When it comes to the property portal industry over the last two decades, two things stand out as being particularly remarkable; its uninterrupted domination by a handful of companies and its lack of innovation.

If a user time-travelled from 2005 to 2025, they wouldn’t notice a whole lot of difference when it comes to using a property portal, beyond some web design updates.

Compare and contrast this with the price comparison market. While this is now dominated by the ‘big four’ (Money Supermarket, et al) each has invested heavily in product innovation, creating end-to-end ecosystems as opposed to just operating as listing sites.

Look at old screenshots of price comparison sites from 2005 and they look almost unrecognisable compared to today.

Innovation blocker

So, what’s been the blocker to innovation among property portals? And how can portals become transaction platforms, just as price comparison websites have?

Firstly, it’s important to acknowledge that houses are about the most complex of assets to trade. Selling car insurance or credit cards, it ain’t.

Most transactions require financing, compliance checks, conveyancing and coordination with multiple government agencies and authorities. And that’s not even taking into account successfully completing the negotiation stage which triggers all of those actions.

Opportunity

However, property transactions will always require multiple stakeholders, so the challenge and opportunity is how to best integrate each of these during a transaction, while delivering a digital experience to customers that manages and coordinates all of this for them.

Both Rightmove and Zoopla’s parent company Houseful have been investing in transaction management tools.

Rightmove launched Coadjute in March this year. It aims to speed up property transactions by automating compliance checks, material information gathering, and conveyancing documentation delivery for estate agents.

Meanwhile, Houseful launched Movemnt last year, describing it as “a national home transaction infrastructure for all property professionals”. It too aims to speed up transactions by providing agents access to data, automated communications, and digital services through its network of integrated conveyancers and brokers.

Same as before

Each of these initiatives are aimed at providing agents with more efficient tools to manage transactions.

As of yet, however, there have been no announcements that these platforms will provide customer-facing transaction management systems integrated into the portals.

In other words, from the buyer’s or seller’s perspective, a transaction may be completed quicker, but it’ll still feel much the same as before.

On the horizon

Change is on the horizon. New platforms such as OneDome are slowly coming to the market that offer more of an end-to-end transaction journey, by offering a property portal with an integrated customer-facing transaction system.

Home buyers typically have access to real-time progress tracking, online document signing, and dedicated support throughout their journey. This represents a shift from portals simply showing listings to actually facilitating and managing the entire transaction process from search to completion.

Questions

This new emerging model raises a number of interesting questions.

Firstly, which market segments will act as the early adopters? A key segment we’ve identified at Anyone.com is a demand from international buyers looking for mid-market homes, perhaps due to a relocation for work.

A digital transaction management platform in this context makes sense, considering overseas buyers are going to lack knowledge of the UK market’s idiosyncrasies.

First-time buyers

Another use case that is emerging from our perspective is first-time buyers.

It goes without saying that millennials and Gen Z are accustomed to seamless digital services and expect this in every facet of life.

But beyond this, we’re anticipating another push factor driving this cohort towards digital transaction engines. That factor is affordability, and specifically portals which can offer products such as shared equity mortgages, or bundle moving costs such as surveys and conveyancing.

Free to agents

Another question that emerges is the business model that these platforms can now build.

Unlike traditional property portals that rely on charging agents listing fees as their primary income source, end-to-end transaction engines could offer free listings to agents while capturing value at other stages such as mortgages, surveys or ancillary services sold to new homeowners.

What worked for two decades may not work for the next two. Emerging transaction-focused customer-facing platforms are beginning to demonstrate what’s possible when digital innovation meets the complexity of property transactions. The race is on to build the first truly end-to-end property platform that customers actually want to use.

Reza Sardeha is Founder and CEO of Anyone.com

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