A screenshot of Propified’s website.
A new real estate tool with Richmond roots is aiming to help agents and sellers list homes faster and more efficiently with an assist from artificial intelligence.
Local agent Remington Rand is leading the group behind Propified, a listing-creation tool that uses AI technology to generate real estate listings using photos and other info supplied by homeowners and agents.
Users upload photos and fill out a questionnaire on Propified’s website, which then uses AI to create a listing with property details and descriptions gleaned from the images. Agents can then review and finalize the listing before it is integrated directly with their respective multiple listing service.
Rand, who leads Richmond brokerage Rand Properties and has been active in real estate for 15 years, said Propified is intended to help agents sell more homes by using AI to streamline the process of building and creating an MLS listing. He said the tech creates listings three times faster and more precisely using keywords and auto-fills, than agents typing out descriptions and building them on their own.
“Ultimately the goal is to create better, richer listings, so that the facts and features that really make a house or property great get readily applied to a listing,” Rand said.
“The listing is still bolstered by the real estate agent; they still have to fill out certain things that obviously can’t be gleaned from photographs. But essentially what we can do is upload photographs into Propified and create an entire listing, including all of the bells and whistles, in 15 minutes, versus an hour and 15 minutes if done manually.”
Property photos uploaded to the platform are gleaned for info that the AI tech uses to build the listing. (Screenshot)
Rand developed Propified with Will Urbanski, a high-school friend from Roanoke who serves as the company’s chief tech officer, and Sam Pietrzak, a local freelance designer who studied experience design at VCU’s Brandcenter.
Urbanski, who lives in Montana, is a staff security engineer at AI firm Databricks and previously held a similar role at payments platform Stripe. Rand said the idea for Propified grew from a conversation that he and Urbanski had in 2020.
“It spiraled from there,” Rand said, adding that the rise in popularity of AI tech, as well as the recent legal cases involving the National Association of Realtors regarding commission splits and how agents are compensated, further drove their idea for an AI-powered listing assistant.
Remington Rand
“The large lawsuits that happened with the National Association of Realtors and the major brokerages was my first inclination that there might be an opportunity for a technology to expand into a space that otherwise (NAR) has had a chokehold on for decades,” Rand said. “We were messing around with a bunch of stuff and I came up with a thesis, and we executed on it.”
The group developed Propified using Claude 3.5 Sonnet, the latest AI model by California-based Anthropic. It is built on Amazon Web Services’ cloud infrastructure and is integrated with MLS platforms via Selenium browser automation software. Rand said the group has put hundreds of thousands of dollars of their own funds into Propified’s development.
Launched this spring in beta-version form, Propified rolled out a a more fully formed consumer-facing site this week. Users can sign up by selecting “book a demo” on its website, which sets up a 30-minute video meeting with the team to provide a user tutorial and exchange MLS and payment info. Users are then directed to an app site to access the platform.
Rates vary for brokerages and individual agent users. Brokerage pricing for up to 50 agents starts at about $100 a month, while single agents can purchase listing inputs in blocks that are good for 12 months: 10 for $200, 25 for $380, or 35 for $450.
Rand said a goal is to have Propified licensed by MLSs, like the Richmond area’s Central Virginia Regional Multiple Listing Service, for use by all of their member agents. While buy-in from MLSs would be a boost, he said the backbone for Propified will be agents and brokerages.
“Obviously the MLS could very easily implement through their buildout of how you develop the listing, but an individual agent could use it, a brokerage can sign on for subscriptions. It’s got a large licensing structure so that we can take on a 100,000-person MLS or a five-person brokerage,” he said.
“It would obviously be very helpful, but the tool is used by real estate agents. It was built by a real estate agent for real estate agents.”
