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Real estate reporter Jeff Andrews sat down with Ocusell founder Hayden Rieveschl to talk about artificial intelligence and compliance software in a post-settlement environment.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Jeff Andrews: Tell me a bit about Ocusell and its platform. If I’m a listing agent using Ocusell, I’m able to post listings to multiple MLSs that are compliant within the same interface. Is Ocusell replacing the need for Matrix, Paragon, or another legacy MLS interface?
Hayden Rieveschl: It’s not, and that’s something we have to clarify a lot. Instead, we’re streamlining the listing process. So as an agent or an admin that’s doing listings on behalf of agents — which you can do within our platform but not the legacy systems — all they do is enter in the address and Ocusell auto-populates all of the listing information, so anywhere between 80 to 85% of that listing is completed. They do a cursory check, and we notate all the fields that have obviously been autofilled with a slightly different color. When the user interacts with that field, it will change to white. If there is an improper value put into that field, we will notate the business rule underneath, and there’ll be a little red alert saying, hey, this is wrong, and this is how you need to remediate it and fix it. They can get that listing done within seconds.
JA: The new rules related to the National Association of Realtors antitrust settlement put the onus on MLSs to make sure they’re in compliance. How prepared for these changes do you think MLSs are from a technology standpoint?
HR: Most of these MLSs have compliance teams, if you will, and most of the compliance solutions are point solutions. They essentially validate data within the interface, but that doesn’t mean that it’s validating the actual rule in place. What’s happened over time is they’ve made changes to policy and to rules and regulations.
What typically happens is that the MLS vendor is hard-coding those changes into the interface and it’s not reflected in the metadata. So there are major inconsistencies, and none of this is checking in real-time, because these are all legacy systems. They were really just set up to validate, not actually checking if there is a violation within that listing that’s going live. So that violation is going to be happening after the listing is live and on market for typically five days. And I think five days is kind of generous. Why in this day and age — especially with the Department of Justice breathing down your neck — do you really want a violation listing on the market for a set number of days? We can do all this in real time.
JA: There are a number of different MLS compliance software solutions. What differentiates Ocusell’s platform from other competitors on the market?
HR: We’ll [have competitors], but we have an extraordinarily large moat that we’ve built, and that’s through — quite honestly — building up our business rules service and building an ecosystem that handles all types of rules and all types of MLSs. So no competitors to date, but we’re very different from any other solution out there.
We absolutely needed to understand the business rules to achieve interoperability and modularity in the space. When we first implemented it [at an MLS], they barely had any API documentation, so we had to figure it out, and then there’s no documentation of their rules. The way that typical rules are kept is in a proprietary syntax in the back of an MLS system, so you actually have to parse those rules out into structured English. There’s many syntaxes in the space, and we actually built a technology around that, which is currently patent-pending. It will translate all those various languages into structured English or into coding languages like C+ and all that stuff.
JA: How are you leveraging AI?
HR: We have a proprietary AI that’s trained specifically on real estate, so AI is seen all throughout our product. It’s auto populating the listing — our AI does that seamlessly. We also leverage AI and computer vision when it comes to media, so images, videos. That’s largely for compliance, but also for data population, as well as descriptions and things of that nature. Agents upload their photos or videos, and our AI is going to write a complete description based on the data that was auto populated, as well as the imagery of the media.
JA: What is your approach to building tools in-house versus buying a tool that already exists?
HR: We just finished building our in-house engineering team, which took damn near two years. It’s six individuals. Our CTO Adam Campbell sits at the helm, and these guys are some of the best in the business. I mean these guys are rock stars, so we build everything in house. We don’t buy because we do it better than anybody.
We do what are more or less exclusive partnership integrations. If there is a company out there where there’s a ton of synergy and it seamlessly works with our solution, it might make sense to do an exclusive partnership. We have that currently with RealReports. We work with them very closely. They are essentially like a CARFAX for homes, and they’ve done a masterful job. The founders there are extremely competent, very intelligent. It made a ton of sense.
JA: What keeps you up at night? And by that I don’t mean a screaming toddler or noisy neighbor.
HR: I have two screaming toddlers that keep me up at night but they’re pretty good boys. Quite frankly, what keeps me up at night is scaling fast enough. We are hyper-focused on growth. We’ve also made a ton of technical augmentations to the software to enable more automated integrations for MLSs. That’s because one of the things that we struggled with in the past was we were only able to get a handful of markets online in a given year. But, starting literally right now, we’re going to be able to get on as many markets as we want with any given year. That was a concern over this past year. Our in-house engineering team took that head on and has done a masterful job.
The first MLS integration that will experience the new technical updates and automated integration process is going to be Triangle MLS, so shout out to Matt Fowler. That right now I’m thinking a lot about every night. This is everything that our engineering team says it will do. We’re able to do this extremely fast compared to the previous integrations, which were not extremely fast.
