Muvan.AI Uses AI to Optimize Real Estate Investments
Key Takeaways
- Muvan.AI, an Israeli-based startup, is developing artificial intelligence (AI) to help real estate investors and asset managers make more informed decisions.
- Unlike other AI systems, Muvan.AI is built specifically for real estate and can be customized to work with different property management systems (PMS).
- The company’s AI, called Lori, is designed to analyze data from a variety of sources, including internal data, market data, and even email communications.
- With Muvan.AI, investors can quickly identify the best performing units, identify potential risks, and make better decisions about renovations, rent increases, and evictions.
Early Stages, Big Ambitions
Muvan.AI, a startup founded just 10 months ago, has raised $4 million in seed funding to develop its AI platform, which it says will help real estate investors “understand” their investments better. While the company is just beginning to scale, it has already cultivated an impressive roster of clients and investors, and is attracting significant interest from the real estate community. In a recent YouTube video, Muvan.AI CEO Laren Gabai demonstrated the company’s latest product to an audience of real estate professionals.
“The name of the company is Muvan.AI,” Gabai explained in the video. “’Muvan’ in Hebrew means ‘understood.’ So we call the company Muvan to keep the Hebrew Legacy alive. But also, when I am speaking with potential customers, when they say, ‘Okay, understood,’ that’s when I know we won.”
Gabai goes on to explain that Muvan.AI was founded on the premise that while real estate companies generate a lot of data, they often lack the context and insights necessary to make the best decisions. Using AI to analyze data sets from different internal systems, as well as external sources like market data and financial metrics, Muvan.AI seeks to deliver actionable insights that help investors optimize their portfolios.
A Deep Dive into AI in Real Estate
The video features a live demonstration of Muvan.Ai’s platform, highlighting the company’s core functionalities. Gabai explains that the AI engine is trained on real estate data, and can quickly analyze large datasets to provide investors with key insights.
“We have four different pieces of data: portfolio perspective, properties perspective, and also the communication and how you actually interact with the data on a personalized experience,” Gabai says. “Instead of just looking at the numbers, you will see NOI, lease ratio, maintenance, utilities—the numbers don’t really mean anything because if it’s just a number we don’t have anything to do with it. But if you press this, for example, the AI will immediately show us the specific units within this property that either had the best or the worst ratios…instead of looking at the lease ratio from up here and saying…I got worse or I got better,” says Gabai.
Gabai continues to demonstrate how the AI analyzes key data points like occupancy rates, delinquency, and expenses, highlighting discrepancies and opportunities for improvement. He points to examples like identifying units that are underperforming and suggesting marketing strategies to improve occupancy, and highlighting instances of excessive water consumption, which could be a sign of a leak.
“What you see on the right side of the screen is Lori,” says Gabai, referring to the AI agent that powers the platform. “Lori is the AI agent that we have developed; it’s specifically trained on real estate data and it’s specifically trained on our customers’ specific data, meaning it’s completely siloed, it’s completely separated from different data sets…and it understands not only the wording on how you communicate, but also the lingo, the jargon, the actual sense that you’re trying to interact upon,” he explains.
Gabai adds that the platform can even analyze unstructured data, like notes left by onsite management teams in their property management software, to identify patterns and trends.
Integration and Scalability
A key differentiator for Muvan.AI is its ability to seamlessly integrate with existing property management systems. According to Gabai, Muvan.AI can connect with popular platforms such as Yardi, RealPage, and Inanda, among others, allowing real estate investors to centralize their data and gain a more holistic view of their portfolio.
“[We are] integrating directly with all of the biggest PMS out there…no one has to upload the data or to transform it into Excel or any of those things, we take the data seamlessly on our end, on our backend,” says Gabai. “What’s actually interesting over here is that because we’re dealing with AI and because we have to address different lingos, different wordings, different definitions…that different PMSs are using…for example, Yardi doesn’t name a lease the same way as Folio or RealPage…each of those guys have different definitions…so what we do is to create our own database…that explains to the AI whenever you see this, that also means this and this…whenever you see a lease, that also means XYZ.”
The Future of AI in Real Estate
Gabai believes that Muvan.AI has the potential to revolutionize the real estate industry by helping investors make more informed decisions, and ultimately driving better returns. He also sees the potential for Muvan.AI to be used in other sectors, like hospitality and hotel development.
“I think what we’re showing here is amazing…the question is, what data sources can we use to pull this information from?,” asks David Peters, a real estate professional who appears in the video.
Gabai responds that the platform can pull data from a variety of sources, including internal systems, financial records, market data, and email communications.
“We’re relying on our customers’ data, so the more accurate and the more deep down you have your data, then it’s a fair game,” says Gabai. “If you have a meter then it’s fair…if you have just the invoices and the billing for us to analyze, it’s also fair. We can do this analysis just to understand what should be the normal consumption and then to do this mind games in between. We saw that management companies or management employees…they tend to take notes within the property management system…For example, unit 3A…the maintenance guy just visited a week ago…so when you’re actually using AI in this specific case, it’s NLP [natural language processing]…you can analyze the notes to compare it with the numbers that you have.”
The video concludes with a discussion about the platform’s potential to analyze email communications and identify potential investment opportunities, as well as to automate the process of evaluating investment proposals.
“What if we can integrate with your emails and say we’re collecting all of the different proposals that you’re getting daily, and the AI will say 80% of those don’t match any of your criteria, 10 of those match 80% of your criteria, and those two that actually match 25%, now instead of analyzing 40 different deals, you’ll be upfront with just two of them that actually makes sense to you,” says Gabai.
Gabai believes that this technology will provide investors with a significant advantage in the competitive real estate market.
“You can actually beat the competitors because you know the best what you’re expecting to get…and now you can optimize your model, you don’t have to rely on anyone else’s assumptions because you are in the process of AI for 10 years now, so the model knows you the best.”
Conclusion and Summary
Muvan.AI is a promising new player in the field of real estate technology. The company’s AI-powered platform is designed to provide real estate investors with actionable data insights to help them optimize their portfolios and improve their decision-making. While still in its early stages, Muvan.AI has shown significant potential and is attracting attention in the real estate community. With its focus on customization, integration, and user-friendliness, Muvan.AI is poised to become a leading force in the rapidly evolving field of AI-powered real estate solutions.