Any good house hunter knows to show up early. Maybe you got a tip about a good place, or maybe you just hit the jackpot; more often than not, the early bird gets the worm. The important part is to be there at the right time and right place before anyone else.
When Matias Recchia decided, a few years ago, to create a machine-learning platform for Keyway, the software company of which he is Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, he did it so his bankers and analysts would have a leg up when forging deals with their partners in real estate transactions. The move was to supplement Keyway’s business, not replace it.
But Recchia was early enough in the race to leverage AI in real estate to notice a good thing when he saw it, and, in 2023, the results were so good that he decided to remake Keyway in the platform’s image, making it the product, with commercial real estate companies the target market.
Recchia had realized, as he said in a recent interview, that the demand for proven, high-quality AI solutions was booming and that Keyway had the right product at the right time. He was the early bird, and he got the worm.
“It may make sense to build your own AI tools,” Recchia said, “but for 95 percent of the industry where your core capabilities are raising capital, closing real estate transactions and managing assets, you’re much better off partnering or licensing third-party software.”
From that point on, Keyway has, in Recchia’s words, been “building the future of real estate,” which he says relies heavily on synthesizing the massive amount of public data in the real estate market. Transparency, the Harvard Business School graduate says, will drive the gains in the industry. Clearly, he’s onto something.
