Real estate reporter Jeff Andrews speaks with Ocusell founder Hayden Liebeschl to talk artificial intelligence and compliance software in the post-settlement environment.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Jeff Andrews: Tell us a little bit about Ocusell and the platform. Real estate agents using Ocusell can post listings to multiple compliant MLSs within the same interface. Does Ocusell eliminate the need for Matrix, Paragon, or other traditional MLS interfaces?
Hayden Rieveschl: No. I have to go on and on about this. Instead, we streamline the listing process. An agent or an administrator listing on behalf of an agent can do this within our platform, but not in a traditional system. They just enter their address, and Ocusell auto-fills all of their listing information, so they're 80-85% done with the listing. They do a quick check, and they show all the fields that are obviously auto-filled in a slightly different color. When the user interacts with that field, it turns white. If that field has an incorrect value in it, we show the business rules underneath it, and we show a little red warning, and it says, “This is wrong, you need to go and fix this and fix it.” They can complete the listing within seconds.
JA: With new rules related to the National Association of Realtors antitrust settlement, MLSs are now responsible for complying with the rules. From a technology standpoint, how prepared do you think MLSs are for these changes?
HR: Most of these MLSs have compliance teams, and most of their compliance solutions are point solutions. They basically validate the data within the interface, but they don't validate the actual rules. Over time, there have been changes to policies, rules, and regulations.
Typically, the MLS vendors have these changes hard-coded into their interface, so they don't get reflected in the metadata. So you have huge inconsistencies, and because these are all legacy systems, they're not checked in real time. They're set up to really validate, they're not actually checking if the listing that's going to be published has violations. So the violations happen after the listing is published and has been on the market for typically five days. I think five days is a pretty generous period. In this day and age, especially when the Department of Justice is watching, do you really want a violating listing on the market for a certain number of days? You can do all of this in real time.
JA: There are many MLS compliance software solutions out there. What sets Ocusell’s platform apart from other competitors on the market?
HR: We have competitors, but we've built a very big wall of defense, and we've done that by, honestly, building a business rules service and building an ecosystem that handles all kinds of rules and all kinds of MLSs. So, we don't have competitors right now, but we're very different from any other solution.
To achieve interoperability and modularity in this space, you absolutely had to understand the business rules. When we first implemented it (in the MLS), there was very little API documentation, so you had to figure it out yourself, but there was no documentation for the rules. The general rules are held in a proprietary syntax behind the scenes in the MLS system, so you actually have to parse those rules into structured English. There are a lot of syntaxes in this space, and we actually built a technology around that. We have a patent pending now. It translates a variety of languages into structured English and into coding languages like C+.
JA: How are you using AI?
HR: We have our own AI specific to real estate and use AI across our entire product. The AI that auto-populates property information works seamlessly. We also use AI and computer vision for media like images and videos. This is primarily for compliance but also for data entry, description and other uses. Agents upload photos and videos and our AI automatically creates a complete description based on the data and media images that are populated.
JA: What is your approach when building a tool in-house rather than buying an existing tool?
HR: We've just finished building out our in-house engineering team, which has taken nearly two years. We're six people strong. Our CTO, Adam Campbell, is at the helm, and our team of engineers is some of the best in the industry. They're rock stars, so we're building everything in-house. We're not buying something because it's better than someone else.
We do more or less exclusive partnership integrations. If there's a company that has great synergies and works seamlessly with our solution, it might make sense to have an exclusive partnership. Right now, we're partnered with RealReports. We work very closely with them. They're basically like CARFAX for home, and they're doing a great job. Their founders are very talented, very smart. It just makes a lot of sense.
JA: What keeps you up at night? It's not a screaming toddler or noisy neighbors.
HR: I have two toddlers who cry at night, but they're very good kids. Frankly, what keeps me up at night is scaling fast enough. We're very focused on growth. And we've made a lot of technical enhancements to our software to allow us to better automate MLS integration. This is because one of the things we struggled with in the past was that we could only bring online a handful of marketplaces per year. But literally starting now, we can bring on as many marketplaces per year as we want. This has been a concern for us for the last year. Our internal engineering team has tackled that problem head on and has done an amazing job.
Shout out to Matt Fowler, Triangle MLS will be the first MLS integration to experience the new technology updates and automated integration process. I think about it every night now. This is everything our engineering team said it would do. It's done very fast compared to our previous integrations, which were not very fast.
