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Ten additional multiple listing services have hired Barcelona’s Restb.ai to amp up the pace and sophistication of how listing data is populated, made compliant and broadcast to consumers, Inman has learned.
In a statement set to be made public April 1, Restb.ai said its collection of new partnerships will benefit more than 45,000 additional real estate agents, making its total national agent reach close to 850,000.
The MLSs now using Restb.ai include Mid-America Regional Information Systems, MIBOR Broker Listing Cooperative, All Jersey MLS, Maine Listings, Montana Regional MLS, Capital Area Technology & Realtor Services, Bryan-College Station Multiple Listing Service, Vail Multi-List Service, St. Augustine & St. Johns County Board of Realtors and Longview Area Association of Realtors.
Restb.ai’s core competency is computer vision, a form of artificial intelligence that extracts actionable data from still photography. After identifying all of a home’s key features, the software generates listing descriptions, image captioning and alt-text/metadata in more than 50 languages. Agents can manually edit the captions and descriptions, or use Restb.ai to adjust the text with several preset writing tones, including descriptive, playful, standard, professional and simple.
This allows users to upload images as a means of populating listing data and also helps MLSs ensure image compliance and data accuracy.
When done at scale and integrated with an MLS’s sales data, Restb.ai can help the industry understand with a level close to certainty how specific home characteristics and photography tactics impact sales performance. For example, it found that homes with kitchen islands and included floor plans result in fewer days on market, among other insights.
“MLSs adopting AI aren’t just improving efficiency. They’re setting the foundation to power future real estate technology,” said Chief Product Officer Nathan Brannen in a statement. “This expansion is another step toward a smarter, more streamlined industry where AI helps agents focus on what they do best: serving homebuyers and sellers.”
The company announced in September of last year that it had signed up 17 MLSs, at the time reaching 720,000 agents throughout the U.S. and Canada. Users spanned New York, Rhode Island, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Florida, Alabama, Minnesota, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Colorado, Arizona, California and British Columbia.
Restb.ai’s rapid pace of partnership in the MLS market indicates that industry leaders are growing to understand AI’s best attribute — its ability to shrink work processes.
Listing information input still remains a largely manual process, involving agents hand-typing data into the real estate industry’s central source for critical business data. Additionally, there is little uniformity among MLSs, despite the best efforts of organizations like RESO (Real Estate Standards Organization) to install universal best practices. Fragmentation remains a burden to how consumers perceive an agent’s value.
However, accompanied by innovations like computer vision, it’s growing more possible with each announcement like this that nationwide standardization is feasible, a milestone that could lead to much greater efficiency, data capitalization and, in the end, better consumer experiences.
