Auckland AI start-up ListAssist sells to US firm Inside Real Estate
He and his team would stay in Auckland. He anticipated he would continue to travel to the US around half a dozen times each year.
Christ’s College old boy McGoldrick was born and raised in Christchurch – where he comes from an extended family well known on the local real estate scene – but moved to Auckland to finish his business degree after the quakes.
“I wanted to go my own way,” he told the Herald.
He worked in logistics (Fliway Group) and sales (Fuji Xerox) before founding his first start-up and spending the next seven years in various businesses.
Those included Sort My Meals, which he founded then sold in 2017 and a stint as partnerships manager for (and a small shareholder in) buy-now, pay-later start-up PartPay, sold to an Australian firm Zip for $50 million in 2020.
He formed ListAssist in late 2022, bringing onboard Countdown Supermarkets marketing manager Brittany Bastings as head of brand and partnerships, Ben Van Norden (a Canterbury honours student formerly a data scientist with DOT Loves Data) as head of AI and innovation and Michael Challis (ex-customer loyalty firm Marsello) as a data engineer.
McGoldrick wanted to build another app and the family industry just had a natural pull.
“The beauty of real estate is that there are phone numbers everywhere and everyone always answers their phone,” he said.
Howard Hanna, RE/MAX deals
In October last year, ListAssist signed a multi-year deal with Howard Hanna – the largest independent real estate broker in the US, with 15,000 agents and just over 1 million listings across 13 states.
“We are taking over their property search,” founder McGoldrick said at the time.
Instead of a customer wading through the traditional drop-down menus and filters, they can type something into a search bar like “A house with a swimming pool and at least three bedrooms near The Gulch, a trendy, upscale neighbourhood in Nashville”.
“Natural language is the way you search for a restaurant, so why not a house?” McGoldrick says.
ListAssist also helps agents put together search-engine-optimised ads and stick within compliance rules around photos, among other features.
US focus
Although based in New Zealand, ListAssist has focused almost exclusively on North America.
Why? It’s just maths. “They have well over two million agents compared with New Zealand’s 15,000,” McGoldrick says.
“AI is a very noisy space,” the founder says. So how did a tiny start-up from NZ get cut through in the world’s largest “prop-tech” market?
Old-fashioned leg work and schmoozing. “There’s nothing like face-to-face.” At a trade show in Las Vegas, he got to meet Gary Ashton, founder of the Nashville-based The Ashton Real Estate Group, billed as “The number one RE/MAX team in the world”.
Ashton not only signed on as an anchor customer but took a 5% stake in the startup Kiwi as well.
ListAssist, which runs lean, has taken little outside investment. McGoldrick and his cofounders owned more than 70% of the firm going into the deal announced today.
Ashton positions himself as a prop-tech early adaptor and managed to blag some coverage on a local ABC affiliate as well (see clip below).
The Hanna, Ashton and other deals mean some 40,000 agents’ listings are now powered by ListAssist.
“We were really fortunate to have buy-in from those sorts of brands, which has given us a huge amount of users across our product in a very quick timeframe – which has allowed us to iterate and work with those brands to refine the offering to really suit what they’re doing,” McGoldrick said this week.
“These companies don’t just use the product then we hear from them when the contract’s renewed. They’re constantly wanting to see how they can get more out of it.”
‘Arm the rebels’
Anyone with even a passing knowledge of the North American real estate scene knows that a portal called Zillow totally dominates listing and traffic.
To boot, Zillow launched its own natural language AI search feature last September.
McGoldrick says his solution produces more user-friendly results.
He says agents also get to keep more of their commission if a sale comes from a lead generated by their own firm’s site.
Zillow makes the most of its popularity, with the portal charging a “success fee” that equates to anywhere from 15% to 40% of an agent’s commission. The upper rate kicks in with US$500,000-plus sales.
“Let’s face it, the portals have built empires. We think it’s time somebody armed the rebels,” McGoldrick told the audience at a pitch competition.
Pre-dating ChatGPT
What’s been the secret sauce? Last October, the Herald asked Ashton what drew him to ListAssist.
The Nashville real estate supremo said that when he met McGoldrick at the Inman Connect real estate conference in Las Vegas in 2022, “Chris described his product, which writes listing descriptions for real estate using information from the realtor, the property address, and data extracted from the listing pictures”.
He added: “The use of AI and the ability to analyse images seemed like something every realtor would benefit from. A few months later [in November 2022], ChatGPT was introduced, and many agents began using it to write listing descriptions – often without concern for accuracy and without the image scanning technology that ListAssist offers.
“Chris then repurposed his product to allow the public to search for homes online, utilising the scanning technology and existing data to improve the accuracy of search results. Adding the search feature to my website allowed me to be the first in the world to do this.”
His site continues to offer traditional drop-down menus and filters but prioritises ListAssist on its homepage.
Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald’s business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer.
