The Industry’s Next Big Thing: Property Portal Personalization

The role that property portals play in the lives of people around the world is changing, and the products themselves are starting to evolve to reflect this. Look closely enough and you can see the trend towards personalization. It hasn’t arrived everywhere yet, but it will.

Why Personalization?

Users have accepted and come to expect that e-commerce stores will use cookies and other tools to track behaviour on their sites with the aim of improving individual user experience. If you clicked on a coat last time, you can be sure that next time you visit the same site you’ll be seeing that coat and a few more like it. Real estate purchases, though much more considered and expensive, are a form of shopping nonetheless, and what works on e-commerce sites will probably work on property portals.

The other factor at work here is a shift in the stage of the purchase journey in which portals enter the real estate transaction. There has perhaps been an assumption among portals and among the real estate industry in general that, unlike consumers looking to buy other goods, those shopping for a home already have a good idea of what it is that they want. Until recently this may have been true to an extent, most who ended up on a property portal would usually have a pretty decent idea of what the most important purchase of their lives should ideally look like.

As a consequence of the confined, fishbowl lives many have been living over the past 12 months, a trend towards escapism and window shopping means that there is now a significant proportion of end-users who are arriving at portals who may not have even realised that they’d like to move house yet. For this reason, the role filled by the property portal is changing from simply matching supply and demand to actually helping to spark and shape the demand as well.