The Australian market-leading real estate portal operator REA Group has issued a press release detailing the company's use of artificial intelligence in its products.
The release gives details of the portal's AVM which it claims is one of the most accurate in the world thanks to AI-powered image recognition which looks at a listing’s images to identify attributes of a property. Remarkably, REA's release claims that more than 35% of all Australian households are tracking their home's value with the tool following a significant marketing campaign.
The portal company is also using AI and machine learning to improve its matching algorithms. One application sees users who are interested in selling their house matched with the REA agent customer that best fits their profile.
Another application of the technology powers the 'Suggested Properties' feature on the group's flagship portal Realestate.com.au. Listing descriptions for suggested properties are sent to the ChatGPT API which is asked to return a ‘Top Feature’ for each listing. Consumers then see the selected ‘Top Feature’ highlighted on their ‘Suggested Properties’ carousel on the home screen.
REA Group Chief Product and Audience Officer, Melina Cruickshank, said the company will actively pursue the use of AI where it makes sense.
“Our product, marketing and engineering teams are continually innovating to make it easier for the millions of Australians who engage with our platforms. The successful launch of our realEstimate automated valuation model, now being used to track over 35% of Australian households, illustrates how critical machine learning has become in our product development process,”
“I’m excited to see the scale and pace of work being produced right now. Recently we sent a group of our ML and Data Scientists to join AI industry leaders at a Global Hackathon at Princeton University in the USA. New technology is allowing us to make a genuine difference in how Australians buy, rent and sell property in the coming years. In addition to what we currently have in market, we see significant opportunities ahead.”
REA Group's announcement is the latest in a string of real estate portals around the world telling the market about how they are taking advantage of the recent boom in artificial intelligence.
Since March 2020 Edmund's job has been to read about, write about, collect data on, analyse and generally know about real estate marketplaces and the companies that run them. Before that he worked at the aggregator Mitula Group (which became Lifull Connect) for five years.
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