Inman

RealReports is real estate’s 23andMe: Tech Review Update

Craig C. Rowe; Canva

At Inman Connect Las Vegas, July 30-Aug. 1, 2024, the noise and misinformation will be banished, all your big questions will be answered, and new business opportunities will be revealed. Join us.

RealReports is a AI-powered property insights software.

Platforms: Web; fully mobile responsive
Ideal for: Buyer agents, investors
Initial Review: June 2024
Updated: July 2024

Top selling points:

• Aiden AI assistant
• Reach of community/market/regional data
• Document processing/analysis
• No use of MLS data
• Client collaboration

Top concerns:

Agents are still cobbling together individual sources for sales support and market data. It’ll take time for the industry to break contracts and habits in order to rely on single sources like RealReports and its colleagues in this space.

What you should know

RealReports was spun out of a remote tech-forward brokerage called Torii Homes, where its bones were assembled to assist its agents in quickly providing advisory services as they worked with clients over the web. In short, it’s the byproduct of an effort to make a better brokerage, like Kingsford Charcoal emerging from the Ford Motor Company’s use of the assembly line.

Now, with its own company and agent-facing productivity solution, RealReports offers a single source to learn quickly and share everything going on in and around a home. Each user has a nicely branded account front-end that can be shared with consumers, but I feel it’s better wielded as an internal value-provider or a presentation tool.

Each listing entered in RealReports will produce a nicely designed, categorized breakdown of the environmental, municipal, community, structural and economic drivers of a home’s value. A left-hand nav allows for an easy jump into local zoning, nearby home values, points of interest, or the long- and short-term rental potential.

Savvy agents should envision RealReports as a valuable tool for comparing homes before an offer is made, especially in a market like this. Beds, baths and budgets are only the start; Real Reports gets into the DNA of a home.

A recent update of RealReports includes a client collaboration feature that enables agents to invite others into the reporting environment, because who hasn’t a hard time trying to communicate a home’s value to its owner? Right. Allowing sellers to actually see the numbers behind your price adjustment suggestion or for buyers to see why their offers aren’t getting accepted can go a long way toward avoiding uncomfortable conversations, especially in a market as challenging as this. It charges for the number of invites you want according to account level, which I don’t love, but it’s likely worth it. It’s a little “nickel-dimey.”

And on the topic of uncomfortable conversations, RealReports has integrated data from the Dru Sjodin registry for sex offender lookups. It’s never an easy question to answer and most agents remain uncertain about how to do it. This is a great way to be the “source of the source,” per industry standard.

I dig the software’s the map feature, which rests on the right column and interactively responds with visualizations of each category being reviewed.

If you’ve read my reviews of TopHap, Revaluate and recently, Land id, then you know I have no shortage of love for maps. There is true power in overhead views — literal and figurative — of the real estate market. We too often look at data in numeric form, flat and clinical. Understanding how data affects the space around you offers a valuable new perspective, and it’s a nice touch here that I think could add even more value if emphasized further.

Speaking of emphasis, the majority of it has to be put on Aiden, RealReports’ clever report translator. Zach Gorman, who presented the demo, called Aiden the “mouth” of the software and the reports its brain. Makes sense.

Aiden can answer specific questions with context without having to root through the minutiae of each data set. If your buyer wants to know if an ADU can be added, ask Aiden about the zoning. How many coffee shops nearby are dog-friendly? Is there a Montessori school within walking distance? Aiden has your back.

The more you ask of it, the faster you can benefit from RealReports’ value proposition. In a personal presentation, it would be a super slick way to answer buyer questions and avoid the classic “I don’t know but can find out for you” response.

Aiden has a thing for real estate documents, too, able to in seconds parse the language of a contract or agreement, meaning when you need to review a clause, date or critical term, the answer is a mere question away. Cool stuff.

RealReports’ Aiden is the latest of a few recent impressive experiences I’ve had with what AI is capable of doing for the industry. This is exactly what The Real Brokerage’s CTO Pritesh Damani meant when he told me that AI is “extremely” worthless without internal data.

In so little time, AI has done so much for real estate productivity; you’re just not totally realizing yet because an odd market has given it so little light in which to flourish. But this downtime has been good for it.

Have a technology product you would like to discuss? Email Craig Rowe

Craig C. Rowe started in commercial real estate at the dawn of the dot-com boom, helping an array of commercial real estate companies fortify their online presence and analyze internal software decisions. He now helps agents with technology decisions and marketing through reviewing software and tech for Inman.