Traditionally, search features on Real Estate portals are limited, causing buyers to spend hours looking through hundreds of homes that don’t match their needs. New Artificial Intelligence technology may be about to change the buyer experience for good.
A brand new day
Sarah wakes up earlier in the morning than she usually does. Today is different. Today she begins a new venture, a new chapter in her life. This is the day she begins searching for a new home for herself, her husband and the baby they have on the way.
She opens the laptop to start the search, remembering the house in which she grew up. It was old, Victorian, with hardwood everywhere. She used to dance as a child in the natural light that shone through the windows, and play for hours with her brother in the large back yard with the neat lawn.
Now she is in charge of choosing where her children will grow up and build memories of their own. With this in mind, she begins her search. She and her husband have narrowed their choices to two big neighborhoods; both are conveniently close to the City and have all the amenities they need.
The search begins
Sarah has a clear picture of her perfect home, with a modern kitchen, the Victorian features she loves and space for the children to play. She starts by noting the features the house has to have:
- Hardwood floor
- Living room with high ceiling and fireplace
- Stainless steel appliances in the kitchen
- A large lawn in the backyard
- A good-sized fire pit
The online property listing on two mainstream portals show the total number of available houses in the two districts is 474. Overwhelmed by this number, she tries to search for the features she needs.
Despite being able to request certain features, Sarah finds the results rarely match. She is shown houses with low ceilings and no back yard. Other houses that are a better fit only show up when she changes her search. She selects another set of criteria. And another. Hours go by without her displaying houses with the combination of factors most important to her. She pushes the laptop aside. She rubs her aching eyes.
It's almost impossible to search by features, she thinks. The houses that appear in the results don’t match what she asks for. It appears the only possible option is to review each of the 474 houses in turn. But after scrolling through more than 500 images in just 20 homes, her frustration turns to disappointment and despair.
Searching for a home hasn’t changed in 20 years
Like Sarah, many buyers experience searching for a new home as a nightmare. Each website may list hundreds of available houses with scores of images and an abundance of attributes, but more than half of the homes have not indexed the features the way a human being would search.
Any website that could accurately search for property features that potential buyers value is bound to disrupt Real Estate markets.
Some portals have started noticing the importance of this. Naberly, for example, allows buyers to intelligently search by features. Indeed, the tagline on their homepage reads, “Find Homes by Features that Matter".
Restb.ai offers the solution
Restb.ai utilizes Image Recognition technology tailored to meet the needs of the Real Estate industry. It’s an Artificial Intelligence solution able to recognize more than 30 important features in a property, making the search function faster and more effective.
The technology enables property portals to build exciting products, adjust the results to individual user requirements, and show buyers the homes that match what they have in their mind.
With this huge improvement in user experience, clients are experiencing increases of up to 50% in the engagement and stickiness of their visitors.
Conventional portals fill the "alt text" of the images with searchable information. Restb.ai, however, optimizes images for search engines by providing complete HTML references. The detailed references significantly improve the SEO results of websites. Portals using Restb.ai receive more visitors and rank more highly in Google results pages than websites with incomplete or poorly organized image information.
Revolutionizing the Real Estate Market
The Real Estate market is rapidly evolving and adopting new technologies to improve its interaction with potential buyers. Artificial Intelligence and Computer Vision as used by Restb.ai are the next step in the evolution of property search and selection.
Restb.ai democratizes housing searches. Its next generation technology dissolves the digital wall between buyers like Sarah and their ideal home; and opening the door to a new generation of childhood dreams.
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