Enterprise: REMAP.ai
USP: The data analysis platform taps into the flow of properties coming to market, sifts through the available information to find what buyers need to know, and puts it all in one convenient place.
Andrew Herbert owns a buyers’ agency called 5 Degrees Property that specialises in development and construction. When the sheer volume of information required to review a property became overwhelming for the team, Andrew developed REMAP.ai to fuse listing information with data from councils, utilities and governments, forming a single location for a fast, comprehensive review. The innovation proved popular with the business’ clients. Andrew launched it in Brisbane and its first external users came onboard in October 2022.
Andrew had come to the property sector after a decade in the Army, filling a number of roles and being deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. He worked in Aerospace for a brief period before getting the opportunity to work in a property investment firm. “My apprenticeship was all about the numbers and how property is a vehicle for wealth creation,” he explains. “After a few years, I launched my own agency, and shortly after winning an AFR [Australian Financial Review] ‘Fast Starter’ award in 2017, we focused on development and construction.
“Looking back over my career, I’ve always been a problem solver,” Andrew adds. “My time in the Army taught me how to be creative in reverse-engineering solutions for complex problems and to persevere in implementing those solutions. The transition into property technology seemed a natural step after hearing Pascal Finette (a futurist) talk at an event I attended in Macau with Entrepreneurs’ Organization. His talk was a wake-up call, and being surrounded by entrepreneurs playing bigger games, I was motivated to create something new; the vision for REMAP.ai was born.”
The data analysis platform uses artificial intelligence to identify, validate, verify and structure property data. “Using machine learning algorithms, we trained our model to handle thousands of data points with minimal human supervision,” Andrew explains. “While I’ve led the development of REMAP.ai, we’ve grown a team of developers spread across four continents.”
“The data analysis platform uses artificial intelligence to identify, validate, verify and structure property data.”
Innovation is at the core of the business. Andrew and his team set about implementing an approach they call ‘one click’. “We expect team members to look at what they do regularly and identify how they can remove just one click in their process,” he explains. “This incremental change over a period of time compounds, and you can see the result in REMAP.ai. It started out as some addresses pasted to a spreadsheet, and then grew into an internal tool before we realised that it appealed directly to our clients.”
After a long internal testing period, Andrew received constructive and encouraging suggestions from peers at Entrepreneurs’ Organization. That led to him launching what he describes as “a fairly polished platform” to beta testers and he has been receiving positive feedback since. “With a database of over 1.3 million listings, we are monitoring nearly 100,000 live listings at any point in time,” he says. “As such, a crucial focus for us post-launch, that our users love, is our listing verification to ensure properties are actually for sale.”
The team is continuing its one-click innovations to keep improving the REMAP.ai platform for users. Given the features Andrew and the team have in development, the speed at which they are acquiring users and their national expansion strategy for 2023, they foresee REMAP.ai becoming the No. 1 choice for time-poor professionals and buyers,who want to focus on properties that matter.
This article first appeared in issue 39 of the Inside Small Business quarterly magazine
