Rick Orr has stationed himself firmly at the intersection of residential real estate and emerging technologies.
Back in 2019, he sold his real estate tech startup RealSavvy to fellow Austin-based real estate tech company Ojo Labs for an undisclosed amount. Now, Orr has reacquired his former startup and merged it with Listing Village, an Austin-based AI startup incubated at Capital Factory. Together, they form the foundation of Orr's new startup, Agnt AI Inc.
As the name implies, Agnt AI is developing generative AI tools that help real estate agents easily manage content creation, listings, websites and other marketing materials that can be laborious and take away from the time agents have to spend on face-to-face interactions with clients.
Its AI persona — "Grant," whose avatar looks like a bit of a silver fox, business-guru type — can quickly churn out customized insights on real estate listings, local market trends and client details, as well as tie in with existing customer relationship management platforms. The AI also can quickly produce listing or agent websites that are ready to publish, although the startup requires registration and payment to publish the pages.
"For an agent, suddenly they're producing valuable content and marketing things that generate leads that it's typically very hard for them to do," Orr said.
So some agents may simply use the Grant chatbot for insights, while others will use it to build out broader marketing materials for the web and for sophisticated marketing materials to send to clients.
"It's a server away from being live," Orr said. "And suddenly you've got your latest logo, your latest headshot, a fresh bit of story about yourself that you can edit and change a lot of ways."
Agnt AI's platform uses Anthropic's Claude model, OpenAI's GPT models and Microsoft's Azure AI platform. Orr, who is also a real estate broker, said that Listing Village founder Matt Young, who was previously president at Desk Agent, has provided much of the AI expertise needed to build Agnt's platform.
Agnt is Orr's fifth startup. While it's not uncommon for founders to build a new company by acquiring one, Orr's case is somewhat unique in that he reacquired his former startup from Ojo Labs and merged it with another acquisition. But those deals in themselves were somewhat of a formality.
"They were fundamentally kind of acqui-hires," he said. "Each individual line of business was sort of sustaining for its own people for the most part. It was very lean, intended to be reinvested into itself."
Orr said one option was to dissolve both RealSavvy and Listing Village and start fresh. But both businesses have customer bases and brand recognition, so they'll continue to operate and their investors can carry forward into Agnt AI. Meanwhile, Agnt has secured early funding from friends and family and is raising a seed round.
Orr worked with his legal team at Kastner Gravelle LLP to find the best way to assemble the acquisitions and allow investors to stay involved in the newly formed company.
"We want to solve a big problem, so eventually a stronger kind of institutional backing will likely be required," he said. "But our revenue growth has been really, really healthy."
Agnt's platform comes at a time when generative AI tools are rapidly emerging. There are already dozens of content marketing AI platforms, some generalized and others more industry specific. That means competition in the space is broad, including plenty of free tools that can be used to drum up smart messaging with a few prompts.
But Orr said Agnt AI's laser focus on residential real estate, its tie ins with MLS services and its combined experience in real estate sets it apart from other platforms and tools.
Meanwhile, the startup is emerging at a tricky time for many real estate agents who are being crunched by rapidly changing housing markets both locally and nationally, as well as uncertainty around their commissions in the wake of a lawsuit that is poised to reshape how commissions are paid and shared among buyer and seller agents.
"It's become very apparent with the commission lawsuits and all the things that have kind of been going on in the space that it's more important now than ever for agents to leverage tech and marketing," Orr said. "They may have to do more in a year to make the same amount of money in some cases, or certainly pick and choose how they spend their time a bit more carefully, and that's where we see a good fit for what we're building."
