Rapattoni, Restb.ai advance MLS partnership, service tools

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Family-founded and led Rapattoni has been offering a broad spectrum of business services to the real estate industry for more than a half-century, making it one of the more plugged-in firms in real estate technology.

That tradition continues with the extension of its relationship with image-intelligence solution Restb.ai, which now includes the growing proptech’s full suite of multiple listing service tools, according to an announcement sent to Inman.

The partnership was initiated in August of 2022 with Restb.ai’s image-reading capabilities to aid in creating property descriptions.

Restb.ai’s software was well-received by its customers, and the augmented partnership should only further benefit its nationwide list of MLS customers, Nicholas Hook, chief architect and chief information officer at Rapattoni, said in the announcement.

“We are excited to offer the full suite of Restb.aI’s technology stack to our MLS customers, allowing brokers, agents, and other realtors to take advantage of the industry’s leading tools for automated image tagging, matching, and validation,“ Hook said.

The new agreement includes automated photo tagging, improved ADA compliance, auto-population of listing details and enhanced agent-consumer search capabilities, as well as providing MLS customers with the full set of tools to automate and enhance their listing processes.

In layman’s terms, Restb.ai’s software “reads” listing photos to extract data from an image’s contents. In a simple use case, it can be used to identify appliances. More advanced applications of computer vision include room-by-room comparisons in CMAs, interior quality analyses for desktop appraisals and unique home searches that can compare homes on a room-by-room basis, among other clever applications.

Rapattoni customers will be able to speed the input of new listings because of Restb.ai’s ability to identify features from the associated uploaded images. It can identify architectural styles and highlight unique home features as well.

“By tagging and labeling these photos, the property listings displayed on MLS, broker and agent/realtors websites become ADA compliant while also enhancing and increasing the value of the data,“ according to the announcement, indicating that artificial intelligence, of which computer visions is a subset, can be used for much more than marketing and productivity enhancements.

Compliance with ADA standards for online search is an increasingly critical operation for brokerages and MLSs to manage as the entire buying and selling workflow becomes more digital.

Inman recently reviewed Lundy, a home search app for the visually impaired that leverages popular smart speaker interfaces to audibly detail home characteristics, as common screen readers are challenged by MLS terminology and description fields.

Restb.ai’s tools deploy technologies that are becoming more familiar to the industry as AI charges into marketing discussions and proptech vernacular. Natural Language Processing (NLP), for example, has found its way into home search and property marketing. It allows computers to understand normal speaking and text patterns.  AskDoss, developed by broker and entrepreneur Bobby Doss, was an early adopter.

The company also uses two forms of machine learning, GAN (generative adversarial networking) and CNNs (convolutional neural networks).

The former pits two networks, a trainer and a discriminator, against one another until a “winning” result is achieved. Its most common application is in creating images. Among legitimate uses, GANs are behind the trend of “deep fakes.” A CNN is used in image analysis, often the basis for facial recognition systems.

Restb.ai was early to the AI application game. Its initial product was reviewed by Inman in 2018. Plunk, a property valuation solution, integrated with Restb.ai in 2021 to better its pre- and post-construction home value reporting.

Email Craig Rowe