Editor in Chief Sarah Wheeler sat down with Lofty CTO Henry Li to talk about the boundaries of artificial intelligence and how it’s reshaping his company’s roadmap.
Sarah Wheeler: What differentiates Lofty’s technology?
Henry Li: Lofty is a platform product — that’s been our vision from day one. We want to be the operating system for our users and their essential operating staff — for agents, Realtors, and brokers, no matter how big they are.
Platform can mean a lot of different things. At Lofty, it’s an end-to-end experience — from consumer search on the IDX portal all the way to nurturing the client relationship in a CRM and converting that relationship into a real transaction. Completing that transaction generates all kinds of operating insight into in the system to drive smart business decisions.
Platform also means we are not just by ourselves. We have a pretty powerful marketplace bundle with our product which comes with two parts. One is, obviously, we have an open API system, so we allow our partners to build their own apps on top of the system. We also allow them to use other partner services through our open API system and our marketplace offers a lot of different value-added services.
One thing where we are a little bit different is we have pretty tight control on user experience. So for the important value-added services — marketing automation services, automated campaign lead generation service — those services are essentially created by us, but also we have a pretty open system We are working with select partners to distribute their service through a native experience on top of our marketplace.
The other thing about being a platform is that when we design the product, we think the product should be generic — we’re not just building a product for the real estate industry. We’re a proptech company, so it’s not only Realtors who are able to use the platform, it’s adjacent businesses like mortgage…