One of the biggest pain points for many Realtors — especially with those who work at large, well-established brokerages — is how to quickly access crucial information during a sales process.

“We have so many resources in our Google Drive that the agents, in the past, had to hunt and peck for: it wasn’t always easy to find those resources, and now, with the AI tool that Virtuo has built, called HomieAI, they can go in and search for the resources and be able to easily find them,” Corinne Lyall, owner and broker at Royal LePage Benchmark in Calgary, told RENX in an interview.

The brokerage recently partnered with Calgary-based Virtuo, which has developed a two-part tool to help agents find all of the pertinent information needed to efficiently close a sale.

“We launched Virtuo in 2017 with the idea to make moving easy for everyone. Basically, taking all those fragmented customer journeys associated with the real estate transaction and just unifying them and making them really, really easy and simple. Everything from forwarding your mail, transferring utilities, your media; boxes, movers . . .” Nate Edwards, Virtuo’s co-founder, told RENX Homes.

Royal LePage Benchmark is the first brokerage to utilize the platform, "but Virtuo is far from new to the industry. Through our long-standing partnerships with leading home builders across North America, we’ve supported over 35,000 homeowners in their new home journey. This experience is what we’re now bringing to the real estate vertical," Edwards said.

The company has its roots in an enterprise founded in the early 2000s as a corporate-relocation firm. However, that original business soon began working with energy companies to assist with transferring workers from city to city, Edwards said.

“We were tasked by these HR directors and these CEOs to build out these programs to really help their employees that they were relocating to Canada, to really just make that process easy. That’s kind of the origin story," he explained. "Basically what we learned is there’s so much more to the move than the move itself. It’s all these other million moving parts."

The Agent X experience

In its new partnership, Virtuo is providing what it calls the Agent X experience for Royal LePage Benchmark.

“Once that agent would log into the app or desktop, what we’ve done is we’ve really centralized all of their tools that they use on a daily basis, so everything from their internal Wikis to their deal manager to their final offer; all of their tech stack, we’ve unified into one experience,” Edwards said.

Brokers are able to access all of these components, as well as such things as MLS or E-signature platforms, through a dashboard.

Virtuo’s pricing model is subscription-based and paid by the brokerage, which then provides access to individual Realtors.

It works in tandem with the AI tool - HomieAI.

“I’ve been building-out these resources for probably at least 10 years, and it’s not always the easiest library to navigate. I think HomieAI is going to help the Realtor with being able to find that information more readily and easily and be able to be more specific,” Lyall said.

Access to "instant knowledge"

“It’s instant knowledge at their fingertips, so they can quickly ask HomieAI anything from market insights to clauses with respect to RECA (Real Estate Council of Alberta) rules, to land-use bylaws, and the whole idea is: do less work and focus more time on those higher-value interactions with your clients,” Edwards added.

He hopes it helps build a loyalty base among clients, as well.

“Clients are not using the same agent twice, and we don’t think that should be the case. It’s creating that customer for life,” he said.

For Royal LePage Benchmark, the tool rollout is “putting our Realtors front and centre, and so whenever that they sign up their client to the concierge service, the Realtor’s going to be front and foremost in the client’s mind, and that they’re the ones that help facilitate this relationship,” Lyall said.

A 'concierge' for homeowners and brokers

In addition to the integration into the back-end information and the AI component, Virtuo offers a “concierge” service for both brokers and homeowners.

It provides clients with access to partners so the customer doesn’t have to worry about some of the “heavy lifting” during the moving process, according to Edwards.

“Our job as a concierge is to go out and procure the best services for them . . . If they need assistance with a lawyer, if they need assistance with movers, our job is to go out and get them a handful of quotes, and then we’ll actually manage that experience, meaning we’ll make sure that the movers show up (and) if anything goes wrong, we fight the fight. We’ll work with those trade partners to ensure that they get a world-class experience.”

This allows Realtors to focus on their core responsibilities in buying and selling, Lyall said.

“Our business is built on relationships, and creating top-of-mind awareness that we love. That’s why most people get into the business, is they love helping people and to be able to support and help our clients in a way that’s quite unique, and I think this will give our Realtors an edge out there in the competitive world of real estate.”