Proptech Leans Into AI to Speed Residential Listings Searches

Seemingly everything to do with artificial intelligence is changing with the speed of light these days. Among AI’s potentially exponential uses is its ability to make apartment and house hunting simpler and faster.

For now, popular prompt-driven marketplaces such as Apartments.com and Zillow are in no danger of being replaced by AI. But consumers — especially those on the younger side — are increasingly using large language model AI in a way that comes more naturally and efficiently to them.

“There was a report that the volume of daily ChatGPT prompts was now approximately 18 percent that of daily Google searches,” Anthemos Georgiades, CEO at San Francisco-based rental platform giant Zumper, said in an August Linkedin post. “I believe this. Here‘s an update of ChatGPT traffic to Zumper. This now represents more than 5 percent of our SEO traffic and is growing fast. AI search is only just getting started.”

Proptech investors have already taken note and begun placing bets.

“Over the course of the past two decades, home buyers’ search processes have steadily shifted from agents to the buyers themselves,” Elizabeth Chrystal, a partner at Manhattan-based proptech venture firm Zigg Capital, said in an email response. “It’s exactly this dynamic that led to the National Association of Realtors settlement on buyers’ agents commissions in 2024.

“Now, AI is reshaping real estate search in ways that go beyond incremental improvements to existing portals. Traditional sites like Zillow or Apartments.com remain valuable for inventory, but buyers — especially younger ones — are increasingly drawn to AI tools that offer conversational, personalized, and proactive matching. Instead of clicking through endless filters, users can ask, ‘Find me a three-bedroom within 30 minutes of work, near good schools, with a garden,’ and receive curated results.”

These younger home seekers comfortable with ChatGPT and Google AI are increasingly expecting this level of service, Chrystal emphasized.

For investors, the implications are clear: Capital is flowing toward AI-enabled tools that deliver speed, personalization and defensibility — in other words, tech that competitors can’t improve upon. The future will belong to platforms that move beyond static search engines to truly intelligent, transaction-driving marketplaces, she added.

Chrystal said the need for AI-driven portals to drive deeper into the transaction process and improve consumer advice suggests a shift from traditional classifieds-like sites to more consumer-centric platforms.

Noting that platforms in the U.S., like Zillow, are quite good at what they do, Chrystal said that Zigg Capital has seen greater AI portal investment opportunity in Europe, where such search engines are not as reliable and often fraud-ridden. Markets in Western Europe, where buyers’ agents are uncommon, are in some ways several years ahead of the U.S. in buyer-led AI search.

That’s why the venture firm has invested in a Paris-based proptech startup called Zefir that is at the center of this shift, she said. “Zefir is a listings platform that consumers can search with free text, the same way that you can type something into Chat GPT,” Chrystal said in a follow-up interview. “It will populate a list according to those filters and I can refine my search via chat, the same way that you can continue chatting with Chat GPT after you ask your question.”

Zefir’s AI assistant, ZIA, acts as a “digital buyer’s agent,” unifying listings across fragmented classifieds, delivering personal searches, and suggesting comparable properties, explained Chrystal. Zefir reports that average transaction times have been cut in half — from four months to two. Brokers also benefit from Zefir’s buyer qualification process, reducing dead-end inquiries.

“The last decade of real estate was about digitizing listings. The next decade will be about intelligence — helping people move from search to decision with speed and clarity,” Remy Fabre, co-founder and CEO at Zefir, said in a statement. “That’s exactly what we’re building with ZIA.”

A nascent U.S. proptech company, Los Angeles-based Homiere, sees itself at the forefront of digital homebuying.The startup uses natural language search, real-time multiple listing service listings and AI-driven data and insights to help agents, institutions and buyers find homes more efficiently, said Addy Kim, Homiere’s CEO and co-founder.

Kim’s background is in AI research and data science, but she also has experience with house flipping through her parents’ business

“We flip residential homes, and we’ve been doing this for years,” said Kim. “We’ve always got stuck on sourcing for the right homes. Looking at the current tools that are available, like Zillow,  Redfin, or Homes.com, there really isn’t an easy solution where I can just search things like, ‘Find me a home in a good school system that has ancillary dwelling unit potential based on zoning,’ or something like that.”

Having to do such searches manually took a lot of time. Kim realized this was the opposite of what is happening with evolving AI innovations and technology. So, earlier this year, she and her co-founder and CTO Chris Dimitriou, began brainstorming.

“We realized there’s a huge gap in the market right now for enabling humans to search for homes as naturally as we speak and have conversations,” she said. “That’s how Homiere got started. And in my family’s business, we actually were able to find three homes in the last one and a half to two years through [what became] Homiere’s algorithm, and they’ve all been very profitable.”

Additionally, Kim and Dimitriou realized that this problem existed far beyond her family’s business.

“We spoke to real estate agents and brokers, and other homebuyers in our network, and we realized it’s sort of a widespread pain point for them,” Kim said. “So in particular, agents actually dislike existing platforms like Zillow, not only because of the clunky filters, but because these platforms and their whole business model is stealing leads away from agents by trying to distract buyers from booking open houses with another agent and different things like that.

“We found this nice wedge where we could build a natural language search platform that is agent-centric,” she added. “The agents feel safe using our platform and recommending it to their clients because they aren’t going to be stolen away. Plus their clients get to know an easier way to search for their homes.”

Kim and Dimitriou are bootstrapping Homiere, which is an early-stage prototype developing its minimally viable product, she said. Homiere’s business model involves agents and brokers paying for the service, while their clients use it for free. The platform is gaining interest from VCs and is particularly appealing to tech-savvy homebuyers under 60, she added.

As to how fast and how well AI chat platforms will cut into the incumbent residential search engine business, Zigg Capital’s Chrystal said it comes down to an ability to go deeper into the actual transaction. 

“For example, I think you’re going to see consumers browsing homes closer to the way they browse Airbnb, things on Pinterest, or different things in social media,” she said. “This is something that Zefir has seen as well, where it’s a great way of engaging people that’s a little bit more fun and almost recreational. And I think that type of consumer delight is something that people are increasingly going to adopt, and that has not been the core focus of Zillow historically.

‘I think people are hungry for advice. They may turn to Chat GPT today, and that provides an on-ramp to being more involved in the transaction. But I think it is hard. People still need access to the listings that are very difficult for Chat GPT to integrate today.”

Philip Russo can be reached at prusso@commercialobserver.com.