Troy Palmquist speaks with Philippe Wellens, co-founder and CEO of Kleio, about what AI-powered listing access means for agents and their customers.
I always love looking at houses when I travel, but that was virtually impossible on my recent trip to Paris. This is because in Europe, listings exist across a patchwork of intermediary sites and localized systems, and access is less centralized than the MLS and portal ecosystem that is well-known in the US.
Because of that experience, I started wondering how buyers in the international market find things. A subsequent search led us to a leading European real estate network that is reimagining real estate discovery by allowing AI systems such as ChatGPT, Google AI Overview, and Claude to natively read its entire real estate catalog.
It’s not indexed or scraped. Structured for machine reasoning.
Built on the agent AI platform Kleio and rolled out to Orpi’s 1,250 real estate agencies in France, the technology implementation marks a new shift. Real estate search is moving away from portals and keyword filters to conversational AI systems that directly interpret user intent.
As this model becomes more widespread, your gateway to real estate listings may no longer be a website, IDX feed, or major portal. It could be a direct conversation with the buyer’s preferred AI platform.
From portal to AI discovery
Orpi’s real estate catalog can now be accessed and interpreted by LLMs such as ChatGPT, Google AI, and Claude. Rather than simply publishing a list on a website or portal, the system reconstructs the list and allows an AI agent to infer both structured fields and descriptive property descriptions.
Kleio’s AI was first deployed on Orpi’s own listing portal and agency website, before being extended to external assistants such as ChatGPT and Claude. This allows Orpi to codify its sales expertise into AI, which could theoretically promote the right property or service to each customer.
philip wellens
According to Philip Wellens, co-founder and CEO of Kleio, the system developed for Orpi will reshape the way real estate data is stored and used by using agent AI to analyze projects, advise users, and recommend properties, services, and solutions. This allows Kleio’s knowledge engine to add functionality to fragmented facts about properties, pricing, and document data associated with properties.
User intent replaces filters
Wellens described the difference as intent-based detection rather than traditional filter-based search. Because AI agents have difficulty distinguishing between structured and free-form information, Kleio’s combination of data and narrative enables conversational matching with buyers searching using AI tools.
While some U.S. portals have built standalone integrations with ChatGPT, Europe’s regulatory environment and market structure provides an opportunity to deploy Kleio’s services more flexibly, Wellens said. “Regulations such as MLS and compliance requirements are much looser in Europe than in the United States,” he said.
Without a centralized MLS, European networks had more control over their data and were able to repurpose distribution from online search portals with more urgency. Mr. Wellens said European brokerages were “pushing money out to these aggregators,” and “so they have a strong incentive to change this.”
AI search as a new distribution channel
AI search is becoming more important as buyers move away from proprietary channels such as brokerage websites and online portals. AI search engines and agents are looking for property data that is unified, structured, and accessible.
“Users who use these assistants to create real estate searches directly will now receive real-time Orpi property recommendations,” Orpi said in a media statement announcing the partnership with Kleio. This provides visibility opportunities not available through traditional search engine rankings or paid portals.
“We’re redistributing the game,” Wellens said. [buyers] I had to go through an aggregator. ” Now, he said, the AI assistant itself is the entry point.
“The importance of initiatives like Orpi and Kleio is not just that property search is becoming AI-enabled,” said Natasha Terinova of REACH UK and Second Century Ventures. “This is a response to the fact that the entire search structure is changing.”
“Real estate data is moving from static websites and documents to systems that can understand, interpret and act on information,” she said.
The UK will see government-backed reforms focused on up-front information, digital asset records and more efficient transactions, Terinova said. “These developments point to a more connected, data-driven real estate ecosystem,” said Terinova.
When AI systems become a place for forming and refining intent, real estate discovery becomes less a matter of search and more a matter of language. This means that first impressions are likely to be made by those with the most readable, structured, and semantically rich real estate data.
Troy Palmquist is the founder and president of HomeCode Advisors. Connect with him on LinkedIn.
