As newly-minted wealth from the artificial intelligence revolution floods San Francisco Bay Area's real estate market, it's hardly surprising to find a local startup is seeking to become the facilitator for realtor-client interactions in the brave new world of AI-driven commerce.
Consumers are increasingly turning to large language model AI platforms such as Gemini and ChatGPT for advice. Homebuyers and sellers are no exception. For realtors, or indeed any service professional, being discovered in an often cut-throat market increasingly means being seen by AI.
Catchouse, a San Francisco-based startup, is aiming to leverage that technological and behavioral change with a new type of platform built for the AI era: instead of being designed primarily for human viewers—the function of websites since the start of the internet—it is aimed at AI agents that will use the data and content supplied by realtors to make recommendations to the potential client.
"I believe the future is we are going to these agentic models, you’ll have your agent, I’ll have mine and our agents will talk to each other, and ultimately give us recommendations on what to do next—I think we are already in that world," Mark van Ryswyk, chief executive officer and founder of Catchouse, told Newsweek.
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Catchouse's model shows the early attempts now underway to leverage what appears to be the nascent stages of a disruptive AI-driven revolution in consumer behavior, impacting well-established fields from online social networks, computer operating systems, and even the physical design of everyday devices such as smartphones.
The startup has already attracted a $3.5 million pre-seed round with New Enterprise Associates (NEA), the Founders Network, and TheFounderVC, says Van Ryswyk.
A host of research backs up the shift we see in our everyday lives. A report from SOCi, an AI marketing firm, shows that more than half of U.S. consumers are now using AI to find local businesses, up from just 10 percent last year, while an analysis from Realtor.com shows that 82 percent of Americans are now using AI to find information about the real estate market. Numbers like that show the powerful shift taking place in consumer behavior.
Catchouse has about 1,000 users, mainly around the Bay Area, and is planning to expand nationally this month, while opening up the platform to the huge segment of service professionals by the end of the year.
To drive network effects, Van Ryswyk, a former Tinder executive, will focus initially on those connected to real estate—interior designers, contractor, lawyers, and mortgage brokers, who often do repeated transactions together. The platform will offer tiered levels to users starting with a free tier.
On the Ground in the Bay Area Real Estate Market
Milana Ostroy, a real estate broker at Serhant who works with wealthy clients in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, believes the old referral networks are weakening as especially younger buyers turn to AI. Ostroy recently closed a $5.5 million cash purchase for a couple under 30 where the main requirement was a gaming room. "It's totally different from anyone I've worked with in the last 25 years," Ostroy told Newsweek.
For companies developing technology tools for residential property, cracking this market could be lucrative. The National Association of Realtors has nearly 1.5 million members with about 4 million existing home sales in the United States last year. Tools that can be expanded into the vast category of service professionals offer even greater pickings.
"One of the things we continue to double down on in our investment thesis is the digitalization of real estate," Ashley Stinton, a managing partner at the National Association of Realtors' (NAR) REACH program, told Newsweek. REACH is a technology scale-up program operated by NAR’s strategic investment arm, Second Century Ventures, siting at the cutting edge of so-called proptech innovation.
To be sure, there are thousands of AI startups chasing various user cases.
For Paul Longhenry, a seed investor in Catchouse through TheFounderVC, the business model offers what he calls a "structural data advantage" in the proprietary data the platform builds over time. That helps insulate it from competitors and distinguishes it from other models such as back-office AI tools that, he says, will erode away margin by ultimately competing on price.
"We are always looking from an investor perspective for companies that have a path to some kind of structural data advantage," Longhenry told Newsweek. "If your application starts to get traction, it's manufacturing proprietary data which becomes core to delivering the application itself, such that if Anthropic or Zillow or someone else decide to copy what you're doing a couple of years from now, they are at a disadvantage."
Contact Newsweek editor on this story: Mike Hirst.