This week’s edition of Tech Trends considers three new digital solutions to help homebuyers and a survey that finds one housing market where high-tech tools are not being used.
Making the Most of Listings. CoStar Group (NASDAQ: CSGP) has updated its Homes.com platform with the launch of Homes AI.
The new offering combines Microsoft Azure’s advanced artificial intelligence models with Homes.com’s marketplace infrastructure to deliver a fully embedded conversational experience. User can explore listings, discover neighborhoods and schools, defurnish spaces, refine preferences, and uncover details without being redirected or starting over. The company added that Homes AI data remains entirely within the Homes.com proprietary ecosystem and is never used to train or refine external AI models.
“This innovation signals a shift as significant as the emergence of online search itself,” said Andy Florance, founder and CEO of CoStar Group. “Home shopping is no longer constrained by rigid filters and disjointed online experiences. Instead, it has become dynamic, consultative, and deeply personalized – mirroring the way people naturally research and evaluate a home. We’ve spent years building the industry’s richest property data and Homes AI harnesses that foundation to transform the consumer experience in a way that feels intuitive, human and incredibly powerful.”
More Depth and Scope in House Hunting. Zillow (NASDAQ: Z, ZG) has partnered with Google NotebookLM to make Zillow’s homebuying guidance available in a featured notebook.
NotebookLM is a personalized AI research and thinking tool designed to help users better connect with and understand complex information. Unlike general AI answers that can vary in accuracy, notebook users can ask questions and get responses grounded in Zillow’s guidance, with direct citations to original articles on Zillow.com. NotebookLM also supports multiple ways to explore the information, including “Audio Overviews” that turn Zillow’s written guides into engaging, conversational audio formats. Users can listen to two AI hosts discuss everything from “the first step in buying a home” to “how to choose an agent.”
“Millions of people turn to Zillow at the start of their home journey,” said Jen Berger, vice president for creative and performance media at Zillow. “As more buyers turn to AI tools to research and plan, we want our trusted, expert-backed guidance to show up there, too. By bringing our home-buying expertise into NotebookLM, we’re meeting even more people earlier in the process with answers that are fast, clear and grounded in reliable information.”
Outside and Inside. Planitar Inc., the makers of the iGUIDE camera and software platform for capturing and delivering immersive virtual walkthroughs and property data, had unveiled iGUIDE Site Plans, which is designed to expand iGUIDE property visualizations beyond interior spaces to deliver a complete, inside-and-outside property experience.
Designed exclusively for real estate listings, iGUIDE Site Plans provide a schematic visual representation of the full property—showing buildings, outdoor features, and how interior and exterior spaces connect, orient and flow. According to the company, iGUIDE allows agents to transform a single property capture into multiple listing assets, including immersive walkthroughs, agent-branded interior floor plans, and buyer-friendly exterior site plans.
“Virtual tours and floor plans have become an important part of how buyers explore homes, but they don’t always provide the full picture,” said Skylar Lawrence-LeBel, vice president of growth for Planitar. “Buyers want to understand not just the home and how the interior fits and flows, but how the property as a whole comes together—how the home sits on the land, how exterior spaces connect with interior living areas, and what unique outdoor features contribute to the full experience of the property. With iGUIDE Site Plans, we’re helping agents deliver a complete property perspective for prospective buyers.”
The Old-Fashioned Way. At a time when the US property market is investing in AI and other technologies, the UK market is taking a Luddite approach.
According to a survey by SmartSearch, more than half (54%) of identity verification checks in the UK property sector are still being done manually, with only 46% using digital tools for the process. SmartSearch polled 1,000 professionals in the property, finance, legal and accounting sectors for this study.
“Manual processes can’t scale to catch the volume and sophistication of modern fraud,” warned Collette Smith, chief customer officer at SmartSearch. “Visual inspection doesn’t detect pixel-level document forgery.” She also questioned if manual processes “could catch what criminals are deploying in 2026: AI-generated identities, deepfake documents, and synthetic profiles that pass traditional checks without triggering any alarms. Businesses have a responsibility, and a regulatory obligation, to ensure that the accounts facilitating these scams don’t exist in the first place.”
