Property search is moving into the chat window. The visits have not followed yet.
Portals have put their listings inside ChatGPT and Google is selling listing ads in search. Yet AI still sends portals almost no traffic. The fight is over the consideration stage, and data licences decide it.
By Alberto García Martínez, Managing Director, Harbourline Partners
Every property portal board has had the same conversation in the last year: if people start their home search by asking an AI assistant, what happens to the portal? The product announcements suggest the answer is urgent. The traffic numbers suggest it is not, yet. Both are true, and the gap between them is where the next few years of competition will be decided.
The announcements
The audience is certainly there. OpenAI said in February 2026 that ChatGPT had 900 million weekly active users. Portals have moved to meet it on their own terms. Zillow launched an app inside ChatGPT in October 2025 that returns listings with photos, maps and prices, then sends the user back to Zillow to book a tour or reach an agent. In March it started testing a conversational AI mode on its own platform with a limited group of users, covering affordability, comparisons and tour booking.
The more direct move came from Google. On 11 June it expanded Local Services Ads that show home listings, with prices, images and features drawn from HouseCanary data, to all 50 US states, letting buyers call, message or book an agent from the ad itself. That is lead generation, the core of a portal's revenue, sold inside a search result.
The traffic
Against that backdrop, the reported numbers are strikingly small. Rightmove said in February that traffic from the big AI players was less than 0.5% of visits. REA Group has described LLM traffic as sub-1% and declining. The exception is rentals, where Zumper has reported ChatGPT at 4 to 4.5% of organic traffic.
Why so little? Buying a home is a long, repeated activity. People return to a portal dozens of times, save searches and set alerts. An assistant is useful for the first question, not for the thirtieth visit. Renting is shorter and more transactional, which is exactly where the AI share is higher.
The fight is for consideration, not discovery
The real contest is over the stage between "show me some homes" and "book a viewing": comparing options, checking affordability, understanding an area. That is where the portals are putting their AI effort. CoStar's Homes AI, for example, remembers properties a user has clicked on and answers questions comparing them. Whoever owns that stage owns the moment a buyer is ready to talk to an agent, which is the moment agents pay for.
What decides it is data. An assistant can write a fluent answer, but it cannot invent a current listing, a verified price history or the name of the agent handling the sale. Those sit with portals and listing services under licences, and the licences say who can show them and where.
What this means for Southeast Asia
In markets without a central listing service, the portal's licence to its listings is even more of a moat, because there is no shared feed for an AI company to license instead. That favours the leaders. It also changes what a smaller portal or brokerage should build. Conversational search on its own is becoming cheap to copy. Exclusive or verified inventory, response speed from agents, and the data that shows which enquiries turn into transactions are not. Those are the assets a buyer will pay for when AI has levelled the front end.