Northern Ireland property portal unveils a smarter, faster website with AI-powered search, real-time mortgage rates and seamless agent contact – fueling a 38% surge in traffic and 13% rise in home searchers

Northern Ireland property portal Propertynews has relaunched following an investment of over £250,000.

The upgraded Propertynews website includes a range of new features designed to make house-hunting easier for consumers.

Emma McNally, chief operating officer of Propertynews explained: “The new Propertynews website has been rebuilt to improve the home search experience with several new and improved user features such as natural language search, advanced travel time search capabilities and new and improved methods to connect with estate agents.

"The site is now also on a new code base to allow for agility and ongoing technical enhancements. The theme of the upgrade is: Better, Faster, Familiar, because the new site brings smarter home search tools and a more personalised approach to the property journey, while retaining the trusted and familiar look and feel that users know and love.”

Upgrades to Propertynews include a smarter search function that allows users to discover properties that take into consideration desired walking, cycling, driving and public transport times.

Users can also now search exclusively for new homes through a new section within the search bar. And the site’s calculators have been enhanced to use daily mortgage rates and automated rate updates. There is also a new function to enable house-hunters to contact agents directly in the search results page, as well as a “floating contact form” as the user scrolls up and down the page. This is designed to make agent contact much more accessible to help make the home enquiry process frictionless.

In a move to future-proof Propertynews, the site has also been re-engineered and migrated to a new hosting environment powered by Google Cloud Run, enabling greater agility in launching new products and services.

This comes a year on from PropertyPal Group acquiring Propertynews and is in line with the group’s commitment to invest in both of its property websites to drive innovation and enhance the experience for home searchers and agent advertisers.

Andrew Murdoch, chief product and technology officer at PropertyPal Group, added: “Google Cloud Run is a scalable, secure and globally distributed infrastructure, and with it we can iterate faster, integrate with advanced tools, and deploy updates with minimal friction. Google Cloud’s modern architecture also ensures we’re ready to adapt to new technologies and evolving customer needs, helping us stay ahead of the curve and deliver value at speed.”

Propertynews continues to demonstrate strong growth with Q2 2025 delivering a 13% uplift in home searchers browsing the website vs Q1 2025. In addition, direct traffic to the website in the same period grew by an impressive 38%, reflecting the strength of the Propertynews brand in the marketplace.

The PropertyPal and Propertynews brands continue to operate as distinct websites, appealing to their loyal audiences. Significant investments being made in the platforms focusing on marketing, upgrading the underlying technology infrastructure and enhancing the software suite for agents, will continue to deliver even greater value and improved services for both agents and website users.