AI won’t replace estate agents. It will kill the bad tech that buried good agents and bring in a new golden era.
There’s good news ahead. AI is making decades of poor ‘PropTech’ redundant and allowing agents to restore the high service, human-contact methods that work better, while curbing the admin burden.
Moving home in the 1990s typically took 8-12 weeks. In 2026 it’s typically taking over 6 months. Terrible technology has been part of the problem. AI will finally end that, by freeing agents from the scourge of gimmicky proptech solutions still in search of a problem.
How good agency got smothered
Good estate agency never went away. It just got smothered by waves of bad estate agency and bad tech. Good agents, the ones who used to thrive on personal recommendations, became gradually harder for sellers to identify. The arrival of the internet enabled already-unscrupulous agents to take their manipulation to cyberspace and corner the market of online leads, even though their performance had never warranted the market share of listings they became able to secure.
The poster child for this bad practice was Foxtons, a business that never even tried to sell more than 1 in 4 of its clients’ homes. It was the first to effectively use technology to create a false impression of it’s prowess and grow like a weed becoming London’s largest agent by 2007 when its founder Jon Hunt sold it for £390m, just before the market crashed in 2008.
That old, pre-sale version of Foxtons explicitly trained its staff to use any number necessary to win instructions to sell homes, in order to boast the biggest inventory and attract heavy buyer traffic. It was devastatingly effective. It unfairly took much market share from good agents, more deserving of the business, as sellers were dazzled by Foxtons hollow promises of wild prices.
As a commentator on Bloomberg TV once noted “Foxtons is more of a sales organisation than an estate agent.” and they were.
They spawned numerous copycats, most notably Dexters, whose MD said to my face “We’re just going to copy Foxtons” and did, to equally devastating effect. Unlike Foxtons, Dexters also went on a buying spree to grow their business, buying up as many smaller independent estate agencies as possible and gutting them of their personality and quality of service.
I know this because many of my former clients sold their businesses to Dexters saying “They’ve become too hard to compete with so I may as well just take the money.”
Every time this happened, a good estate agent who used to win business on the back of reputation alone, disappeared for good.
Bad agents watched Foxtons and Dexters and also started to copy them, using endless new ‘lead-gen proptech’ products to emulate them in any way they could. The public had no chance of being able to identify good agents from bad any longer.
Genuinely outstanding agency owners I have known for decades started saying to me “No matter how good our results and how happy our clients are, we just don’t get the inbound enquiries from personal recommendations like we used to. It’s become too hard.”
I lost count of the number of events I went to where agents were publicly begging the PropTech sector to stop inventing solutions for problems that didn’t exist.
The technology bar was so low when I entered the industry in 1998 that a 26 year old with no software or estate agency experience was able to devise and build a software product that was immediately taken up by a prominent London agent owned by the Countrywide group, then the largest estate agency in the country. Then Dexters signed up, and Douglas & Gordon, Chestertons and countless smaller agents started using it. We even got estate agents in Australia using it.
The estate agency world is blighted by a non-stop barrage of young entrepreneurs who all think that estate agents make lots of money, are very inefficient and all their problems can be solved with one ‘revolutionary’ piece of software. I know, because initially I was one of them, but they continue to this day. Inevitably some were relatively successful, but despite this wave of tech, property transactions started getting slower, and fall through rates started to increase.
At the other end of the scale, large estate agencies were spending large sums on staggeringly outdated, server-based database products that didn’t connect up branches. On more than one occasion I personally witnessed IT managers from famous national brands openly admit to me that they would never allow their companies to take on web-based software because it would put many of them out of jobs. These short sighted IT managers badly damaged their employers businesses, in some cases fatally.
So, by the late noughties when the rest of the world was surging ahead with exciting tech, estate agency was falling behind on the one hand, and being further nobbled by the adoption of sparkly new gimmicks that not only didn’t integrate with their existing systems, but also created distractions for staff who had to log in to ever more dashboards to access the gimmicks. Transaction times continued to get even slower.
Rock bottom
So to summarise, we have moved from a low-tech, high service, high fee ~10 week exchange scenario in the 1990s to a high tech, low fee, low service, low success shitstorm in 2026, helped in no small way by the PurpleBricks fiasco which used some basic tech to pretend estate agents were no longer needed.
On top of this absolute mess, lenders, portals, brokers and house builders have all been talking house prices up so hard that we have reach a point where asking prices and sold prices are roughly 17% adrift, causing transaction volumes to grind lower and lower.
Agents have become so consumed with competing for stock and driving up ‘additional income streams’ that many have lost sight of the real job. That’s an opportunity for genuinely good agents.
We are at, if not close to, rock bottom in terms of estate agency housing market function. But the turning point is now. The only way is up, and AI is the catalyst that’s going to allow good agents to fight back, along with our help.
The turning point
As I proved in 2025 with the Carringtons estate agency, it’s entirely possible to reliably sell homes with multiple offers in under 28 days and complete on over 95% of them. Their fees doubled because sellers were willing to pay a proper fee for a reliable satisfactory outcome. Their average transaction time shortened by 3 months and to this day they are often reaching exchange in just 45-60 days after sale agreed.
To achieve this they did three things:
1. They eliminated all distractions, especially all ‘proptech’ gimmicks
2. They followed the 10-step BestAgent ‘No Valuations’ process I taught them.
3. They used AI to get rid of their old tech, cut costs, and gain total control of their operating
In a nutshell, they wiped out all their old tech, resumed an old fashioned high service, high human contact approach to their customers, and used AI for where they needed tech.
Since they did this, AI tools have become much easier to use and I see more agents doing the same. Large estate agencies will not be able to use AI as a wholesale replacement for their systems, so they will try and bolt it on to old systems which won’t work well or improve anything. In fact it will only further detach agents from customers.
At BestAgent we are going to be recommending this approach to any and all good agents who like the sound of simplifying their business, reducing their tech dependency, returning a personal-service approach to their clients and shortening deal times along the way.
AI will be the weapon that, used well by good agents, will return them to their rightful place at the top of the pile, where they’ll be easier for the public to find. There’s a reason the internet didn’t wipe estate agents out. It’s a much-needed, intensely personal service at a crucial life moment. The challenges have little to do with property and everything to do with human behaviour.
Good agents will thrive and prosper as they deserve to again, and the age of AI will expose the sharks and corner-cutters trying to make a quick buck. The market may be tough, but there’s a golden era of new estate agency dead ahead.
by Charlie Lamdin, BestAgent Founder – September 2026
