Rechat Introduces AI-Powered Co-Pilot “Lucy” at the iOi Summit in Miami
Rechat CEO Shayan Hamidi took center stage at the 2023 iOi Summit Pitch Battle to introduce “Lucy,” Rechat’s AI-powered personal assistant, in a dynamic and interactive presentation to judges and a crowd of real estate investors. Rechat was selected by the National Association of Realtors® as one of 12 finalists to compete at the event in Miami.
Watch Rechat’s pitch here:
NAR’s strategic investment arm, Second Century Ventures, hosted this year’s Pitch Battle. The competition provided an opportunity for companies to showcase innovative new tools and resources for commercial and residential real estate marketplaces.
Hamidi highlighted how Lucy will help agents increase their productivity tenfold, whether by creating a marketing campaign, managing relationships or even providing coaching.
“Lucy’s trained for real estate, and she’s not just another chatbot,” Hamidi explained in his pitch. “She has memory, privacy, and she’s an expert in using Rechat tools.”
Hamidi was also able to highlight Rechat’s growth, doubling revenue three years in a row, with the last two being profitable.
“Our mission is to join every broker, every agent, and every home buyer and seller with Lucy, and we hope you join us on this mission, so together we can shape the future of our industry,” Hamidi concluded.
Rechat team members had a blast at the event and made many new connections, and also enjoyed reconnecting with industry colleagues like LeadingRE’s Jeff Kennedy (pictured below).
Read the full transcript of Rechat’s pitch and Q&A session below:
Shayan Hamidi:
Generative AI is about to revolutionize real estate, and we are here getting in front of it. This is Jack. He’s a hardworking agent and he has a lot of tools, but he’s not using any of them. I’m going to share a number that will shock you. More than 80% of agents are just like Jack. They rely on texts and email to run their business, which is kind of crazy. It’s like the whole industry is trying to win the Formula One race on bicycles. But it’s not really their fault. The other option is to juggle 15 different products. None of these talk to each other, and they have to use this on a desktop, so they can’t do it on the go. So it’s super complex and slow and they give up, rightfully so. But this has a massive cost. This is why we still don’t have that Amazon-like experience when buying and selling a home. This is why real estate is still so fragmented and slow, costing our industry and our consumers billions of dollars every year.
My name is Shayan Hamidi. I’m the CEO and founder of Rechat. And for the past 14 years, I have obsessed over solving this very problem, and the last eight of it with this amazing team at Rechat. Rechat is our solution to this chaos. Rechat is the ultimate mobile platform for real estate. Imagine if Jack had all of his relationships, all of his marketing, and all of his transactions in one simple super app. That’s Rechat. So everything Jack needs in one place no matter where he is. It’s that simple.
Now I want you to meet Lucy. She’s the groundbreaking AI copilot in Rechat. Lucy’s trained for real estate, and she’s not just another chatbot. She has memory, privacy, and she’s an expert in using Rechat tools. I want to show you Lucy in action. Lucy is an incredible marketer. Here, Lucy is letting Jack know it’s a past client’s home anniversary, so she’s put together a fresh market analysis with a stunning presentation to send to them. And when they win that listing, Lucy puts together an amazing marketing campaign. She creates all the collaterals, which are to die for, and distributes them herself.
But that’s not all. Lucy is also exceptional in relationship management. Here, Jack is leaving a voice note for Lucy after he’s met with a buyer. Lucy immediately goes to work, inviting the buyer to Jack’s app so they can collaborate, and sharing targeted listings and much more. And my favorite. Lucy’s a fantastic coach. Here you can see she’s delivering real-time data to Jack and his broker, and she’s available around the clock.
As you can see, Lucy can help Jack to be at his very best while she’s saving him an enormous amount of time because she’s doing a lot of the work for him. Imagine what that would mean for Jack. Imagine what that would mean for his broker or his franchise, to have a fleet of top performing agents like Jack. And what would that mean for our industry and our consumers?
We are so glad to have the support of a strong 10,000 super agents and brokers in the industry. With their support, we’ve been able to grow Rechat and double our revenue three years in a row, and the last two being profitable. Our mission is to join every broker, every agent, and every home buyer and seller with Lucy, and we hope you join us on this mission, so together we can shape the future of our industry. Thank you all so much.
(Question & Answer Section)
Marki Lemons Ryhal:
What is the cost per month?
Shayan Hamidi:
So it’s a SaaS product. It’s a monthly fee. The retail would be $100 per month per user, but if you are not getting the entire product or you have a larger roster, then we have tier pricing and we work with you on that.
Marki Lemons Ryhal:
Okay.
David Anderson:
So it’s CRM, marketing transaction management?
Shayan Hamidi:
Correct.
David Anderson:
Super app type?
Shayan Hamidi:
Absolutely.
David Anderson:
And you’re building all of that?
Shayan Hamidi:
We have already built it for eight years. We have 10,000 people using it. We are profitable and it’s thriving as mentioned.
David Anderson:
So what’s… On the transaction management, right? So the company that acquired my company owns half of transactions in North America, Lone Wolf. So how do you battle against that, knowing that brokers, it’s hard for them to switch systems and MLSs have agreements. How are you going to go against that? I’m assuming you’ve got a better product, but…
Shayan Hamidi:
Yeah, no, that’s a great question. So twofold. So a lot of that, it’s possible you go for the full product. It’s possible if you have transaction, you can go for the growth and then you can slowly grow into that. The majority of our folks by now, like 80, 90% I would say, are on full product, either grow into it or not. I think the fundamental difference between Rechat, Lone Wolf, Moxi and a bunch of other products that we have in the industry is that those companies have a portfolio of products out there that cater to some of these needs. We have built all of these fully integrated. And it’s all mobile-based, so you have it on your Android, you have it on iPad, you have it on iPhone, and I think that all-in-one integration is really helping drive what we are doing in terms of getting it out there. It just streamlines it. There’s a lot of AI, obviously, and enablement behind it for compliance, for doing the task efficiency and all of that as well.
Bill Fowler:
How long has this version of the product been available?
Shayan Hamidi:
I mean, we’ve been doing this for eight years. We are building stuff every week. We are actually rated elite by Google Matrix metrics. Yeah, so we’ve been doing this for a while. Some of the stuff obviously that you see with Lucy, they’re a lot newer. These are now able. We can do this now because ChatGPT-4… GPT-4, I guess, is available. But this is not a vanilla GPT. Obviously, you go to ChatGPT, it does not have memory. It doesn’t know real estate. It hallucinates. Some people call it creativity. We’ve addressed those problems.
Bill Fowler:
Do you feel like your customer is the high-producing agent? You’re building something that’s fairly advanced and for people who do a lot of business?
Shayan Hamidi:
Well, I wouldn’t call it advanced. We’ve historically focused… We’ve spent $0 on marketing advertising. And we work with top performing brands and brokers. We think that’s a great way to break into the market. As you look further out, they’re probably going to continue growing their business and investing in their business.
But it’s actually very easy to use it. It’s the simplest product out there. You may say that because you’re like, “Oh, marketing transaction.” But first of all, it’s mobile. There’s a lot of automation built into it. It’s super simple, like the first thing. And then as an agent, so we sell it, this is enterprise sell. We sell it to the brokerage, and then all the agents will be able to log in. When you log in, it’s literally two seconds.
80% of people are not using their tools. They have CRMs. They can’t even get their contacts into the CRM. Here you click one button, one button. Your entire Google, your Outlook, whatever you got is synced up real time. So it’s very simple to get in and use it.
Marki Lemons Ryhal:
So you’ve been in business for eight years.
Shayan Hamidi:
Correct.
Marki Lemons Ryhal:
If you looked at year over year growth, what was it as a percentage?
Shayan Hamidi:
Well, the past three years we’ve doubled the business, and the two last few years, as I mentioned, we’ve been profitable.
David Anderson:
And you said your go-to-market strategy, the teams, high-end teams,
Shayan Hamidi:
It’s brokerage. We’ve really focused on enterprise, so almost all the brands you saw, Douglas Elliman, Ryan Serhant, all these brands you see that are using us, it’s the entire brokerage. So we’re not really focused on teams. I think that would be the next step for us, to work with some of the top bigger teams and top performing teams. But yeah, so we’ve focused on that. We built that enterprise relationship and that’s how we’ve got it out so far.
David Anderson:
Do you require any integrations with third parties or just everything is just self-sufficient?
Shayan Hamidi:
Oh no, absolutely. Yeah, I think the concept of saying everything in one app, it’s a little bit overloaded, obviously, right? So there’s always going to be a need for certain things you need. We integrate with a ton of different APIs. We integrate with third-party products. So there may be a point-to-point solution you may need at times that you want to work with it. Absolutely, we have a very robust API. But at the end of the day, again, many of these experiences that you go through, they’re actually broken up between five different products. You create your design in one place. Then you have to distribute it somewhere else. Then you put it all together and get insight from another product. No one’s doing that. So we bring all of that into one streamlining experience.