Podcast: AI Won’t Transform Estate Agency Until We Change How Estate Agency Works

Mark Burgess, our CEO, recently joined The Estate Agent Consultancy podcast for a conversation about where AI is really taking estate agency.

And for him, the biggest mistake we can make is thinking this is simply about using AI to do the things we already do, a little bit faster.

Writing a property description in seconds is useful. Automating an email is useful. Summarising a call is useful.

But none of those things fundamentally change an estate agency.

During the podcast, he uses the example of factories replacing steam engines with electric motors. Initially, productivity barely improved because they put the new technology into factories that had been designed around the old technology. The real transformation came when they redesigned the factory around what electricity made possible. Estate agency is at exactly that point with AI.

The opportunity isn't simply to bolt AI onto a traditional CRM. It's to rethink what the system at the centre of an estate agency actually knows.

Who is visiting your website? What are they looking at? Which emails are they opening? What conversations have taken place by phone, email and WhatsApp? Who had a valuation eight months ago, instructed another agent, reduced their price, came off the market and has suddenly started looking at your content again?

Give AI that context and suddenly it can do something far more valuable than write an email. It can help identify who your people should be speaking to, why they should be speaking to them and when.

That leads to a much bigger conversation about the jobs people actually do inside an estate agency.

Ultimately, there are four outcomes that matter: listings, viewings, offers and completions.

Much of everything else is the work we've historically had to do in order to reach those outcomes.

AI gives us an opportunity to change that — letting technology do far more of the digging, searching, qualifying, chasing and analysing, while humans spend more of their time doing the things humans are brilliant at: persuading, negotiating, reassuring, solving problems and building relationships.

That's the future of AI in estate agency that interests us.

Not replacing estate agents but elevating what an estate agent is capable of doing.

We get into all of this in the conversation, along with big data, why traditional CRMs lack the context AI needs, the Netflix vs Blockbuster lesson, human potential and why he believe the next 24–36 months could fundamentally change how an estate agency operates.

You can watch the full conversation above.