AI, Rightmove, and a 'viral' LinkedIn post

OpenAI released a 'shopping' feature, where ChatGPT could scour the internet and bring you products and services, compare prices and suppliers, and give recomendations. 

So I tested it for a property search...lo and behold, it came back with a gallery of results, summarised and matching my criteria, and all linking back to the agents' website. NOT a portal. 

But better than that - instead of using the search function on portals now (which are some variety of location, radius, price range and bedrooms), I could speak to it like a human (ironic!). 

My instruction was 'I am looking for a 4 bedroom detached home, near me, within a 20 minute drive of a railway station, located in the catchment for an ofsted rated 'good' or above primary school, budget between £550,000 and £650,000. Can you suggest some suitable properties?' 

And it did just that. It was less clicks than a portal, and I can search for things that portals don't let you. E.g., Barn Conversions. 

And...its free. In every sense. Free for me as a user, and free for the agents (ChatGPT was just searching the web). 

I recorded a video of this, and posted it to LinkedIn, and it clearly struck a chord with the industry as it went about as 'viral' as I'll ever go, or ever want to be! A normal post for me gets around 1,000 impressions or so, this got (at the time of writing), 30,477 impressions and 142 comments. You can check it out here if you want to: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/davidlindleyceo_rightmove-killer-overused-expression-for-activity-7326158441406734336-74jm?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAchm7EBENgsQTsq4NQ83IxrKIM15nc2t-A

Firstly I don't really have a horse in this race, I'm a customer of Rightmove, but don't share the strong feelings (either way!) about them as some do in the industry, this is just something I find particularly interesting (as did 30,000 other people apparently). 

My prediction is this goes one of two ways. 

The first way is portals integrate an 'ai search' functionality to their platform. So you could go on Rightmove / Zoopla / On The Market etc. and type (or speak) to it as I did above, and it shows results based on that. Significantly better customer experience for buyers, sellers and agents as consumers can find a property better suiting their needs, quicker and easier. 

The big asset Rightmove have to make this a reality (and just them specifically in this case), is their brand awareness and the national hobby it has become. It has 86,500,000 visits per month, and with about 1,000,000 actual transactions per year, it is clear people LOVE scrolling Rightmove, out of curiosity, nosiness, window shopping, fantasising, etc., as if it were Instagram for houses. 

The second way this could pan out, is the AI 'intercepts' users, and people just go to ChatGPT (or others) to search for everything in their lives. Its their personal assistant, who understands them, they understand it, and trust it more than third party websites. 

This might seem outlandish, but actually the stats suggest that we are at the early stages of this being the case. 

ChatGPT now has more monthly visitors than Wikipedia.

In 2024, ChatGPT was the 15th most visited site in the world. Now its number 5, surpassing Reddit, Amazon and WhatsApp, and its still climbing whilst every other site in the top 10 is falling...

Even Google isn't safe... their market share as a primary search engine declined from 80% to 74%, whilst ChatGPT share increased from 1% to 8% since it launched. 

People are 'skipping' the web entirely, with ChatGPT no longer being seen as a tool, but as an interface. 

I dont really see a 'third' option here, to be honest. Portals have to adapt and make their search better, now customers are getting used to having a conversation with an AI that can deliver them incredibly personalised results, and it wont be long before they don't tolerate a one-dimensional search function.

But it might be too little too late for them, and ChatGPT just becomes the way people use the internet. 

'Search Engine Optimisation' will be replaced with 'AI optimisation' for websites, and I'll bet you a tenner we start to see companies selling websites to agents with this as their big unique selling point soon, if they aren't already.

Otherwise, its an incredibly exciting, and fast changing, landscape for agents, and whatever happens, the way consumers, and therefore agents, market properties online will be markedly different in 5 years time (if it even takes that long!). 

Well now Ive got my amateur 'AI-expertise' out of my system, your normal content will resume next month...till then!