Your Next Buyer Is Asking ChatGPT, Not Google

Are estate agents really using AI?

Yes, and far more than most people assume. In a recent poll of our LinkedIn following of nearly 5,000 property professionals, 75% of those who responded said they use AI on a daily basis. This is no longer an early-adopter habit. It is becoming the baseline for how agents draft listings, summarise market data and manage their marketing, and it increasingly extends to the tools they rely on, from compliance checks to LonRes’s own Rental Checker.

But the more useful question is not whether agents use AI. It is how to use it without losing the thing that makes a good agent valuable in the first place.

The dissonance at the heart of it

There is a quiet tension running through every conversation about AI in property. Agents know their value lies in the things a machine cannot do: reading a room, managing a fragile chain, knowing which buyer will fall for which house before they have walked through the door. Whether you work as a sales agent, a letting agent or a relocation agent or a property finder, the worry is the same: the fear, often unspoken, that leaning on AI somehow dilutes that. That it turns a trusted adviser into just another voice in an increasingly automated echo chamber.

It is a fair concern. And the agents getting it right are the ones who have resolved it rather than ignored it.

Chelsea Whelan, Regional Partner at Knight Frank, puts it plainly:

That distinction is the whole game. AI is not the relationship. AI is what frees up the hours so you can spend more time on the relationship, and making sure the right buyer finds your property in the first place.

Will AI replace estate agents?

No. AI is changing how agents work and how they get found, but it does not replace the relationship-led core of the job. The viewing, the negotiation, the trust built over a coffee, the read on what a buyer actually wants: none of that is automatable, and it is precisely where good agents win. What AI changes is the work around the edges, including, increasingly, whether a buyer ever discovers your property at all.

How are buyers using AI to search for property?

A growing share of buyers now begin their property search by asking an AI assistant a question in plain English, rather than typing keywords into a traditional search engine or scrolling the portals. Instead of searching “2 bed flat Battersea” and working through a hundred results, they ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Copilot something like “show me two-bed flats in Battersea on the third floor or above with a river view, up to a million.”

Illustrative: the AI does the filtering – the buyer sees a shortlist, not a hundred results.

The AI does the filtering, the comparing and the shortlisting. The buyer sees a handful of options rather than a hundred. And here is the part that matters for agents: if your properties are not legible to these platforms, they will not appear in that shortlist. You are not outranked. You are invisible.

For two decades, being found meant ranking on Google and appearing on the portals. That logic is starting to fracture, and the agents thinking about it now will own the advantage when it becomes the norm.

The trajectory is hard to ignore. Research from Realtor.com found that 82% of Americans now use AI for housing-market information. The UK is earlier in the curve, but the direction of travel is the same, and that gap tends to close quickly.

What is structured data, and why does it matter for property listings?

Structured data is clean, machine-readable information about a property, covering its price, location, number of bedrooms, floor level, key features and availability, presented in a format an AI platform can read and reason over. It is the single biggest factor in whether your listings get surfaced by AI search.

The same property, twice: photos and prose an AI cannot parse – and the clean fields it can.

This matters because AI platforms do not “see” a listing the way a person browsing a portal does. They cannot interpret a nicely designed page full of photos and marketing prose. They rely on the underlying structured data. If your listing information is messy, locked inside images, or scattered across formats, an AI assistant struggles to use it, and your property loses out to one that is cleanly structured.

This is the AI-search equivalent of search engine optimisation. A few years ago we optimised pages for Google. Increasingly, the task is making sure your properties are intelligible to the models buyers are now asking. That is a meaningful thing to do well, and not something most agents have the time or infrastructure to manage property by property.

How does AI Boost help agents get found by AI?

AI Boost provides AI platforms with structured, high-quality sales and rental data from LonRes, pushing your visible properties to the forefront of AI search results, so that when a buyer asks an assistant for exactly the kind of home you are marketing, yours is among the options it returns. It joins the wider set of LonRes member services built to keep your properties in front of the right people.

The mechanics are simple. A prospective buyer searches for a property using an AI platform. AI Boost ensures the platform has the structured data to present your most relevant listings. The buyer is then connected directly to you and your instruction, via embedded weblink landing page technology, so the enquiry that follows comes from someone who is already informed and genuinely interested.

Which brings us back to Knight Frank’s point. AI enables; personal connection carries. AI Boost gets the right buyer to your door faster and better informed. What happens next – the viewing, the conversation, the trust, the deal – is still entirely yours.

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