This year, nearly every piece of software estate agents use is promoting its own AI. Most of the big systems have bolted an assistant onto their own platform, and some have raised fresh money to do it. These assistants are genuinely useful for the jobs they're built for.
But twenty years of owning property taught me to ask one question before I get excited about an improvement: is this on land I own, or land I'm renting?
An AI that lives inside someone else's platform can only ever see what that platform holds, answer in the ways that platform allows, and stay as long as that platform lets it. It makes the rented ground more comfortable. It doesn't make it yours. The moment you want to take your data somewhere else, or ask a question the system was never designed to answer, you find out whose machine you've really been building on.
I'm not saying don't use the tools. I use plenty of them. I'm saying be clear-eyed about the difference between a tool that improves your patch and one that quietly deepens your dependence on someone else's.
The data your business runs on should be yours to take with you. If it isn't, that's worth knowing now, while it's a preference, rather than later, when it's a problem.
Co-founder of Propalt and a property investor and developer for 20 years
