Howard Hanna leaps into AI-powered home search game
The nation’s largest independent brokerage has launched a new natural language search experience on its website, powered by ListAssist to rival portals.
Not to be outdone by the portal giants who have invested heavily in AI-driven enhancements, independent brokerage Howard Hanna today unveiled a new natural-language home search tool on its website powered by third-party developer, ListAssist.
The integration will allow buyers and sellers to find homes by using conversational descriptions of the property itself, the neighborhood and nearby amenities, among others.
Brokerages "need to give consumers a reason to start their property journey on your website," said Chris McGoldrick, founder and CEO of ListAssist, told the crowd before the company's first-round win at the T3 Sixty Tech Summit Pitch Battle on Monday.
"Let's face it, the portals have built empires" with AI, McGoldrick said. At ListAssist, "we think it's time somebody armed the rebels."
In addition to Pittsburgh-based Howard Hanna, which has just over a million listings across 13 states, ListAssist also handles the AI-powered search for the Ashton Real Estate Group of RE/MAX Advantage in the Nashville area.
Value in the data: But the tech is not only designed to help make a consumer's home search easier — it's also meant to provide Howard Hanna agents and executives with a rich new dataset, McGoldrick said.
"Their real reports on real data are interactive, so you can understand what the top search words are," he explained to Real Estate News. "This is really important for a big business like Howard Hanna — the locations where people are, and not just you know where they currently are, but also what they're interested in searching."
How it works: Similar to competing products from other AI-centric home search software developers, such as recent entrant Flyhomes, McGoldrick said that the ListAssist search is based on a mix of various inputs such as MLS data, Census Bureau data and other sources. But in this case, there's an emphasis on tinkering with the weighting of specific data or terms over others.
What is actually most important to people? "One of the things we've found with our live customers, is that, interestingly enough, what people put earlier in the search is what's most important to them," McGoldrick explained, adding that the keywords listed in the beginning of the search are what are given the most "weight."