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Kathleen Lappe, the founder and CEO of a multilingual AI property marketing solution, has been named Innovator of the Year at the National Association of Realtors’ 2024 Innovation, Opportunity & Investment (iOi) Summit, according to a Sept. 5 press release.
Lappe’s company is DirectOffer, which provides three primary products: DO Audio Tours, Interest Grid and the eponymous DirectOffer, a search experience that integrates the other two. InterestGrid, which tracks hard leads for a listing and DO Audio Tours, an AI-powered vocal description solution, can each be purchased independently of the parent app.
Kathleen Lappe
“We are proud of the platform we’ve created to break down barriers and make it easier for people to achieve their homeownership goals,” Lappe said in the release. “The iOi Summit showcases NAR’s commitment to supporting and showcasing how technology can improve the lives of agents and the consumers they serve, and I’m honored to receive this prestigious award.”
Lappe has secured multiple patents for real estate technology, specializing in multilingual solutions and ADA-compliant listings, according to her website’s bio. Her app was inspired by the notion that everyone should be able to compete for homes on equal ground and that the industry needs to do more to enable that.
“The iOi Innovator of the Year Award recognizes leaders who are driving the advancement of real estate through innovation, no matter what role they play,” the iOi Summit website states.
The audio tour component of DirectOffer can turn any written listing description into a spoken narrative in 57 languages, making it highly valuable to agents who work in large cities known for diversity, such as New York, Houston and Los Angeles. It can create longer-form narratives or be used as quick explainers for specific pictures within a listing asset.
In July of this year, State Island MLS chose to integrate DirectOffer and leverages 10 languages to promote member listings. The company also has in place an enterprise agreement with SentriLock, one of the industry’s two primary providers of lockboxes and home access software.
Inman reviewed Direct Offer in 2021, noting that it “benefits from being carefully balanced on the edge of consumer search and brokerage marketing. The former is not an easy world in which to tread, the competition is simply too big. If you want to step into the category, have something good to offer.”
The company’s tools have been made available to more than 300,000 agents through a series of notable partnerships with RE/MAX, HomeServices of America, Leading Real Estate Companies of the World®, EXIT Realty and FIABCI-USA.
