In the ever-evolving world of property and technology, OpenAI's latest offering, Deep Research, is making waves. Priced at $200 (about £180) a month, this service is being hailed as a significant leap forward in AI's reasoning capabilities. It's a development that has the potential to disrupt the traditional property search landscape, particularly the role – and balance of power – of familiar portals like Rightmove, Zoopla, and OnTheMarket.
This week, I put Deep Research to the test with a specific property search challenge. I tasked it with finding properties featuring a ‘sea view, three bedrooms, and located within a half-hour drive of Chichester station, all within a budget of up to £1.5 million’.
The results were impressive, with the AI discovering nine properties from a variety of sources, not just the big portals. This demonstrates AI's growing ability to aggregate property listings from both portals and local estate agents, signalling a shift in how properties might be discovered in the future.
Here are my three big observations from this week’s (ahem) deep research:
Deep Research doesn’t just rely on the portals. It ventured into the realms of local estate agents such as Redwood and Sons, King and Chasemore, and Baileys, suggesting that the days of relying solely on a single large portal are numbered.
Deep Research doesn’t just rely on text. As it continued to search and argue with itself about whether it was finding the right properties – which, in itself, is fascinating to watch, somewhat like the mental gymnastics a human goes through when pursuing a goal – it became clear that it was looking at images to find those that had sea views, as well as relying on the text.
Deep Research makes human errors too. Interestingly, as a direct result of it looking at images, it included one property where the agent had included a birds’ eye view of the home a street back from the beach. It didn’t (quite) have a view of the sea – but that photo’s presence convinced the AI that this was to be put on the shortlist.
What does that mean for agents?
Your website needs attention: Check in with your website developer and make sure that it’s super-primed for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). This is the closest thing we currently have to AI Optimisation, though I expect the two disciplines to diverge in the coming years, as AI will be prioritising different things than those which SEO (ie Google search) has always done. This gives you a chance of your property’s listing on your website appearing on searcher’s shortlists ahead of a portal’s.
Content, baby, content: Take more photos. Even of that tiny box room. Write more text – there are plenty of AI Particulars Writer tools around, not least ours, which can quickly and efficiently write summaries in your own tone of voice, in UK English, to the length you desire. Make sure there’s a floorplan. Add attributes as bullet points. Construct a straightforward, unique property URL for every one.
There is a post-Rightmove world: Imagine that OnTheMarket’s listings are just as easy to find with AI as Rightmove’s. Imagine restricting distribution of your highly sought-after property content to just a few sites that will give a genuine return on investment (RoI), rather than being somewhere because you think you have to. Enterprising AI businesses will show you (and your vendors) which these are. Some of us already know.
As I tell clients every day – this is the worst it’s ever going to be. Deep Research will bring forward V2, V3, V5 – it will spawn competitors that move faster, deeper, are more Chinese (next week’s newsletter!), more specific and more able to work out that a property one street back from the beach can’t necessarily see the sea.
I grew up when no one could ever see 'print' failing. With agents relentlessly targeted with increased page costs, having to band together to try and stop these publishers from putting some of them out of business. Agents have worried about this with Rightmove for decades – and for some, genuinely, it’s too late. They weren’t able to afford Rightmove’s ever-increasing fees.
Like the internet in 2000, AI in 2025 offers the way out of that vice. So stop talking about Rightmove to vendors. Stop agreeing that it’s critical to list there – put forward an alternative view. You don’t have to come off straight away – just shrug and say “Yeah, we’re on there, but it’s certainly not as effective as it used to be … and there’s something else that we think might be better for your lovely home …”
Here, we’ll continue to explore cutting-edge AI tools and how they’re going to change the industry. In the meantime, play around with some of the tech out there already, subscribe to our weekly newsletter, listen to our weekly podcast and join our monthly webinar to increase your AI literacy.
This is what is going to separate great businesses from good ones in the future; understanding what AI tools are here, what are coming – and how to maximise profitability using them.
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