AI Computer Vision for Real Estate Listings Search On Your Website

Enjoying Brokerage Insider? Please Subscribe Using Your Favorite Podcast Player.

TRIBUS CEO Eric Stegemann is joined by Restb.ai VP of product and sales, Nathan Brannen to talk about how AI and computer vision is changing the real estate media landscape.

Learn how you can make search on your real estate brokerage website better by incorporating computer vision. In addition, the same tech can help your website become more accessible and follow ADA compliance.

TRANSCRIPTION

Eric Stegemann (00:04):

Hi, everybody. Welcome to Brokerage Insider the podcast for all things, brokerage and tech related today, we’re joined by Nathan Brannan, the VP of product and sales at a company called RESTB, Restb.ai. And Nathan is coming to us from Barcelona, Spain where their company is based, but they work with clients all around the world. So, Nathan, thanks for joining us.

Nathan Brannen (00:32):

Thanks sir. Good to be here.

Eric Stegemann (00:34):

So tell me a little bit about RESTB and what you guys do.

Nathan Brannen (00:39):

Okay. So RESTB that AI as a company that was launched about five years ago and spent as a computer vision company. So what does computer vision mean? That means image recognition, looking at photos and extracting information out of them music. A lot of the latest advances in AI, and we started pretty early on solely focused on the real estate industry because from personal experience, working with different sites, the founders understood that there was a lot of opportunity to improve and use this information with photos. So really at this point we’ve taken that and working with clients in Spain and realize that these problems don’t just exist there, they exist across Europe. They exist across the world. And particularly for the people listening to this podcast and they exist a lot in the U S as well. And so the things we do with these photos is try to add whatever intelligence or information we can so that it can be used better by the consumers. The consumers can be portals, they can be adolescents, they can be brokerages. They can be really anyone across the entire real estate spectrum that deals with any digital assets. And you know, I think we’ll probably get into a little bit about what those different things are, but a lot of really cool things are happening in both the extracting information space and the enhancing space and editing space and, you know, just creation space of listings and descriptions and captions and things like that.

Eric Stegemann (02:06):

Yeah. So RESTB is a company that we at TRIBUS have been tracking for quite a while and it’s, it’s been really interesting to watch their expansion and the things that they’ve been doing. So, Nathan, can you tell me a little bit, give me an idea of how many images do you guys tag or, or look at using computer vision? How, how many do you look at per day or per month?

Nathan Brannen (02:30):

Great question. And this has been quite interesting to track in relation to the Corona virus outbreak and seeing how it differs in different areas. But you know, on an average month for processing, you know, upwards of a hundred million photos a day or not a day, I’m sorry, a month. And you know, doing that in areas all across the world. And we’ve seen with the, the coronavirus, the, they kind of shift as it’s moved across different parts of the world, a corresponding drop in those image volumes quite similar to what people have seen with drops in listings and things like that.

Eric Stegemann (03:05):

So you know, a hundred million, that’s obviously lots of images, even if there is some drop because of listing volume going down, that’s a lot of images. And so for those that don’t have any background in this, which is probably most of our listeners, cause they’re busy running their brokerages and selling real estate and recruiting agents, not worrying about tech per se. Talk to me a little bit about how the process works, like how, when you get an image, what happens to it from the minute it hits your system?

Nathan Brannen (03:36):

Okay. So there’s two kinds of processes that happen when we receive images, the images are coming from our clients and they’re passing us basically either an image URL or an image file via API. So we work with a restful API interface, which is an industry standard API. And when that image comes over to us, we are then processing through the relevant, a AI model that we have and returning information back to the user in a consumable format for them to apply that information in different ways. So that’s one of the ways where we’re just tagging information saying, okay, what room type is this? What features are within this photo? What condition is this room? But we also do other things where we’re actually editing the photos. And in this case we will provide a link to a new photo once they pass us a photo. So that, that new photo can be used, however, the user may want to use it.

Eric Stegemann (04:31):

So, you know, obviously AI is part of this, it’s part of your company name, it’s part of your URL. So for those that aren’t familiar with kind of the concept of AI, can you, from a very high level standpoint, talk about what goes into that, what goes into maybe a model of AI and then how that yields results down the road?

Nathan Brannen (04:53):

Yes. So at a high level, a 10,000 foot view, what our AI does or tries to do is act very similarly to how a human would work and look at photos that they receive, but doing this at a scale that you know, is much more possible when you’re dealing with a a hundred plus million images a month. And so what this means is basically we train models that look over a bunch of different photos that have been pre tagged or identified as far as here are that these within these photos. And then we feed all of that information to our AI and train over it and iterate over it until it basically is able to identify those photos to the level that we’re looking for. And so that’s in the upper 97%. And once that model is trained, any new photo that has passed to us can then be analyzed and the result immediately returned to the user based on all of this data that we’ve trained it with in the past.

Eric Stegemann (05:48):

Yup. Okay. So the model, I think that’s the part that I I’ve been always very interested in is the model. So as understand it and feel free to correct me if I’m not, not right here, but as I understand it, the model it’s, the idea is it’s almost like a human in that it learns and gets better over time. Is that correct? Correct. So, you know, it seems like when you have these many images that you’re getting per day, it just gets better and better and better over time. Right. So, so the way, I guess I’ve seen it as it’s kind of like Tesla and their lead in self-driving where they have an AI model too, is that they’re far head because they have so much data that they’re looking at. And from what we’ve seen at TRIBUS with RESTB, is this the same thing. They have so many images that they look at and train their model and get it better and better and better over time that they have such a lead in terms of anybody else that’s trying to do this, particularly when it comes to real estate. So in training that model, Nathan, is there anything that is particularly interesting that, that maybe it’s seen that’s new, that wasn’t expected or that you guys found by training that model?

Nathan Brannen (07:01):

So I’m going to rewind a little bit Eric, and just make sure that I’m not misleading you at all. When we talked about the model getting better over time. So with any model that you have, there’s going to be a certain amount of detectives that are correct. And perhaps detections that are missed in a detection would be something that was within the photo, say hardwood floors that we wanted to be there, and it wasn’t detected or vice versa. It wasn’t there, but we said it was there. And we only know that these are incorrect by looking at them or by getting feedback from, from users or by doing our own analysis. So there’s no automatic updating of the model simply based on getting more photos. But what we do get is one, we have some feedback loops set up with customers where when they identify that photos are incorrect, they get sent to our data team for analysis.

Nathan Brannen (07:50):

But too, we have just the feedback from all these clients that we’re speaking to that have unique issues that focus on specific areas of the country. So even, you know, photos different quite a lot from the U S and Europe, but even in the Northeast and in California, there’s differences and getting those feedback from users that are in both parts of those countries, help us be aware of where we need to you know, clean up certain areas of the model. And because we have all of these customers and all this experience and all this data that we’ve looked through, it’s very easy for us to then find the right types of things to improve the models and the ways that our users are seeing.

Eric Stegemann (08:27):

Yeah. Makes, makes sense. So you know, anything that comes out of it that’s really, you know, unique or different that you guys maybe hadn’t been expecting with it.

Nathan Brannen 08:38):

Yes. So for example you know, there’s certain things that we just don’t detect that are quite interesting to detect. And so this would be say a kitchen back splash, a really interesting thing. That’s great to be able to look at in a photo, but not something that made our original list of items that we, we decided to tag. So we get requests like that quite a bit when people want to say, Oh, Hey, can I look for this? Or kind of look for that. And those are great to kind of roll in, but, Oh, sorry, go ahead. No, I was going to say but beyond that, we also ended up with a lot of things that are a little bit more peculiar. So I think we had an issue where there’s a certain MLS and they had a lot of pencil drawings or sketches that would be upstate the front of the house, but it would be John and a pencil as a kind of rendering. And for us, this would be returned as, you know, a plan at first and a plan would be like a floor plan, but it’s not a plan. And you can kind of see what the AI was thinking based on the data it had. But it also shows the, the need to keep iterating over these models and proving for these cases that they may not have run into before.

Eric Stegemann (09:49):

Super interesting. What can I ask what MLS that was?

Nathan Brannen (09:53):

So I can not say what am mostly

Eric Stegemann (09:58):

Can you, can you explain why they have these pencil drawings? Cause it seems really interesting slash odd that they have so many pencil drawings of fronts of houses.

Nathan Brannen (10:08):

So what they told us when we reached out to them about this was that they are, they actually have the text of rendering on a lot of these photos that show these, these front of houses. And it’s basically a, a new construction, but rather than using a, an actual rendering, which we also see quite common name, it is a pencil sketch. And for us, it was as surprising as it was to you. And that this just, wasn’t something that seemed to happen often, but I’m guessing this is a certain, you know, perhaps construction company that provides these I mean, they’re quite nice pencil drawings, so I’m not talking about stick figures, but they are very different than anything else that our AI had seen.

Eric Stegemann (10:49):

Interesting. Very interesting. I see. That’s the kind of stuff that I figure when you see a hundred plus million images on a regular basis, you’re going to get some oddball items like that, where you’re saying, Hey, this is not something we ever expected. I’m sure you probably have a number of other, other things like that too, but that’s a good one. So you know, obviously with it getting better and with it, with you changing the model over time and adding things like this with these pencil sketches to plan in for that how good do you think the model is going to be in say three years from now? And what do you think you’ll be able to tell about a photo and give back information to a brokerage or to an MLS? What are some things you aren’t doing right now that you think, yeah, in three years we’ll have the model that it can, it can definitely do that

Nathan Brannen (11:42):

Three years is a long time when it comes to these types of things. So I’m quite excited thinking about where we’ll be in three years, I think from a tagging perspective, extracting just the features that are within photos, the, the accuracy you can get to is quite high as you get more data. And as you understand how to divide things, what I think is interesting for us is that as we get all this information, but all the tech before you can then go into greater detail and understand, okay, you know, not only is this a kitchen Island, but this is a kitchen Island with granite countertops. And not only is it a kitchen item and granite countertops, but they are a darker shoe. So these are the kind of second, third order things that you can do once you are getting this data and understanding what to look for and what to build off of, because we can so much easier to query our database of images to, you know, find this new themes that we want identify and build. So that’s the basic stuff that I think we’re getting better and better at right now.

Eric Stegemann (12:41):

Yeah. Oh, it’s something that I had mentioned to your team in the past that I thought would be really cool. And you know, and certainly is not a today or tomorrow type of a thing, but it’s three plus year maybe type of a goal was I thought it would be great to have your model be able to even tell what the, what the model of appliances are and things like that that are inside the house because now, you know, if, you know generally you can say, okay, well it’s probably X years old. Which tells me if I’m looking at the house that if the appliances are, you know, 15 years old, I know there’s a good chance that the fridge might go out in the next few years or the the washer and dryer or something like that. It also helps me tell if the if you know, those are, those are the types of appliances that I would be looking for. Right. Do I want stainless appliances, which I think you guys might be able to already do, or you were getting close to be able to say that it’s all stainless appliances, right?

Nathan Brannen (13:47):

Correct. We can identify which appliances are stainless steel.

Eric Stegemann (13:50):

Yeah. See, that’s, that’s phenomenal. Okay. So you know, as far as search goes, and this is something that we’ve been working on with you guys, and we’re excited to, to get implemented, hopefully in the very near future is to make a more visual search process. So where somebody could go in and say, I want you know, w good landscaping, and I want a open and airy as far as what the house looks like. And I want updated kitchen, et cetera. All things I think you guys have currently, but we haven’t seen many sites adopt a more visual approach to search most sites. In fact, the vast, vast majority of sites today still are enter your city, state, zip et cetera, your price, maybe your beds and baths, and that’s the search process. But the thing is most consumers think of things and start narrowing it down once they get to city to say, okay, well, these are the ones that have the kitchens that I like. Why do you think more sites haven’t implemented a search process that, that takes into account the visual and you know, updates and things like that. But to be, we’re looking for inside of the house, why do you think they haven’t implemented that yet?

Nathan Brannen (15:14):

That’s a great question. I think we, we thought, you know, say two years ago that we would see a big shift in these, and we have seen a greater amount of people start to adopt some of the things you mentioned over the past 18 months. But I think one of the big challenges here is that you have, and this is in any country, not just the U S but you have the large portals that get the lion’s share of traffic and these debt, the beginning stages. And these are the people that have the least incentive to really innovate in the space. As long as everybody has a, basically the same type of search where you have, you know, a map on one side, a bunch of filters, and then the results on the other side, because of their position and kind of dominance in the market, they’re always going to get all that traffic so they don’t need to be risky. And the flip side is the smaller players know that they’re not going to be getting as much traffic. So is that where they really want to be trying to stand out and you know, an area where their, their amount of users or visitors are getting is not near as high.

Eric Stegemann (16:17):

Yeah. And I, and I see that, but is, I mean, do you guys have data behind it to say, Hey, well, look, when you implement a visual search in unison with a location and what I call the metadata of the listing search, meaning that the basic fields like price and beds and bass, do you have any data that shows maybe perhaps that people that implement that are more likely to use the broker, or at least more likely to be down the funnel further when they use a visual based search, like RESTB could power.

Nathan Brannen (16:52):

So what we’ve seen here, and I think this is important to keep in mind it didn’t, you mentioned it a little bit is what’s going to make people more like they didn’t come back to my site. And I think that’s a very big key of this in, you know, if you have something unique as a, say, a brokerage, it’s not just a matter of how many people are gonna use it. It’s how many people are going to be, wow, this is cool. I want to share this with someone else, because I don’t think they’ve seen something like this. And you can tell that these things are working based on the metrics of, you know, what percentage of users are using these different features. So, as a, an example, something that we’re probably seeing the most commonly is allowing users to select the default photo that appears in the search results.

Eric Stegemann (17:34):

So, whereas now that’s typically the front of the house because it’s the default photos selected by an agent. We have clients that allow you to select, okay. I I’ve been stuck in my house due to COVID for the past four months. I’ve been cooking a lot more. I know where my next house, I really want a nice kitchen. So I want to see the kitchens first, rather than the front of the house. And beyond that, I also want to make sure that I can see a kitchen Island because I have one now, and I can’t imagine living without one. So with these users, we can now filter, and it was only showed the results that have these kitchens with kitchen islands. And I can now search these you know, in a matter of seconds, rather than having to click into each listing and swipe through all the photos.

Eric Stegemann (18:18):

So, yeah, there’s this logical kind of reason of why I want to do it, but you also have this data on this particular user that says, all right, they’ve been to our site three times. And every time they filtered by the kitchen and by the kitchen Island, I know that this person is interested in this feature that I would have no other way of really understanding otherwise. Now, when I shoot emails to them saying, Hey, there’s a new property. I can alter that email to show that the first photo in this email is going to be the photo of the kitchen with the kitchen Island. And for these users, we’re seeing increases from anywhere of 30% to over a hundred percent engagement with these emails, because they have this personalized touch because the site knows what they’re interested in, what they’re looking for.

Eric Stegemann (19:05):

And that there’s always this idea that I had that you CA the best search that would be out there is the most curated search for the individual, right? And the problem is most agents don’t bother to spend the time to really nail the search down unless they know the client is going to be using them as the agent. But I think what we found is the data shows the more curated the searches, the more likely they are to use the use that agent. So it’s a chicken and the egg situation, but if you can have a search that implements that, that option, that’s there and show the agent, Hey, they really care about kitchen islands. Then they can do a better job of curating that search and, and getting them to the right property. Right. So yeah, I, I think I think it’s vital to have things that help the consumer narrow thing narrow down to the right properties going forward.

I know when I searched for a home recently that is the, that is the idea of what we’re looking for. We knew the area we wanted to be in, but the inside of the house certainly mattered. And, and it’s hard to do that without getting to the fifth photo. That’s in there. So you have to click through everything. So you know let’s talk about international real estate for just a second. You, you earlier, you kinda mentioned some particularly at the international portals, and I know that in many other countries, the portals that are in those countries, like for example, real estate.com.edu for down in Australia they are by far the dominant player in this space. So talk to me a little bit about how search maybe works in other countries other than the United States.

Nathan Brannen (20:44):

So I think if you’re looking at search in general, outside the U S you have to even rewind a little further and think, all right, how are these listings even getting to the portals? And in the U S do you have a whole MOS system? And you have all this data that’s, you know, so they get it out and, you know, players like yourself for, you know, helping combine this data to make it easy to use. And in other countries, this doesn’t exist. And so you end up with one the portal is acting as the content moderation piece, and as the portal piece, which you know, was trying to show as many properties to users as possible, and because they want to make sure they have as many listings as possible, you end up with these interesting limitations from, I guess, the ideal user experience.

Nathan Brannen (21:31):

So what do I mean by that? It means that if I’m a portal and I want to have a portal with no minus things do not have, you know, obnoxious watermarks on them, I don’t necessarily want to prevent other sites from not having watermarks, because then that person kind up on my list and he made a side, I’m just going to go to your competitor, who isn’t giving me any issues. And as the user, this means that you end up with a lot of weird things when you’re searching. It also means that I guess a lot of people don’t know in other countries, there’s no exclusive listings, so you can go to a portal and you may see the same listing over 10 times, and it’s not necessarily an agent representing that, but they want to have someone reach out to them.

Nathan Brannen 22:15):

And then they want to redirect them to the person who actually owns that listing for a different fee. And you have these things that are quite painful and frustrating as a user, but the portal, because it wants to keep traffic and it doesn’t want to push people elsewhere is incentivized to let it happen, because that’s just kind of the status quo. So you have issues like that, that don’t really exist in the U S thanks to the analysis from a another point of view. I think it’s you know, you have a lot more monopolies or do operators as far as who controls most of the traffic. And because it’s very difficult to get that traffic from the different, you know, people who are creating listings, because you don’t have these MLSs that you could easily go get a feed from you end up with the incumbents, not really needing to innovate that much. And for the competitors having a lot harder time innovating, because it’s a lot more difficult for them to get access to the listings. And so the, the interfaces are a bit more basic and a lot of these places.

Eric Stegemann (23:22):

Interesting. so do you, I mean, do you think that the reason why there’s been rise of that in other countries with the way the portals are a monopoly or duopoly in, in the country, as far as real estate search goes, do you think that’s because of the model and how they don’t have MLSs and really for the most part, most other countries don’t use binary buyer’s agents at all?

Nathan Brannen (23:48):

I think it’s a, it’s a very big factor. And I think that, you know, you have, these incumbents are typically quite safe and there are, you know, there is innovation and in other countries, and particularly in a country like India, there’s a massive

Eric Stegemann (24:02):

VC funding going into these companies to try to

Nathan Brannen (24:05):

Disrupt and innovate in this industry. But for a lot of these countries, there may not be that type of VC money that can allow some of these companies to scale and to innovate. And the incumbents, you know, don’t have really an incentive to, to make it easy for these people to work in their area, either because they’re comfortable with their, you know, majority in their market. And I think that, you know, if you had an MLS, it would make things easier just because you’d have greater access to the data. And some more people could get the data and do things with that data. And even if it’s copied by these larger portals, that’s ultimately good for all of the end users. But right now, there just, isn’t a lot of incentive or pressure or even ability for a lot of these people to, to do that. And I think, you know, there’s some countries particularly up in Northern Europe where most of the listings that are actually available, aren’t even publicly accessible. So you’re working with an agent and no base that you sending you this things that exist, but they aren’t on any public place for you to see them. And they basically understand what you want and serve you listings, but it’s not something that anyone can search unless you’re an agent and those listings are available to your particular brokerage, not even all brokerages.

Eric Stegemann (25:16):

Yeah. And I I’ve heard this in previous podcasts, you know, we, we’ve had a number of people on so far that have experienced in other countries with real estate and including a great interview that we had with the ad Phoenix team on a previous episode where we talk about that inventory, and it seems like it’s always held so tightly where, you know, it’s, it, it is, Hey, I’ve got listings. And I control the listing inventory that I have, and I wield it like a weapon of my inventory around because I’m the only one that knows that it’s there. But also it seems like, and please feel free to tell me if you see something different in Spain or in other countries that you guys have experienced. And it seems like there’s also a lot of listings that aren’t exclusive in other countries where you have to keep it private, because if another broker finds out about it, then they’ll try to find buyers for the properties. Is that what you see too, in, in Spain or in other countries? Yes.

Nathan Brannen (26:18):

So both of the things that you just mentioned are quite common in varying levels between different countries, but there’s a lot of people who don’t want, you know, they want to have, I guess, the equivalent of almost a pocket listing in the U S they, they see the risk of putting a listing out there as greater than them holding onto it and using their network to basically find a buyer without it being available for everyone to look at, or if it is out there, then yes, it will be duplicated by other people. And you know, we’ve seen markets where upwards of 20% of all the listings are duplicated which causes a lot of problems and it’s just the nature of the beast and a problem that you have to deal with.

Eric Stegemann (27:02):

Interesting. Interesting. Okay. So one last topic coming back here to the U S and something I know that you and your team are passionate about helping solve, and certainly something that’s been top of mind here at TRIBUS, as well as something we’ve cared about for quite a long time is accessibility when it comes to real estate search. And I had a great conversation with Jessica Edgerton of leading a re a few weeks back where we discussed the importance of ADA compliance and the fact that it’s not only just, you know, to protect you from getting a lawsuit or a demand letter on your hands, but it’s actually just good business since nearly 10% of all visitors to websites need some sort of accessibility tool turned on, on their computer or on their browser. So talk to me about how RESTB is helping to solve the Brokerage Website ADA concerns with making sure that websites are ADA compliant and accessible to the most number of people.

Nathan Brannen (28:11):

So this is an issue that we’ve been working with for the past couple of years. And it’s been interesting to see how it’s evolved, not only in the, the demand from the market, but also in our understanding of the challenge. And I think the opportunity to really improve in this area. And so, as you mentioned, you know, there’s a large amount of people, or a large percentage of people who, you know, have some disability or have some need for the, for a website that is ADA compliant and where we really see a big opportunity with the things we do being involved with photos and digital assets is in the image space for the images. There’s a component of ADA that says that every image needs to have descriptive text. And this descriptive, all text is meant to help people who use screen readers to deal with, to understand the images on sites.

And so when I originally started, I was thinking, all right, you know, I don’t personally know anyone who uses a screen reader but this seems like a good thing to do. But after reaching out to a bunch of different people in the space, I found out that there are a lot of people that we reached out to that said, okay, I personally have a relative who has this issue. And it is a very big, important issue to me. And when you look at the numbers, there’s actually 4.4 million adults that use screen readers. And, you know, all these people, you might say, well, how many of these people are actually potential home buyers? And, you know, three quarters of those people are between 20 and 60 over three quarters of them say that they are very expert users at the internet. These are people that, you know, really are potential buyers and potential people that you would want to make your site accessible to.

Nathan Brannen (29:48):

So it’s, you know, it’s great to be able to serve these people, but these are also a very large amount of people that can increase the reach of your website to what is really right now and unserved market. And what we’ve seen with the tech specifically is that because you have so many images in real estate, it’s quite difficult to put descriptive text for each of your images. There’s just too many of them. And, you know, it’s really difficult to expect agents to do this for every single one of their photos. So there are people in the space to comply with this. What they’ve done is just put a one, two, three main streets, photo one, photo, two, et cetera, for all of their images. Whereas what we want to do is say, okay, you know, what is actually relevant about this image? Is it a living room with lots of natural light and hard work for, in front of a fireplace? You know, this is more helpful context for someone who’s trying to get a feel for what a house is like on an image by image level.

Eric Stegemann (30:45):

That’s that’s great. And it’s, it’s certainly something that we’re suggesting to our brokerage clients here at TRIBUS to seriously consider working with the team at RESTB, because it is a lot better than just saying one, two, three, any street. It’s also just darn good business. Nathan here just mentioned some great stats as far as how many people use this. It’s also just good for SEO. And this is, this is kind of goes back to what I’ve been saying for almost 10 years now about accessibility is what’s good for accessibility. What’s good for ADA. Compliance is just good business overall because you’re potentially effecting, you know, a big percentage of, of buyers and sellers that you’re not able to communicate with, but also from an SEO perspective, Google loves all text. And if your broker site has all texts for all of the IDX images and all the images on your website, whereas none of the rest of them do, you’re far more likely to have your site rank higher. I’m assuming you’ve experienced that with different clients that you have, right. Nathan.

Nathan Brannen (31:52):

Yeah, absolutely. And I think this is you know, the added bonus of doing this, you know, beyond just helping these people who are you know, in need of extra accessibility is that, so if you look at all of these search traffic on the internet, over 20% of that is image searches. And if you think about the fact that in real estate or with an IDX feed, you have the exact same images as everyone else. But if you can do something to make those images more easily searchable by Google you have a massive opportunity to kind of get ahead of the curve, because what we’ve seen with a lot of our clients is that less than 1% of their traffic is from images. And it’s because they have the same images. But if you take advantage of these SEO tricks, you can immediately leapfrog and make your listings that have the same information as everyone else shoot to the top of the image search results, which also plays in the role of the overall website traffic and the website rankings, because Google, like you said, Eric is looking for sites that are more accessible and compliant with these different guidelines that have been set out for what makes a brokerage website template accessible.

Eric Stegemann (32:57):

And, and great points there. Definitely recommend listening to some of our other episodes of this podcast to talk about ADA, where we get much more in detail. But Nathan, before we finish up here, one last question on one last question on accessibility. So in the United States, we have the Americans with disability act Americans with disabilities act, ADA. Have you seen anything like that or have you seen similar laws slash benefits to being accessible in other countries?

Nathan Brannen (33:31):

So this is something that we frequently ask whenever you present this solution where we talk about our image captions that can be applied for this all text field. And unfortunately we haven’t really seen this been being an issue on any of these other countries. And you know, I don’t know if that’s something that we’ll see changing in the future, but it is kind of nice to see the U S on the you know, the forefront of this issue and really kind of pushing this in a way that hasn’t popped up for us in other markets yet.

Eric Stegemann (34:03):

Got it. Okay. Well just one last question for you that I’ve been asking everybody. So if you could change and wave a magic wand and change anything about the real estate industry, whether it’s in the United States or around the world, what’s the one thing you would change?

Nathan Brannen (34:22):

That’s a, that’s a tough question to end on here.

Eric Stegemann (34:27):

I think,

 

Nathan Brannen (34:28):

You know, for us, selfishly from, from our perspective, I would love to see, you know, more risk taking by some of the people who have a lot of opportunities and market share and, and things like that. Because, you know, for RESTB’s perspective, we would love to kind of build this ideal portal based on all these different interactions that we’ve had with, with all these different clients. And, you know, unfortunately we haven’t had that happen yet. So I would just love to see kind of more, more risk taking and doing things that you know, affect the search for the way that people interact. Because I think that there’s just so much opportunity there that hasn’t really been taken advantage of because there the way incentives work for the companies that have the resources to do these things it can be quite difficult to take that chance. So that may be a cop out. And I apologize.

Eric Stegemann (35:22):

No, I think it’s a, it’s an absolutely perfect answer, particularly for somebody who does what you guys do, where you guys are way out in front in terms of this, this little part of the real estate world, I think it’s something I wish to and that I found that asking that question to everybody, it’s been a consistent answer where I agree with them. But there are obviously everybody that asks that answers that question. They come from their own lens, their own frame of reference. And I think it’s something you see. And I, I certainly wish that was the case as well. So great answer there. Nathan, thank you so much for joining us again. Nathan is the VP of product and sales@RESTB.ai. You can visit them at restb.ai. You get more information. You can also just look our website at TRIBUS.com. We have plenty of great details about things that brokers can use RESTB for on our website. This is Eric Stegemann, the CEO of TRIBUS. Thanks so much for listening to this episode of Brokerage Insider, make sure to subscribe to future episodes, to keep these great interviews coming. Thanks so much for listening everybody.

CEO | Director of Strategy
With more than 17 years experience in the real estate industry, including being a Realtor and Broker / Owner, Stegemann brings a wealth of knowledge to this job as CEO of TRIBUS. He focuses his time on helping brokers enhance and expand their business and working with the TRIBUS labs team to consider what's next in real estate.
Unlimit Your Brokerage - Get A Brochure Now