Unveiling their latest robust and powerful tool, hunter, New York-based tech company LocalizeOS is amplifying real estate brokers’ ability to turn leads into closings at scale. As CEO Omer Granot said on stage at The Real Deal’s South Florida Showcase, hunter, a sophisticated system powered by Artificial Intelligence, lets agents “offload much of the labor that has to happen for a deal to take place and allows them to focus on the human aspect.” The Real Deal recently sat down with CEO Granot, VP of Research & Development Erez Yakoel, and Vice President of Marketing Julie O’Hara to learn more about how hunter works with agents to provide the best experience to all of their clients, all the while helping them convert leads into successful transactions at rates unheard of, even for the most successful brokers.
An Industry Built on Inefficiency
The vision for hunter began when the LocalizeOS team took a look at how real estate agents acquire, engage, and prioritize leads. O’Hara told a story about visiting her friends, a pair of high-powered brokers, and noticing that they spent more time going back and forth with their clients about simple preferential and logistical concerns than they did actually building the kind of trust and rapport that clients need from an agent. The manual, replaceable tasks that they spent their time doing one-on-one was exactly the work that the hunter tool exists to do at scale, freeing up the agent’s time to focus on the personal aspects of the job so important in the relationship-driven real estate industry.
“The reality is that you can only meaningfully engage with a few people a day, maybe 50 at most,” said Granot. “And many agents who are starting out, or acquiring large batches of leads in order to scale quickly, decide who to talk to essentially at random, because the lead acquisition systems don’t have a process for qualifying and prioritizing based on the agent that will end up procuring the lead.” This process, which is the industry standard, is based only on the person visiting a listing in a marketplace, with no indicators that they actually need an agent’s help or are willing to transact anytime soon. These quotidian realities underlie the stark statistics of an industry in which even the most successful broker has a conversation rate of just 1%, regardless of whether they have acquired the lead inorganically or some time ago. This statistic means that, for every hundred leads that even the best agent acquires, they close a deal with just one of them.
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Behind these numbers is another figure with which LocalizeOS became obsessed: the opportunity cost that comes from being able to meaningfully engage with only a small subset of your leads each day. Simply put, by the time an agent gets in touch with a lead, that person may have already closed a deal with another agent who happened to be at the right place at the right time. “You lose those people because it’s not humanly possible to manage so many meaningful relationships every single day,” said Granot.
"We’ve built the technology to help you stay on the pulse of the leads in the market, to understand who is looking to transact and when. hunter gives you the power to know when it’s time to jump in, meet them, and build a personal relationship.”
Personalized Lead Exploration At Scale
Enter the hunter technology. At root, hunter is an Artificial Intelligence system that contacts leads on behalf of an agent and does this exploratory work for them, turning over the lead to the agent at the point where that person is ready to be shown specific properties that have been selected for them based on their unique preferences. “Unlike with existing automation tools that send out form messages, with our AI every person has a one-to-one conversation that’s highly structured,” said Granot. These conversations are powered by hunter’s Natural Language Processing algorithms, which mimic human speech and respond to a lead’s messages in real-time using language that gives them the impression that they are working with a person to refine their search.
These one-to-one conversations take place over text message and mirror the kind of exploration that a broker would do with a lead: hunter sends a listing to a person, who then responds by saying something like, “This is a nice home but I’d prefer one with hardwood flooring,” to which hunter replies by applying that additional filter to all of the active listings in the client’s area and sending back a more refined option. Not only does hunter use language that mimics natural speech (similar to Alexa when we ask her to play our favorite playlist), it also leverages the power of machine learning to gain more and more knowledge about the person with whom it’s engaging. Finally, when the buyer is ready to visit the chosen properties, the agent is reconnected with the person and receives a report detailing all of the buyer’s preferences as well as a schedule for showing them those homes.
While this back-and-forth communication is nothing new, being able to offload these early stages of engagement to an AI-powered system that is monitored and supported by a local team at LocalizeOS, is revolutionary for the simple reason that the system can engage with thousands of leads a day, simultaneously.
“What is unique about the real estate market is that the leads stay with you for so long,” says Yakoel. “Even the best lead takes months to close. When you take a journey with a lead and you really want them to buy, usually you spend long hours with them, which is fundamentally unscalable.”
hunter allows brokers to engage with their leads at scale and with the kind of speed and personal attention that the best brokers can provide to only a fraction of their leads each day, taking much of the busywork out of being an agent and letting the broker focus on the part of the process for which the relationship is so critical.
Agents who use LocalizeOS have an unbeatable advantage over their competition, similar to chess players who consult a chess computer before making their next move. When it comes to amplifying an agent’s effectiveness, hunter’s return on investment speaks for itself. Agents who sign up for LocalizeOS and fully integrate their workflow with hunter net more than three times as much revenue within six to twelve months as compared with agents who aren’t using the tool. Thanks to the industry’s high margins, one additional sale often pays for the price of signing up with LocalizeOS, and everything beyond is gravy.
Working With hunter
When it comes to actually implementing this system into an agent’s practice, LocalizeOS offers an off-the-shelf, Software As A Service package that covers the most common use cases as well as a bespoke integration for teams with unique workflows.
"It’s not a one-size-fits-all solution,” said O’Hara. “Our implementation, from tailored team pricing to rule-based integration with CRMs, is completely customizable.”
Over the course of a couple of weeks, the LocalizeOS team will meet with agents, learn about their needs and the systems they’re already using, and then seamlessly integrate hunter into those existing structures.
The LocalizeOS team emphasizes that the goal is not to replace agents with Artificial Intelligence; after all, buying a home is often the largest financial decision that a person makes in their life, and working with a broker they trust as they get closer to closing can make all the difference. hunter simply gives brokers a powerful tool that helps them engage with leads at scale during the early part of the process, making their work each day less random and more efficient.
LocalizeOS is already working with brokers in New York and Chicago, and is preparing to expand to Miami and nationally in the near future. Granot believes that hunter will become the industry standard within the next 2-5 years. “hunter unlocks personalized, real-time, efficient service for every home buyer lead,” said Granot. “Our motto is You, Amplified. We want to help you, as a human, leverage technology to be better.”
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