Property portals are sales tools, what buyers need are truth tools
There is no front door anymore
Thought leadership by Olivier Jauniaux Founder of NestLink
‘The UK property market has an access not a search problem. For two decades, property portals solved the obvious question of where are the homes? They did it well enough that the industry mistook solving discovery for speeding the property transaction. Now those two things are coming apart at the seams, and the gap between them is where the government, regulators, and a new generation of PropTech are all converging on the issue, whether the big fish are ready or not.
Consider what a serious buyer actually does today. They find a property on a portal, then spend several days reconstructing information that often already exists somewhere: cross-referencing the EPC against energy bills someone mentioned on a forum, checking the planning portal for nearby applications, screenshotting the lease length, pasting the address into a crime map. Most of the time, they do not really know why they are doing this.
They are going through motions their auntie (a buy-to-let developer with an astounding portfolio of two whole flats) has assured them are fundamental. These days Auntie is likely backed up by Dr. Google, Prof. ChatGPT, and assorted AI assistants, none of whom have read the title register.
Then they call the agent, who has a different mental model of the same property. An offer gets negotiated. A solicitor gets instructed and starts almost from scratch. Weeks in, they discover something that should have been visible on day one.
The property portals are losing the room
Here is what the portal traffic numbers obscure: a significant and growing share of that audience is not there with serious purchase intent, they are just browsing. Running a simple calculation based on the number of transactions per year against the number of viewers on the portals, less than 0.72% of viewers on these platforms have genuine intention to purchase at the time they are searching. Property portals have become the nation’s most popular form of aspirational interior design content but for their clients, this is a lower click-through-rate than their email campaigns.
Meanwhile, property discovery is quietly migrating. Social media channels like Instagram, TikTok, Facebook groups, YouTube walk-throughs are where a growing proportion of buyers, particularly younger ones, are first encountering properties. Agents who have built audiences on these platforms are generating inquiry volumes that compete with, and in some cases exceed, their portal leads. AI search is accelerating this further: buyers increasingly ask ChatGPT or Perplexity to describe a neighbourhood, compare two streets, or identify where their budget goes furthest. The portal is no longer the guaranteed first call.
The portals’ response has been to apply AI to the discovery surface. Rightmove has launched AI keyword search, allowing buyers to search using emotional nuance rather than fixed filters. Zoopla has leaned into smart tags. OnTheMarket, under CoStar’s ownership, has announced over 100 AI initiatives for 2026. These are reasonable product improvements. They are not a response to the deeper redundancy problem portals are facing.
Rightmove’s structural challenge is legible: when you have promised investors a 70%+ profit margin, bold transformative bets look unattractive from a City perspective. Zoopla, meanwhile, faces its own strategic uncertainties, with a possible sale circling and no clear direction. The portal that once positioned itself as the innovation-led challenger has not produced a credible answer to what the post-discovery transaction should look like.
The honest industry consensus is that portals are sales tools. Not truth tools, consumers are beginning to reach the same conclusion, the law has already moved. What makes this moment genuinely different from the last decade of commentary about “broken home-moving” is that the regulatory ground has shifted underneath the market.
The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act (DMCC 2024) came into force in April 2025, transferring enforcement from Trading Standards to the Competition and Markets Authority, which can fine companies, without going to court, up to £300,000 or 10% of global turnover. The NTSELAT material information guidance that defined Parts A, B and C, has been withdrawn, leaving agents in the difficult position of having a clear legal obligation and no updated sector-specific guidance on how to meet it.
PropTech is evolving but WhatsApp is still winning the Property transaction battle
A home-moving process that a decade of PropTech failed to fix
Thought leadership by Olivier Jauniaux Founder of NestLink
There are a particular series of messages, somewhere in every property chain, that decides whether a sale lives or dies. A solicitor confirms a completion date. A buyer agrees to pay a deposit. An agent relays that the seller will agree to leave the curtains and a dishwasher they can’t be bothered to move. They are consequential, time-stamped, and legally relevant. And there is a very good chance they are all sitting in a WhatsApp thread on someone’s personal phone, two messages below a photograph of their dog and a selfie of their aunt on holiday somewhere.
This is the part of the home-moving process that a decade of PropTech has quietly failed to fix. Discovery was solved: listings, valuations, mapping, agency CRMs, conveyancing case management, mortgage sourcing, all digitised and reasonably mature. Then an offer is accepted, the transaction becomes real, and everyone migrates to the lowest common denominator already on their phone.
The most valuable, highest-liability stretch of the whole process runs on the least controlled technology in it. For years that was filed under “messy but harmless.” That filing is now out of date, and three things have moved underneath it. A throwaway message is now a contract.
In Jaevee Homes Ltd v Fincham [2025] EWHC 942 (TCC), a property developer and a demolition contractor negotiated partly by email and then, as people do, drifted onto WhatsApp. The contractor asked whether they were on. The developer replied, in effect, “yes.” When the relationship later soured and a formal sub-contract was waved around, the High Court held that the binding agreement had already been formed by the WhatsApp exchange, informal tone and missing start date notwithstanding. The casual “yes” won. The tidy paperwork sent afterwards did not.
The principle is not new; offer, acceptance, consideration and intention have never required letterhead. What is new is the venue. Courts now routinely read these threads as the contractual record, which means every loose “yes, fine, go ahead” fired off between viewings carries a weight its sender did not necessarily intend. This frontier, and risk, is very rapidly moving into property transaction territory: a High Court test case is examining whether a WhatsApp message can dispose of an equitable interest in land under section 53(1)(c) of the Law of Property Act 1925 was a formality the sector has always assumed only a deed could satisfy.
This is no longer the case, set against the June 2026 reform plans, which aim to introduce binding agreements earlier in the process to stop parties walking away without penalty. We are about to formalise commitment at the very moment buyers and sellers are most likely to be expressing it, ambiguously, on the channel with the least structure and no reliable audit trail. A market that is being told to make its commitments binding is still making them on the platform designed for sharing memes.
The data exposure nobody priced in
Then there is the personal information, a property transaction is a small treasury of exactly the data regulators care most about: bank details, mortgage figures, passports and ID documents, AML material, sometimes health-related context buried in a chain-of-circumstance explanation.
Much of it now passes through agents’ and brokers’ personal devices on an app with a data-protection policy best described as “hopeful”. UK GDPR penalties run to £17.5m or 4% of global turnover, and the land and property sector already files data-security incidents by the hundreds.
PropTech innovator Vinny launches its UK’s first rental viewing platform
AI-driven end-to-end technology is set to transform the lettings sector
PropTech innovator Vinny has announced the launch of the UK’s first rental viewing platform which allows potential tenants to self-vet and view properties securely, entirely on their own schedule, without an agent being present. The AI-driven end-to-end technology is set to transform the lettings sector by saving an estimated 80% of traditional property management time.
The seamless automation begins as soon as a potential tenant enquires about a property. From lead capture and qualification to booking and follow up, Vinny’s self-guided property tours offer a safe and secure experience for both tenants and operators by:
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Aligning applicants with landlord’s rental criteria before inviting them to view, providing tenants with a clear, fast-track qualification process and ensuring properties are only viewed by suitable candidates
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Allowing prospective tenants to book a viewing slot online at a time that suits, without the need for calls, emails and back and forth scheduling
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Verifying each viewer’s identity before granting access, providing peace of mind for landlords through robust, automated identity verification, while ensuring a safe, secure, and professional environment for viewers
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Sending a secure mobile key to the viewer’s phone, giving them access only during their booked viewing slot
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Enabling prospective tenants to view the property independently and at their own pace, without the need for a letting agent to be present
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Carrying out post-tour follow ups, allowing landlords to manage engagement personally or let the AI take the lead
Piloting the technology in their single family housing units at The Chapters in Ely, Cambridgeshire, are specialist BTR Operating partners Armstone ltd and building operators Allsop Letting & Management Ltd. Working in collaboration with Vinny and mobile key innovators, Unloc, they successfully rolled out bespoke self-guided tours.
Having been live for just over one week, the pilot has successfully supported Allsop and Armstone to lease-up 30% of their available units, with plans to roll out across their wider portfolio once all units are let. The first ever self-guided tour resulted in a positive outcome and a new tenant in place.
