually the same problem, and that solving one without the other is why previous attempts at transaction reform have stalled. OpenMoove, ADoor, Homey and others are working in adjacent territory, and their presence confirms the category is real. What remains open is who defines it.
The Conveyancing Association’s work on AI in legal workflows signals that the legal layer is slowly starting to be rebuilt from the inside too and that ‘maybe’ conveyancers are becoming more open minded to modernising. The buyer’s information problem and the conveyancer’s workflow problem are the same problem viewed from different professional vantage points, which is to say: nobody owned it, so nobody fixed it.
What replaces the front door?
The portal front door worked because it solved one problem cleanly, at scale, in under a decade. They build megaliths fast but failed to innovate now that the tech has changed and the consumer is changing. The problem the market now has to solve is different in kind. It is about making property transactions legible to the consumer who cannot read a leasehold structure but expects far more speed, information, and trust than ever before.
In an era of ‘fake news’ consumers do not trust what is written on a property portal. Ironically, they trust their ChatGPT account far more. The transactions become more legible to the agent who cannot see inside a solicitor’s inbox, to the conveyancer who receives a poorly scanned PDF where they actually need structured data.
The companies that figure out how to make the process as navigable as the listing, will not necessarily replace the portals. But they will own the moment that actually matters not when a buyer finds a house, but when they decide whether to commit to it. That decision is currently made with worse information than it should be, in a tightening legal environment, toward a regulatory destination the industry can now read clearly. Fixing the information problem is no longer just a product opportunity. It is becoming an obligation.’
Andrew Stanton Executive Editor – moving property and proptech forward. PropTech-X
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