Almost everyone is familiar with the pain of going through countless listings while searching for a new home. To make this process easy, protech startup SearchSmartly offers its AI-powered property search platform for users. The company provides ‘hyper-personal’ property searches in London and the Home Counties and has now secured a £1.25 million investment in its latest funding round.
Seed investment details
Notable names from the property and tech domain participated in SearchSmartly’s £1.25million seed investment round, including Matt Cooper, James Hind (founder of Carwow), serial proptech investor Antony Senny, Founders Factory and IFG.VC. The company will utilise these fresh funds to better its offerings and expand to all major urban centres in the UK over the next 18 months.
SearchSmartly’s team currently consists of 13 employees. In a conversation with UKTN, SearchSmartly’s founder and CEO, Taha Dar elaborates, “We are investing in our product to enhance our offering for both home movers and for the agents and professional landlords who list with us. Furthermore, we are investing in the quality of service our users receive from our customer service team and building our brand to help more renters and buyers in their move.”
AI-assisted personalised home search
AI is one of the most prevalent technologies that’s being used almost everywhere, and proptech startups are using it too. SearchSmartly says it employs AI and Machine Learning (ML) algorithms to enable better searches for its users, which is touted to help reduce search time and generate better leads for estate agents.
Dar explains the inner workings of their service, saying, “As part of our user onboarding process, we understand as much as we can about our users and what matters most to them in their home, neighbourhood, and commute. Our matchmaking algorithm then scores every home in our database against this wide range of criteria and distils this information into a single ‘SmartScore’ for each property. This helps uncover hidden gems and locations that users may have overlooked in their search.”
With the help of existing data sets, the startup says its ML algorithms deliver a more comprehensive search while bridging the information gap for listed properties. They use the same technology to know their users and their needs better.
Taking air quality into account
SearchSmartly believes that the rising pollution levels in urban and suburban areas is something worth considering while house hunting. The startup has partnered with AddressPollution, an initiative by the Central Office of Public Interest. Under the partnership, properties listed on the platform follow a rating system generated to indicate that particular location’s air quality. This might help users to get a better sense of surrounding air pollution.
The company claims to have over 100,000 listed properties from partner estate agents and Build-to-Rent operators. These listings also include some renowned brands in the UK property market such as Hamptons, John D Wood & co and JLL. Further, the company claims to have helped 100 people complete their move and helped landlords and vendors earn about £3 million.
Currently a part of the Founders Factory accelerator programme, SearchSmartly was founded back in 2018 and is headquartered in London.
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