At AiRE, I have had the opportunity to be a leader in one of the most innovative, agile, high-energy and fast growing teams and there can be no surprise that the people raising RiTA have had their share of accolades with innovation awards and being named in the top 5 Ai companies serving real estate, globally.
Why would a company like AiRE choose an acquisition from CoreLogic when the growth graphs were rising so fast?
Well here is one thing I know about good teams. If you team up with another good team, you can amplify your impact exponentially. With the mother of all springboards in CoreLogic, that is precisely what we intend to do.
For anyone who didn’t catch the big announcement at the end of 2021, CoreLogic acquired AiRE, bringing RiTA and all the clever people I work with into the most extensive property data universe across Australia and New Zealand. The weight of this partnership is as obvious as it is profound and it was met with hundreds and hundreds of positive messages upon announcement.
Yet it wasn’t until I attended an industry event (in real life) in December of 2021 that I was able to palpate the excitement from our clients. No one asked the crass questions that I was dreading like “how much” and “how long” etc… Instead, our clients were curious about what it meant now that we had “the keys to the kingdom” – by which they meant access to the most prolific data available.
The smart people in the industry are poised now for the potential of this partnership to come to life for their benefit.
Now I’m not going to let those last three words hang at the end of a sentence like that so let me repeat them – for their benefit.
Let me tell you a story that inspired me to become RiTA’s Mum. Our CEO Ian Campbell was telling me about the sale of his mum’s property. His mum was a very house proud lady and she was devastated to return to her home after the first open to find that the local newspaper had been left on the driveway for potential buyers to step over and she was devastated. The agent didn’t have time or the service mindset to pick up the paper.
Now I have been to conferences for the last two decades where speakers have told agents to work harder and get up earlier: “GCI, GCI, GCI”. My experience working in the front lines, studying the mental health and wellness of the industry, and being married to a real estate agent for just as long tells me that agents haven’t got a lot left in the tank to give.
I’ve also seen hundreds of technical solutions on offer to agents that don’t integrate or tangibly save agents time. The solution for me did not involve blaming the agents or the tools but taking some responsibility and finding out which tools would actually help agents and businesses to be able to get off the screens and focus on the people along footpaths and driveways of their local area, and the relationships that build trust.
When RiTA was born, agents had more technology than ever, agents were more stressed than ever and customers had higher levels of expectation and dissatisfaction than ever. While most entrepreneurs went down the path of disruption, we recognised that there was a fundamental and valuable role for property professionals and that the last thing those professionals needed was more technology. Agents needed a resource that would give them more time and a mindset that was human-first: agent-first and customer-first.
So RiTA was born to be the digital employee that every real estate agent needed to live their best lives – both at work and at home. To do that, RiTA needed to be smart and we needed to hire smart people, partner with smart people and then listen and learn from the people she would be working for – our customers.
When servicing the property industry, which is the most lucrative industry in Australia, you have a choice whether you are going to do that in a disruptive way or a way that is enabling and empowering for the people who do the work.
The independence of CoreLogic and their commitment to finding solutions that help the real estate industry do what they do with intelligence, accuracy, timeliness and simplicity made them the perfectly aligned adoptive parent to RiTA and a new home for AiRE to scale and fulfil our vision.
Since the merger, I’ve learned that CoreLogic is a lot more than CMAs and a phat database. There is a suite of products that I didn’t even know existed that I wish I had when I was running my real estate business – I mean I wish I had RiTA back then too!
Things like RP Proposals integrate the intelligence of CoreLogic’s property data with personalised agent branding so agents no longer have to create a CMA and attach it awkwardly to listing kits or post-appraisal documentation bundles.
That alone cuts down about 75 clicks and jumping in between different systems to send clients information about their property and other information about why you should be the agent to sell it.
I bring this product up specifically because one of the few ‘challenges’ I know of when people start using RiTA is that when she is generating so many appraisals off the back of her automated SMS conversations, some people struggle to keep up with all of the opportunity if that next step isn’t streamlined.
And let’s face it … a massive influx of appraisals is not what most people would want to call a ‘problem’, so it is an important workflow to get flowing.
What next?
Well, I wish I could tell you! We’ve spent 5 years digging deep and proving the problems for the industry that are worth solving. CoreLogic have been doing that for 98% of real estate professionals for even longer.
Both AiRE and CoreLogic product teams are working hard to build the data pipelines to bring intelligence from the beating heart of property data into the hands and handheld devices of the real estate industry. RiTA’s ready for the next level, are you?
