The big uncertainty facing millions of workers across the world right now is whether their jobs are about to be replaced by AI.

And it is a question that troubles me – will this new and fast-developing tech soon replace my skills? So I’m sure it keeps many estate agents awake at night too.

But I feel their insomnia may be misplaced. If you want to know why I think that, then let’s roll back to the beginning of my career in property reporting, which started the same day that Rightmove launched just after the Millennium.

At the time both that portal, its soon-to-be imitator Zoopla and the plethora of property software companies (that were starting up before and after 2000) were all predicted to disrupt the property game.

To some degree they did. Rightmove and Zoopla eventually replaced magazines and newspapers as the key marketing platforms for houses for sale and rent and property software changed the way agents manage sales progression, landlords, properties and tenancies.

But apart from that – despite all three portals’ recent and historic efforts to become a provider of other services to estate agents, the work required to be an estate agent remains a job centered on people not tech.

Whatever some AI enthusiasts within the industry claim, the fact is that selling and renting houses will for many years to come require people to do valuations in situ and later visit the property to take measurements, do photos, glad-hand the vendor, put a For Sale sign up and so on.

Some people disagree with me. I see Purplebricks has once again said that the future of estate agency includes ‘virtual’ valuations on Zoom and, while a handful of vendors might think this is a gamechanger, I think the majority prefer to press the flesh with a prospective estate agent before signing on the dotted line to hand over 1.5% of their selling price as commission.

AI storm

I would go as far as to say that the sales, lettings and property management arms of our industry are one of the UK’s ‘white collar’ sectors (as office jobs used to be called) most likely to weather the AI storm.

But I agree with people like Mal McCallion (the founder of MyPorta) who argue that AI is likely to disrupt the big property listings platforms that have relied for too long on traffic from Google to feed their leads systems, and which AI is likely to bypass if tech like ChatGPT becomes part of everyone’s lives.

But once a buyer or tenant has found a home they like online regardless of their digital route, then the current status quo where viewings are undertaken by human beings clutching keys and printed-out property details… will endure.