Searching for a home has always been, at its core, a way of describing a life. The kind of mornings you want to have, how close you need to be to your children’s school, whether you need a home office or a south-facing terrace. For decades, though, that search has had to pass through a rigid and limited filter: price, square metres, number of bedrooms. The property portal as the only possible route between the buyer and what they are actually looking for.
That model is starting to crack. And what comes next is more interesting than it might seem.
The relationship between estate agencies and the big property portals has never been a comfortable one. Portals like Rightmove in the UK have been repeatedly criticised for creating what some experts describe as a virtual monopoly that drains the profits of smaller agencies while posting record profit margins. In Spain, the situation is not very different since Idealista and Fotocasa came under the control of the same investment fund, which has reduced the negotiating power of agencies even further.
The result is an industry that has spent years paying rising fees to platforms that, when it comes down to it, do not actually know the buyer and simply aggregate the properties of their clients. They know what people search for, but not who they are or what they really need.
The underlying problem is structural: these portals are built on a static search model, based on filters that have not changed in twenty years. Today’s buyer, and especially the high-end buyer, does not search that way. They are looking for a lifestyle, an environment, a community. None of that fits in a dropdown menu.
Attention is being split in new ways. Younger buyers and high-net-worth international buyers no longer start their search on a portal. They discover properties organically through Instagram or TikTok, platforms that allow an emotional connection with a property long before anyone talks about price or square footage.
At Terra Meridiana, we see this clearly: buyers arrive having already watched a video of a villa in Benahavís, having saved photos of properties for months before making a single formal enquiry. The decision-making process has changed significantly. Contact with the agency comes much later, but it also comes with far more genuine intent.
What is interesting is that these channels do not replace each other. TikTok works as a reach and discovery engine. Instagram acts as a visual catalogue that builds trust through consistency and social proof. And conversational AI, which enters at a later stage in the process, is what turns that intent into a concrete recommendation.
The real disruptor is generative artificial intelligence. We are moving from keyword search to intent-based search. According to Google, user behaviour has shifted towards longer, more complex and conversational queries, where the buyer expects technology to understand the nuances of their actual situation.
It is no longer about ticking a box. The buyer wants to say: “We are a family with two young children looking for a quiet area on the Costa del Sol, close to international schools, with a safe garden and space to work from home.” And they want the answer in seconds, with real and well-reasoned options.
The industry is responding. A leading example is the French network Orpi and its partnership with AI platform Kleio: more than a thousand agencies have restructured their data so that models like ChatGPT or Claude can reason with it in real time, delivering precise recommendations and removing the friction of traditional filters. The portal stops being the intermediary. The AI becomes the search engine.
We often look to the United States as a technology reference, but in property, Europe has an unexpected advantage: its fragmentation. In the US, the market is heavily structured around the MLS (Multiple Listing Service) model, a centralised and efficient system that is also very rigid when it comes to disruptive change.
In Europe, agencies have far greater control over their own data. And the pressure of rising portal fees has acted as a catalyst: property networks have every reason to look for technological alternatives that allow them to connect directly with the client, without intermediaries that drive up costs and hold on to the data.
This shift does not mean SEO positioning or advertising spend no longer matter. They still do. But the rules are changing. Search engines are increasingly driven by AI, which means the content that performs best is no longer just keyword-optimised: it is written in natural language, rich in context and genuinely useful to the person reading it. Whoever adapts their data and content to this new reality will be better placed to make that first impression on the right buyer.
For an AI to recommend a property to a qualified buyer, that property cannot just be an address and a price. It needs rich descriptions, contextual information about the surroundings, and data that allows language models to understand why that home fits that particular way of life. It is not just a technical question. It is an editorial one. It is about how a property’s story is told.
At Terra Meridiana, we have spent years investing in how we present each property: carefully written descriptions, quality photography, videos, social media content, 360º virtual tours. We have always believed that a well-presented property travels further than a well-advertised one. It is not about abandoning portals overnight, but about understanding that they are no longer the final destination. The real connection with the buyer is built on quality content, presence in the channels where that buyer is searching, and the ability to respond to what they actually need.
Property has always been a people business. AI does not change that. What changes is the language you need to speak to reach them first. If you are looking for your next property on the Costa del Sol, browse our property portfolio or get in touch with our team for an initial conversation.
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