EP29: Discover, Stage, Sell – AI for Estate Agents with ModelProp

From Property Portals to AI

Mal's experience with technology in property stretches back to the early days of digital transformation. He was part of the team that helped establish PrimeLocation.com, one of the early property portals focused on the luxury end of the market, before the business was sold in 2005.

He later joined the launch team at Zoopla in 2008, gaining further experience of how technology could reshape an established industry.

For Mal, one of the biggest lessons from that period was the way general-purpose technologies can transform consumer behaviour. Property had traditionally been discovered through newspapers, magazines and local estate agents. The internet changed that relationship almost entirely.

Today, he sees AI as another technology capable of producing a similar shift — but at a much faster pace.

AI Adoption Is Moving Faster Than Digital

There are clear parallels between the arrival of the internet and the current AI transition. In both cases, consumers began adopting new technology before many businesses had fully understood its implications.

But Mal believes the pace and breadth of AI adoption are significantly different.

He points to AI being used across a much wider range of demographics, including older homeowners who may find conversational interfaces easier than traditional search. Someone who finds typing difficult, for example, can simply speak to an AI system about what they are looking for.

This accessibility means AI is not simply another digital channel. Mal sees it as a broader societal shift that could change how people interact with technology — and consequently how they interact with property businesses.

For Model Prop AI, the challenge is helping a traditionally structured industry understand what that change means in practical terms.

Making AI Accessible to Estate Agents

Model Prop AI focuses on helping estate and lettings agents understand AI and deploy it in ways that can increase market share, reduce costs and increase revenue per transaction.

Rather than presenting AI as one enormous technological transformation, Mal breaks its applications into more accessible areas.

• Text-based AI can assist with tasks such as rewriting property descriptions, answering customer questions and providing website-based chat.
• Visual AI can digitally stage properties, removing existing furniture and replacing it with different styles. This makes a previously expensive marketing technique more accessible to smaller agents.
• Video AI can turn property photographs into animated videos, generate a script and use an AI avatar and voice to present the property. What might previously have required significant production costs can now be created much more affordably.
• Voice AI can act as a receptionist, handling calls, taking messages, transferring callers and, where connected to relevant CRM systems, allowing customers to book viewings.

For Mal, these individual applications are important not simply because of what they do, but because they provide an accessible entry point into AI. An agent might initially adopt one relatively inexpensive tool before becoming more comfortable with the technology and exploring broader applications.

Trust Is the Real AI Moat

Technology itself is not necessarily a sustainable advantage in AI. Mal argues that relationships and proprietary data will become much more important sources of differentiation. In an industry where many businesses will have access to similar AI tools, the question becomes who customers trust to use them effectively.

That makes education part of Model Prop AI's role.

Estate agents need somewhere they can ask basic questions without feeling that they should already understand the technology. From there, they can gradually build enough confidence to become an AI champion within their own organisation.

Mal describes trust as a form of currency. As consumers encounter increasing amounts of AI-generated content, businesses will need to demonstrate that what they produce is reliable, transparent and aligned with their values.

Making AI Visible and Responsible

Model Prop AI's Trust AI initiative is intended to make the presence of AI more transparent. For Mal, responsible AI is not simply about avoiding obvious mistakes. It is about being open about where AI is being used and ensuring customers can still access human expertise.

This becomes particularly important in property because buying or selling a home can be one of the largest financial decisions an individual makes.

AI can handle repetitive and mechanistic tasks, but Mal believes the final human relationship remains critical. Customers need people who can understand their circumstances, answer questions and provide reassurance when the stakes are high.

The objective is therefore not to remove the human from the process, but to give them more time to do the work where human judgement matters most.

From Property Search to Property Discovery

AI could also fundamentally change how people find their next home.

Traditional property portals rely heavily on structured searches: location, price, number of bedrooms and other predefined criteria. AI allows consumers to describe a much more complicated idea of what they want. A prospective buyer might describe a three-bedroom house on the south coast, with a sea view, good secondary schools, access to nature, a particular lifestyle and a commute into London of less than 90 minutes.

Instead of forcing that person to translate their preferences into a series of filters, AI can interpret the whole request.

Mal sees this as a shift from property search to property discovery. The starting point becomes the person's lifestyle rather than the inventory currently available on a particular website.

The AI Buyer’s Agent

The next stage could be an AI system that behaves much more like a personal buyer's or relocation agent.

Rather than simply responding to a search, it could remember a user's preferences over time. It could understand that a particular type of garden, school, transport connection or location matters to them and use that information to identify relevant opportunities.

This could even extend beyond properties currently listed for sale. Mal imagines a future where an AI system could identify homes that match a person's requirements even if they have already sold or are not currently on the market — potentially helping identify owners who might be willing to sell.

The experience could become increasingly conversational. Instead of asking what properties are available?, consumers could effectively describe their ideal life and let AI work backwards from that vision.

Making Estate Agents Unique at Scale

For Mal, this does not necessarily mean every estate agent becoming identical. In fact, he sees AI as a way of making individual businesses more distinctive.

The UK has thousands of estate agent companies, with a particularly large number of single-branch firms. Yet traditional property portals have tended to standardise how those businesses present themselves.

AI could allow agents to communicate their values, expertise and local knowledge much more effectively.

Rather than competing primarily through a logo, a limited amount of text and a property listing, agents could build richer relationships with prospective customers through conversational AI and personalised experiences.

The result could be what McCallion describes as being "unique at scale": using technology to amplify the characteristics that make an individual business different.

AI and the Three Measures of Success

For estate agents, Mal identifies three fundamental measures for evaluating AI investment.

The first is market share. In a market with a finite number of properties being sold at any one time, agents need to win a greater proportion of those instructions.

The second is lower costs. AI can automate repetitive processes and allow smaller teams to accomplish more without necessarily increasing headcount.

The third is revenue per transaction. If AI helps an agent market a property more effectively, attract more potential buyers and ultimately achieve a better outcome for the seller, that can strengthen the case for a higher-value service.

This gives agents a practical way to think about AI. The question is not simply whether a particular technology is impressive, but whether it changes one of these underlying business outcomes.

Machines Doing the Machine Work

One of the biggest barriers to adoption is fear of job displacement.

Mal sees a striking parallel with his experience introducing the internet to estate agents in the early 2000s. At the time, many agents feared that digital property portals would eliminate their jobs.

Decades later, estate agents remain an important part of the property transaction. His argument is that AI should follow a similar trajectory. Rather than eliminating the profession, it can remove some of the repetitive tasks that prevent agents from spending time with customers.

His guiding principle is simple: "getting machines to do the machine stuff and getting humans to do the human stuff."

For an estate agent, that could mean spending less time writing descriptions, answering routine enquiries or managing bookings and more time building relationships, negotiating and advising clients.

Challenging the Property Portal Model

AI could also challenge one of the most established structures in the property industry: the property portal.

Mal argues that portals historically solved an important problem. They gave estate agents a way to put their entire property inventory in front of consumers at a scale that print advertising could not match.

But AI changes the discovery process.

If a consumer can ask an AI agent to find their ideal property and that system can search across multiple sources, the consumer may no longer need to visit a particular portal.

That creates a fundamental question for the portal business model: if AI can find a property wherever it is listed, why should an estate agent continue paying substantial fees simply to access that discovery platform?

For Mal, this could become one of the most significant disruptions AI brings to property.

Natural Language Search Is Already Emerging

This transition is not entirely theoretical.

Model Prop AI is already seeing consumers use natural language to search for properties through AI assistants embedded on estate agent websites. Instead of entering a location, price and number of bedrooms, someone can describe a much more specific combination of requirements — such as a riverside setting, proximity to a train station, parking and a highly rated school.

AI can then interpret the request and identify relevant properties.

The implication is significant: once consumers experience this kind of search, traditional filtering can begin to feel unnecessarily restrictive.

The Future of the Augmented Estate Agent

Looking ahead, Mal is particularly excited about AI systems being able to interact with one another.

For estate agents, that could ultimately change not only the technology they use but where they spend their time. Rather than being tied to a desk and screen, agents could rely on AI to manage much of the research, administration and matching process while they spend more time in their local communities.

That could create a seemingly paradoxical outcome: more technology leading to more human interaction.

The most valuable estate agents may increasingly be those who excel at the qualities AI cannot easily reproduce — building relationships, understanding people, negotiating and making deals happen.

As AI handles more of the operational work, those human capabilities could become more valuable rather than less.

Building the Next Generation of Property Technology

Mal's career has given him a unique perspective on technological disruption in property. He has experienced the transition from print to digital, helped build the early generation of property portals and is now working through the emergence of AI.

His central lesson is that technological change does not simply replace old behaviour with new tools. It changes what consumers expect from businesses.

For property, that could mean moving from portals to AI agents, from search to discovery, from standardised listings to personalised experiences and from repetitive administration to relationship-led work.

The opportunity for estate agents is therefore not simply to adopt AI. It is to use it to become more distinctive, more efficient and more human.