It’s September 2028, and the public doesn’t “search” for property any more. They ask for it. Not in the clunky, filter-happy way portals trained them to, but in plain English: three beds, decent primary, somewhere to park without a daily feud and tell me what we can actually afford.
If you think that’s sci‑fi, you haven’t been paying attention to how quickly consumer behaviour bends when new tech serves up more complete access to their dream home. AI provides that complete access – it’s just whose new tech is the public going to become addicted to?
In the bleak version of 2028, it belongs to Rightmove.
Not because Rightmove suddenly became the most visionary AI company in Britain but because it already owns the habit, the traffic, and – crucially - the industry’s learned helplessness. Give it an AI “front door” and it doesn’t need to be perfect; it just needs to be first, familiar, and default. Then the gravity does the rest.
That’s where your “nice little agency you’ve got here” problem starts. You’re still paying – obviously - but the relationship has inverted. You’re no longer a customer buying marketing. You’re the fulfilment arm bolted onto someone else’s demand engine. By then your monthly fees will easily be north of £3,500, just to be allowed in the room while the portal decides who gets the best leads, what extra “visibility” costs this quarter and which bits of your future income it has its beady eyes on next.
And yes, the future income piece is the point. The old portal game was: charge agents for exposure, then raise average revenue per advertiser (ARPA) because you can. The new portal game is: own the conversation, then monetise the intent. Mortgage pre‑qual, conveyancing, insurance, landlord services, vendor prospecting - anything that sits upstream of an instruction, or downstream of a lead, is now fair game. Should a future version of ‘Ask Rightmove’ becomes the dominant interface, they can decide which options get surfaced, which get buried and which are wrapped in a “premium” package.
You can already see the runway behind us. Since the 2006 float, Rightmove has hoovered up more than £1.5bn in share buybacks and paid £815m in dividends: roughly £2.3bn extracted, overwhelmingly from agent and developer spend. ARPA over £1,700 now (and that includes the eye-watering discounts corporates get which are offset by independents paying over £2,500 already), up 72% in eight years, while many agencies’ real economics have barely moved. Rightmove runs at a 70% profit margin; yours doesn’t. That delta isn’t abstract - it's staff, growth branches, training, resilience, the Xmas party and the ability to build something saleable.
The most telling stat from Rightmove’s financial statements this year isn’t even the further hikes in ARPA – it’s lack of churn. When retention percent hits mid‑90s despite 12%+ annual price increases, that’s not “loyalty”. That’s captivity. It’s the moment the portal knows it can tighten the belt again, lift the goodies into a higher tier, and watch you swallow it because coming off remains a hard vendor ‘no’ at valuation.
Even the pricing tilt matters for you and the industry at large. If a self‑employed model can access Rightmove cheaply through a large umbrella, while a new high street branch gets quoted multiples of that, the incentives are obvious: fewer independents, fewer new shops, less local competition for those richer agents. RM believes that transactions will be the same regardless of whether your agency exists or not, it’ll just go to your better-resourced (or unfairly-charged) competitor. They’ll still get their money from one of you.
So yes: the AI estate agent you should worry about isn’t the rogue one breaking out of a sandbox. It’s the obedient one doing exactly what a plc instructs it to do - optimise margin, protect the moat and turn our entire industry into their supply chain.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
On Tuesday, MyPorta formally launches.
AI-first search: ‘find a life, not just a listing’. Free to list - not an introductory offer; free, always. Owned by agents and proptech companies, so whatever it earns further up the funnel flows back to the people it used to be taken from. No ranking for sale: partner or not, the algorithm treats your stock the same because this is about homehunters seeing the properties they want, not the ones that a portal charges evermore to make visible (leaving yours on page 4).
As a PAIR reader – thank you! – you get an early sight of what we’re doing: myporta.ai, the first new national portal in over a decade, is live now. Like anything new you may find a rough edge here or there so if you spot one, tell us on support@myporta.ai. This is the start of the journey, not its destination – and with your help in the days, weeks and months ahead it will become the free portal that you always knew you needed, but feared that would never arrive.
Now run 2028 again. Buyers ask an AI which the industry owns. Rightmove is still there as another shop window, a choice; but it's one marketing channel among several, priced like one (just like print became), because for the first time in twenty years you can say no. The RM rep's script changes. The Xmas party's back on. One ravenous business is no longer deciding the winners and losers. Your business trades more, profits more, is worth more – a lot more – the day you decide to sell.
And it’s more fun again. Finally.
The first 2028 doesn't need Rightmove to do anything new. It only needs you to do nothing. The water's been warming since 2006.
Their whole act has always depended on you believing you have nowhere else to go. From Tuesday, you do.