Real estate digital marketing startup Ylopo announced Tuesday it has developed a new, artificial intelligence-based digital assistant that can send text messages and follow up with consumers on behalf of agents.
A screenshot of a RAIYA conversation | Credit: Ylopo
Ylopo calls the new tool “RAIYA,” which it said in a statement stands for “Real Estate Artificial Intelligence: Your Assistant.” The statement explains that RAIYA can interact with both consumers and real estate agents. In the case of consumers, RAIYA will send text messages asking about the progress they’ve made during a home search.
Ylopo co-founder and chief marketing officer Juefeng Ge said in a statement that the tool is unique because “it’s driven by all the data we’re collecting on each user as they search for homes to buy on the search sites we provide for them.”
“This way we can have informed conversations based on what we know the home shopper is interested in, which makes the conversations very precise and genuine,” he added.
The conversations RAIYA has with consumers also function as follow up that an agent might otherwise have had to do on their own. The result should be a more efficient process during which technology handles the more basic and preliminary communication with consumers.
Los Angeles-based Ylopo was founded in 2013 and offers a variety of technology products geared toward real estate agents. Among other things, those products include a marketing dashboard called Mission Control, a mobile-optimized IDX home search site, branded websites and various lead generation and nurturing tools.
A company spokesperson told Inman that Ylopo currently has 1,000 clients and about 6,000 platform users.
Agents can pay to get access just to Ylopo’s technology, or to have the company manage their marketing for them. The former option costs $295 per month while the latter has a variable monthly price depending on the agent’s goals.
RAIYA, which has been in development for the past six months, is available as an add-on to Ylopo’s other services and costs $100 per month.
As of Tuesday RAIYA was in a beta testing phase and had more than 300 users. The tool is also already conducting more than 10,000 text-based conversations daily, according to a company statement.
RAIYA should be widely available July 1.
Soldera Properties in Lake Oswego, Oregon, is among the brokerages using RAIYA. Dawn Cordiner, the firm’s managing broker, said in a statement Monday that “the power of Ylopo’s AI cannot be overstated.”
“We are seeing a tremendous increase in engagement from home shoppers,” she added. “I’m amazed at how authentic the conversations are.”
Ylopo claims that RAIYA “feels human” because it has been designed to use natural language processing. That allows it to “empathize, communicate and politely converse with a wide range of home shoppers.”
Digital assistants that use chatbot-style interfaces have become a growing focus among real estate firms in recent years. OJO Labs, for example, has raised tens of millions of dollars while building a system that can converse with consumers, then find and share homes via text message.
Other companies focused on consumer-oriented chat apps include AskAvenue, Briepher, Sturcturely, HomeHawk and others.
At the same time, companies such as Keller Williams, with its Kelle app, have worked to create digital assistants that can streamline the agent experience.
While each company operating in the digital assistant space is taking a somewhat different approach, the take away from all of these efforts is that there is a growing consensus that artificial intelligence has the potential to automate more of the real estate experience.
Howard Tager
For it’s part, Ylopo believes that it is the “most rapidly innovating company in the real estate tech space,” according to a statement from CEO Howard Tager. He added that RAIYA is a “breakthrough in the application of artificial intelligence to online real estate lead conversion.”
“We have combined the power of artificial intelligence with our 24/7 monitoring of home shopper search behavior to create a system that automatically communicates with that home shopper, answers their questions, and provides them with relevant, on-point property and market information,” Tager concluded.
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