The next era of real estate won’t be won by whoever displays homes best, Molly McKinley writes. It will be won by whoever understands buyer intent most deeply.
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Last week, Google began testing something that sent Zillow’s stock down 8 percent in a single day. Real estate strategist Mike DelPrete was first to document the shift: in select markets including Chicago, Denver and Austin, home listings started appearing directly in mobile Google search results with property details, photos and a button to request a tour, all without leaving Google.
The test is limited. Mobile only. A handful of cities. Powered by a partnership with HouseCanary’s ComeHome platform. But the signal matters more than the scale.
Google isn’t trying to out-Zillow Zillow. It’s asking a different question: What if home discovery started with search behavior and buyer intent rather than browsing listings?
It’s the question the industry will have to answer in 2026.
The gap visualization never closed
The industry has spent the past decade solving visualization. Matterport scans. 3D tours. Virtual staging. And now, democratized spatial capture through devices like Meta’s Quest 3, which lets users create photorealistic digital replicas of real spaces in minutes.
The technology is genuinely impressive. Luxury developers can showcase unbuilt properties. Agents can offer immersive experiences to international buyers. Renters can tour dozens of units without leaving their couch.
But here’s what visualization never solved: understanding what buyers actually think while they’re looking.
A prospect who spends 12 minutes examining kitchen layouts, repeatedly measures the primary bedroom and asks about HOA fees is fundamentally different from someone who clicks through in 90 seconds. Both register as “tour views” in traditional analytics. Only one is ready for a serious conversation.
This is the silent buyer problem, and it’s about to become the central challenge of 2026.
From visualization to intention
The shift mirrors what happened in e-commerce two decades ago. Amazon didn’t win by showing products better than catalogs. It won by understanding how shoppers moved through digital spaces and what they lingered on, compared, abandoned and returned to. Behavioral data became more valuable than the images themselves.
Real estate is approaching a similar inflection point. As photorealistic tours become ubiquitous, the competitive advantage shifts from who has the best visualization to who understands what buyers do inside those visualizations.
Google’s entry accelerates this. It already possesses unprecedented data about search behavior, location patterns and consumer intent across virtually every category. If it layers home discovery onto that foundation, it’s not just displaying listings but potentially understanding buyer motivation at a scale no portal has achieved.
Google’s success isn’t the point. The shift toward buyer intelligence as the differentiator is already underway.
What intelligence actually looks like
Spatial intelligence, the category emerging to address this gap, layers behavioral analytics onto whatever visualization infrastructure already exists. Rather than replacing tour technology, it makes existing investments more valuable.
Companies like Charlotte-based PATH Intelligence, which recently received a $50,000 NC IDEA seed grant and serves clients including the Ritz-Carlton Residences in Boston and the Antares project in Barcelona, exemplify this platform-agnostic approach. It’s AI agent, Bella, answers property questions around the clock in 22 natural languages while capturing which features prospects explore, which questions they ask and how long they engage with different spaces.
The buyer behavior they observe reveals the intelligence gap in action. Prospects aren’t asking about square footage because that’s in the listing. They’re asking about HOA fees. They’re asking whether cabinets and floors can be changed. They’re asking about distance to coffee shops, gyms and public transit.
These are decision-stage questions. Someone calculating real costs is serious. Someone asking about modifications is mentally moving in. Someone mapping their daily commute is projecting their actual life into the space.
That’s buyer intent. And no tour completion metric captures it.
The accountability advantage
For agents navigating commission pressure and seller skepticism, this shift offers something valuable: proof of work.
The conversation changes from “We had 47 virtual tour views this week” to “We had 47 views, 12 engaged substantively, three focused heavily on outdoor spaces and asked about landscaping maintenance, and five compared bedroom dimensions against other properties they’re considering.”
When a seller questions why their home hasn’t sold, an agent with behavioral data can show that most prospects abandon tours at the kitchen, which could suggest a staging or pricing issue. Or that international buyers engage heavily but ask questions about school districts, indicating a messaging opportunity.
This transforms defensive conversations about commission into collaborative strategy sessions. The agent becomes a data-informed consultant rather than someone defending activity through generic metrics.
What 2026 demands
The convergence is unmistakable. Visualization technology continues to advance. Google is experimenting with intent-based home discovery. AI tools are reshaping how consumers research major purchases. And the industry is under pressure to demonstrate value at every stage of the transaction.
For agents and brokerages, this means investing in intelligence infrastructure that works regardless of which virtual tour product you leverage. For developers, it means treating virtual tours not as marketing collateral but as intelligence-gathering assets that inform sales strategy throughout the project lifecycle.
As Google’s experiment suggests, the next era of real estate won’t be won by whoever displays homes best. It will be won by whoever understands buyer intent most deeply.
Molly McKinley is Founder of Redtail Creative and Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Meredith College, where she teaches Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Social Impact.
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