Property technology firm Altrio — which provides software and data solutions to the global real estate investment, lending and brokerage industries — is launching a new artificial intelligence (AI)-driven product called Altrio Pro to improve the efficiency of deal sourcing and screening and compress weeks of manual underwriting and due diligence into a fraction of the time.

Toronto-headquartered Altrio officially launched in January 2020 and uses a software as a service business model where customers pay licence fees of varying amounts depending on the size of the organization and number of users.

When Altrio chief executive officer Raj Singh last spoke to RENX in July 2022, the company had launched a data-driven, cloud-based deal management platform called Origin and just raised $8 million in funding to add staff and spur product development.

“Following our fundraise we experienced about a year-and-a-half of pretty strong growth, and then continued to grow but certainly at a slightly slower rate as the industry as a whole slowed down in the aftermath of the end of the zero interest rate policy,” Singh recently told RENX. “But we have probably quadrupled in size since since the fundraise.”

One of the biggest changes was Altrio expanding its client base from investors and lenders to also include brokerages almost two years ago. It released a specialized customer relationship management and property marketing platform geared toward brokers to improve deal flow.

“We now serve both the buy side and the sell side of the capital markets, which is pretty unique,” said Singh. “I think we're the only firm doing that.”

Introduction of Altrio Pro

Singh believes real estate-related companies have achieved a better understanding of AI’s potential and started making better use of it over the past six months.

That has enabled Altrio to offer a new version of a platform originally released in 2021 that’s more palatable for a much broader segment of the market that can leverage the technology more quickly, easily and affordably.

Altrio Pro allows users to enter parameters into buy boxes on their computers for the types of properties they’re interested in — such as asset class, location, price, size and age — and it will source and screen emails from brokers to provide a summarized and scored representation to highlight the most appropriate potential deals.

Singh connected Altrio Pro to his email provider for a month to test the platform pre-launch and said the almost 500 property listings sent to him were whittled down to 12 that met the criteria he was seeking, which saved a lot of time and effort on his part.

“Altrio Pro is self-service from start to finish,” Singh explained. “You don't talk to a salesperson, you don't need to do onboarding and you can be fully up and running in five minutes. 

“You can also try it for free. This sort of product has never been available to our market.”

Altrio Pro doesn’t offer all of the institutional functionality of the original Altrio Enterprise, which was formerly known as Origin, but Singh said smaller customers often don’t require all the process controls that large companies do. It also costs about 90 per cent less.

“They're both AI-powered deal-screening, deal-tracking and market data aggregation solutions, but the Enterprise solution wraps up institutional controls, auditability and security that Pro users don't necessarily need,” said Singh.

Altrio Pro will be free for the first couple of months to give people a chance to try it before the company starts charging for it. But it will still have a free introductory trial period after that to give users an idea of if it will be useful for them before they start paying for it.

Future growth and funding

Altrio is running profitably and doesn’t need to seek any additional capital at this point, but Singh said it may be advantageous to launch another funding round in the future if this new product takes off the way he expects it to.

“In this current era of AI having dramatically reduced the cost of producing every kind of content, the cost of marketing and generating awareness has gone through the roof,” he explained. “So we might see fit to do a funding round in order to increase our marketing spend to get the word out more. 

“We expect word of mouth to play a significant role in the release and getting awareness out there, but it certainly doesn't hurt to have the resources to attend more events and potentially pay for more paid media and other avenues because the traditional digital marketing channels have been completely saturated by AI slop.”

Singh expects Altrio Pro to grow the company’s market share with real estate investors, which will also benefit brokers. 

“Brokers are blasting these emails out and Altrio Pro is sucking those emails in and scoring those deals,” said Singh. 

“But as our user base on the investor side and the broker side increases, at some point the email piece becomes removable and you can transition from an email paradigm to more of an instant messaging paradigm where a broker could simply send an investor a deal through the platform, which is ultimately where we're trying to get to.” 

Altrio also plans to supplement deal flow information with real estate industry news, research, profiles and social posts as a free tier that anyone can use just by signing up for an account.