buymyplace reimagines real estate with Microsoft

Real estate disruptor, buymyplace, is launching a fully automated version of its platform that empowers Australian property owners to sell their property privately, putting them in charge of the sale of their home from go-to-whoa and cuts out the middle man.

While early versions were prototyped on AWS, the fully fledged intelligent solution has been built on Microsoft Azure over the last eight months to take advantage of Azure’s scale, performance and resilience.

The easy to use platform allows sellers to take ownership of the process of selling their property privately by doing everything from uploading photos of the property for sale to ordering signboards and arranging an auction. Sellers follow a series of prompts, providing details of the property or land they want to sell, upload photos and design property listings and marketing brochures. Once a listing is complete, the property listing is then published on the major prpoerty portals, including realestate.com.au and Domain.

“This is an Australian business, with Australian customers and Australian properties, we needed a platform that complies with all the legal requirements in this country. Azure provides us with such a platform that allows us to focus on what we do, while it provides the industry and Australian government standards in security and privacy,” said Schiavello.

Customers log into the platform using two factor authentication and once the seller is happy with the look and content of the listing, they can select how and where they want that listing to appear, in return for a fixed fee.  Once in the platform, sellers provide information about their property type, whether they are selling or leasing that property, and where that property is located.  The platform then tailors a recommended campaign for each user based on their individual circumstances.

In addition to using the service to list their property on real estate aggregation sites such as realestate.com.au and Domain, private sellers can also leverage buymyplace’s connection to third party providers,  such as conveyancers and auctioneers.

Inbuilt intelligence ensures that a seller of a property in Queensland, for example, is steered to complete all the data needed for compliance with real estate rules in that State – and throughout the process sellers are prompted by the system how to optimise their listing for maximum impact.

buyMyplace will also leverage Azure’s artificial intelligence capabilities to enhance efficiency and simplify selection of property content. This will help users meet property aggregators’ rules regarding what can and cannot be featured in ‘for-sale’ photographs. Family pets for example are not allowed.

buyMyplace plans to use Azure cognitive services to automatically analyse each photo and provide feedback to the user around what photo can or cannot be included. Traditionally this was a manual task performed by a buyMyplace employee reviewing photos, one at a time.

Lee Hickin, national technology officer, Microsoft Australia said; “Buying and selling real estate can be a stressful, expensive and time-consuming business using traditional approaches.

“buymyplace reimagines real estate, using modern technology to allow sellers to take full control of the process. With Azure as its digital foundation, buyMyplace is in the box seat to continuously enhance the service, leveraging artificial intelligence, machine vision and data analytics to help customers achieve the best outcome.”