What Are Top Property Marketplaces Doing With AI?

A successful property marketplace not only provides its users with suitable accommodation but also prioritizes convenience for hosts, tenants, buyers, sellers, and realtors. Since AI features benefit all sides, top property marketplaces have primarily focused their digital transformation efforts on integrating AI.

Real estate AI enables numerous features for property marketplaces, including:

• Advanced property search with the help of natural language processing and predictive AI (Zillow AI Search).
• Precise property valuation systems based on enormous amounts of analyzed data (Zillow AI, Zestimate).
• Property maintenance predictions, modeling, market trends forecast and more with predictive AI.
• 24/7 virtual AI assistant for everyday tasks like check-ins, check-outs, payments, reminders, notifications, property management, and more (AskRedfin, Ohmyhome HomerGPT, Arinbn AI chatbots).
• LLM- and NLP-based AI listing description generator (Airbnb AI).
• Virtual staging enabled by computer vision (ZIllow AI, Airbnb AI, Trulia AI, Redfin AI).

Airbnb, Zillow, Redfin, and other real estate industry leaders utilize artificial intelligence, machine learning, and computer vision to make their platforms more advanced and convenient.

Computer Vision for Virtual Tours and Design Visualization

Future homeowners rely more on visual representation than descriptions while choosing. That’s why, although image processing and transforming is much more complex than text data analysis, top property marketplaces eagerly adopted computer vision during the pandemic.

Computer vision removes barriers to viewing property remotely, allowing high-resolution 360-degree images to be stitched into 3D environments. Virtual tours provide a truly immersive experience for users. This technology has been gaining popularity in the real estate industry in recent years due to image recognition and generation.

Zillow AI Generates Interactive Plans

Zillow has implemented computer vision to generate interacting plans from 360-degree photos.

Interactive Plans Generated by Zillow AI | Image Credits: Zillow

This lets potential buyers better understand a prospective property’s layout and location. Zillow reports that implementing computer vision has significantly enhanced user experience. There is no such thing as an advantageous angle for property photos because potential buyers can see everything and virtually walk through the home, which makes such listings more trustworthy.

Also, a Zillow report shows that from 71% to 86% of sellers mentioned they are more likely to hire an agent who includes virtual tours and interactive floor plans in their listings. Brokers and realtors also benefit from Zillow AI since the number of unproductive house demonstrations has significantly decreased.

Accordingly, Zillow adapted its services to be compatible with mobile devices and continued working on the property shopping experience for Apple’s Vision Pro virtual reality headset.

Airbnb AI Uses Computer Vision for Image Sorting

Airbnb AI features include creating visual tours based on uploaded photos of the property. AI analyzes photos and sorts them according to recognized similarities, assigning each set of pictures to 19 rooms. This way, potential guests can better understand the house’s layout, and homeowners do not need to spend additional time naming and uploading photos in a specific order.

Beyond virtual tours, AI powers design visualization for buyers to preview potential renovations.

Redfin Uses AI to Reveal The Full Potential of The Accommodation

Redfin had already had 3D walkthroughs and video tours, but their ongoing effort to modernize the home shopping experience led to the introduction of Redfin Redesign AI in December 2023.

Redfin Redesign AI uses posted property photos as a basis for further transformations customized by users, like color palettes or materials. The combination of image recognition and generation has provided an interactive and personalized home shopping experience, making Redfin AI the most popular feature on the portal.

Redfin Redesign AI | Image Credits: Redfin

Integrating Redfin AI has made a significant step in enhancing the buying and selling processes on the platform. Buyers can see the potential and make more informed decisions. Sellers also benefit from Redfin AI since they no longer sell “houses that require renovation” but “cozy future homes” that computer vision helps to discern.

Realtor.com Uses AI to Find Each Customer’s Dream Home

Computer vision includes image generation according to the text prompt. The perfect example is Midjorney, which has already become the most popular tool for creating and inspiring visual content. Based on the same principle, Realtor.com AI Dream Home generates an image using just a few general characteristics and searches through thousands of listings on the website.  

First, Realtor.com AI uses prompts highlighting a few things about the home, like “two-story house with a porch and two-car garage,” to create an image of the house. Then, it compares these pictures and characteristics with existing property options on the website, suggesting the most probable match.

Realtor.com AI Dream Home Search Results | Image Credits: Realtor.com

Realtor.com AI demonstrates how creative implementation of artificial intelligence leads to more personalized and convenient searches. The only disadvantage of Realtor.com AI Dream Home is that it doesn’t take into account price or location, only visual characteristics. Nevertheless, it is a huge help for those who struggle to understand what they want and visualize their dream home.

The positive experience with Realtor.com AI inspired many marketplaces to use image recognition and comparison for duplicate detection. Every real estate marketplace faces the problem of property duplication in listings. Artificial intelligence can recognize slightly different angles of the photos, or description changes to remove similar listings, which substantially improves user experience while searching.

Trulia Uses AI and Computer Vision for Personalized Search

AI systems can learn the attributes most important to buyers across multiple sessions or inquiries and then suggest the most relevant listings that closely match preferences without users needing to enter every criterion in the filter.

Trulia AI uses computer vision to recognize particular common interior elements in the photos – from hardwood floors to French windows. Trulia’s AI-powered recommender system uses that data to suggest suitable alterations based on user preferences. For example, if a user opens a few houses with granite countertops, the system will prioritize options with this characteristic in further search.

Zillow AI for Advanced Search Experience

Natural language processing is the basis of Zillow AI search. Users can enter the sentence “Seattle 2-bedroom flat for short-term rent not higher than the 3rd floor with an AC and cat allowed” directly into the search bar. Zillow AI analyzes the input and scans all the listings according to the inquiry. The main competitive advantage of Zillow AI search is that no matter how unorganized the query is, the system will extract everything necessary, making results more relevant and precise.

Zillow AI search is available for IOS mobile application users.

Zillow AI Search | Image Credits: Zillow

Trulia AI and Zillow AI search eliminates the most common property marketplace user’s frustration – an unorganized and time-consuming search. Algorithms identify individual preferences from online behaviors, continuously suggesting suitable listings. As usage data grows, these systems will gain an even deeper understanding of customer preferences.

AI Listing Description Generators

AI listing description generators are a popular choice for many property marketplaces because they save valuable time and effort required to generate detailed descriptions.

RentSync uses AI to help customers effortlessly build detailed listing descriptions due to ChatGPT integration. Now, RentSync listings include information about houses, amenities, and locations using the most appealing language for the target demographic.

RentSync AI Listing Description Generator | Image Credits: RentSync

The British property portal company OnTheMarket has also implemented an AI listing description generator. After the AI analyzes the data and returns the complete list, agents tick the property features they want to include in the description.

Not only did RentSync and OnTheMarket add this feature to their platform, but Airbnb is also about to do it. AI Airbnb listing description generation is part of extensive digital enhancements that await the platform in the Airbnb 2024 Summer Release.

According to Airbnb’s latest news, the portal will engage AI in customer profiling, price predictions, personalized search experience, and more. Travel experiences will also improve significantly with trip planning AI assistance that will help pick up the destinations and accommodations according to the user’s previous choices.

Regarding the now, Airbnb generative AI can sort reviews and create summaries, providing more context on property ratings and enhancing customer understanding of the overall picture. They have been testing this feature for a while and are ready to add it to the platform permanently.

AI Copilots and Chatbots

AI copilots in real estate marketplaces are becoming vital customer service tools. Available 24/7 through messaging, these AI chatbots handle common questions on financing, paperwork, neighborhoods, and others, saving users time searching for answers.

For example, hosts use Airbnb AI chatbots for property management and basic tasks like check-ins and check-outs. Although they are popular, Airbnb doesn’t have its own AI chatbot yet and relies on external services such as AirbE, Guest Guru or HostAI.

Meanwhile, Redfin has recently launched its own AI chatbot, Ask Redfin. It is designed to provide buyers with necessary information about the property, neighborhood or open house schedule without the seller’s or realtor’s involvement.

Redfin AI chatbot Ask Redfin | Image Credits: Redfin

Another property platform, Ohmyhome, continues to enhance its AI chatbot capabilities with new functionality. The Ohmyhome AI chatbot HomerGPT serves as a personal property expert, answering common questions about a particular house, from facts about neighborhoods to interest rates and property transaction data.

Ohmyhome AI chatbot HomerGPT | Image Credits: Ohmyhome

Also, HomerGPT informs users about the latest property updates and can even conduct approximate property valuation, which is one more handy feature for property marketplaces.

AI Property Valuation

AI property valuation uses machine learning, automated valuation models (AVMs), or neural network models to estimate a property’s value. These systems analyze data sources such as property characteristics, local market trends, and transaction history to provide more accurate results. Careful consideration of all those factors is highly time-consuming, so top property marketplaces use the latest technology trends to facilitate this process.

The most prominent example is Neural Zestimate, which took home valuation to the next level. This tool considers all factors that can influence the price of the accommodation, from location and square footage to tax assessments and public records.

Neural Zestimate was launched in 2006 and has experienced significant advancements. According to the latest Zillow COO statement, Zestimate now shows twice as many listings as in 2006 and has decreased an error rate to under 2 per cent in 2024.

Zestimate, Zillow’s AI Property Valuation Software | Image Credits: Zillow

Top property marketplaces like Redfin and Realtor.com have attempted to create AI property valuation systems, but Zestimate remains the most accurate and advanced.

Summary: Real Estate Marketplace AI Applications

Many property marketplaces have already adopted AI-powered features to keep up with the pace of digital transformations in the PropTech industry.

Natural language search and image recognition are among the most popular integrations because they quickly improve user experience.  

Ascendix Expertise in Developing AI Features for Property Marketplaces

At Ascendix we have developed The Property AI Search framework that leverages natural language search capabilities to significantly improve the user experience by making it easier and quicker for potential tenants to find the most relevant properties.

Property AI Seach allows searching with conversational prompts so users do not have to go through numerous filters anymore – the AI property search module will understand the way you talk and apply all necessary filters automatically as well as remove previously set.

The module includes:

• A user-friendly chatbot-like interface, customizable to suit different marketplaces.
• Natural Language Processing (NLP) and AI technology, allowing users to input search queries in everyday language, akin to conversing with a friend.
• Azure Cognitive Search, facilitating accurate search queries by understanding context and tailoring results.
• Persistent Storage (Mongo Atlas), ensuring personalized search outcomes based on user history and preferences.

Automatically Applied Filters in AI Property Search

How Can Ascendix Help You Evolve Your Property Marketplace with AI?

Ascendix has over 16 years of experience in PropTech and would be a reliable partner to enhance your platform with the latest AI integrations.

Our dedicated team seamlessly integrates advanced technologies like these within an intuitive design focused on the user experience.

• Consult with experts in the PropTech industry to select the most beneficial AI features according to unique business objectives.
• Integrate various AI tools from chatbots and price valuation to preferences analysis and demand forecasting.
• Improve your existing AI solutions with our comprehensive tech audit.

Contact us to discuss how AI can boost your portal. Let AI be your competitive edge.