ISU Real Estate Startup Secures $25,000 From State
A real estate startup housed in the Iowa State University Research Park has secured a $25,000 award from the Iowa Economic Development Authority.
Structurely, which gathers and reports on-demand housing price data to users, received the funding from the Authority’s Proof of Commercial Relevance fund. The fund exists to provide loans and capital to business owners planning to bring working prototypes to the general market after heavy vetting from investors.
Structurely CEO Nathan Joens said the product came from dissatisfaction he noticed from home buyers and sellers while working with real estate agents. He said demand for real estate information online is growing more than what the agents can handle as they go about their jobs, pointing to research showing about 70 percent of homebuyers and sellers thought their communication with their real estate agents were lacking.
“Real estate agents aren’t necessarily the best at responding to those leads online,” Joens said. “They’re usually out in the real world trying to sell physical properties and shaking hands.”
The company’s product is a chatbot, or a piece of artificial intelligence installed in a messaging app such as Facebook Messenger or Whatsapp. Users can ask the program to find housing information in a conversational sentence, such as “find me a 3 bedroom house in Ames, Iowa for under $300,000.”
Structurely then scans local real estate agents and returns appropriate listings to the user without them ever having to leave the messaging app.
Joens said the product will begin a private testing period next month for users in Iowa and on the east and west coast, and plans to launch to the public in January 2017. He hopes to eventually sell the product to a larger company, allowing it to scale to a national audience.
