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In a few short years, Rental Heroes has shaken up the Australian real estate sector and become one of the fastest-growing proptechs in the country. The company’s significant investment in property technology has not only cemented its reputation as an award-winning leader but as an innovative and ground-breaking entity.
In 2022, Rental Heroes won the Most Innovative Proptech Start-up for Efficiency and Optimisation at the coveted national Proptech Awards for the development and successful rollout of the AI chatbot, ‘Alex’. The award was a culmination of more than three years of hard work and dedication to launching and improving Rental Heroes’ property management software solution and followed on from a successful $ 1 million seed funding round.
Introduced to the world in 2020, ‘Alex’ is a natural language and AI conversation automation platform for real estate agencies that can be used across web, Messenger, email and phone services.
The chatbot lessens the load on property managers by providing a communication solution for tenant enquiries and complaints. As Rental Heroes has grown, so too has its core market – the technology is now a sought-after solution for all sectors of the real estate market. Alex can be used to generate new leads and answer any property-related enquiries from interested buyers or sellers that come through your website or email, even prioritising tasks.
As Rental Heroes has so clearly demonstrated, proptech is changing the way the industry works; changing how vendors, agents and buyers sell, purchase and rent. To grow with the industry, the Rental Heroes team is forging ahead with a substantial and strategic rebranding campaign.
On 16 May 2023, Rental Heroes will launch the newest chapter in its journey by rebranding to reHeroes – short for Real Estate Heroes. This step forward embodies what the company wants to achieve in the future.
National sales manager Leanne Sorby says, “We workshopped a lot of name ideas, but we wanted to keep ‘heroes’ in the brand name so that it still resonated with us and our customers. We landed on reHeroes over a year ago.”
Winning a Proptech Award has been an incredible achievement for the organisation and it not only cements Rental Heroes’ role in the current world but also its future within the property market.
While the accolade aligns with the nature of the company’s property management software solution, reHeroes’ current and potential customer base must recognise that the technology goes far beyond its rental management capabilities.
Rental Heroes currently has four products:
Three of the four products serve both the sales and rentals side of the real estate, demonstrating that Rental Heroes is capable of supporting real estate professionals beyond property management.
As Rental Heroes continued to grow, the team realised that it was becoming challenging to field preconceived notions about the company with potential customers.
“Receiving industry-wide recognition for our product was incredibly rewarding for everyone in the Rental Heroes team,” co-founder and COO/CTO Dominik Chmielewski explains. “But we felt the need to further this reach and educate the wider community on our full suite of services. When we’re selling the product, there’s a certain initial understanding that we only deal with rentals.
“Our core competency was always around property management, but our AI system expands over time to develop new skills in automation-use cases like lead generation. This is the benefit of ‘Alex’, which we built exactly for this reason.
“The rebranding will help us with our sales process, and remove any preconceptions about who we are. The broader implication of reHeroes means that potential customers will now consider our product and content rather than completely ignore it.”
One of the core values of Rental Heroes is centred on customer-driven and efficient communication and services. The great news is, the rebrand will not change this value.
Co-founder and CEO Ben Burton says existing and future clients can still expect the same focussed service they have come to know and love.
The main goal of our business has been, and will always be, to create superb real estate experiences that are free from communication issues. This is possible through the use of the virtual assistant ‘Alex’. The technology enables a reduction of time spent on low-level tasks such as explaining to multiple tenants how to reset a pilot light, confirming appointment times or approving a quote. Instead, instant decisions can be made and communicated promptly.
For many clients, AI technology has increased efficiency and profit in their business. Take Distinct Property Management’s Taylor for example. She says that ‘Alex’ has helped their tenants resolve common and simple issues immediately. Then there’s Jo from Jellis Craig. She says that ‘Alex’ enables the agency to meet client expectations of “modern technology and instant responses”.
While expanding its services and client reach, reHeroes continues to invest in property management, developing exciting future releases that will further elevate the overall experience across a broad range of real estate fields.
“It’s quite an evolutionary story here. We’ve always been customer-driven,” Ben says. “We started Rental Heroes with a vision to create brilliant rental experiences. If we fast forward to what our vision is now, our AI helps real estate people, be real estate heroes. Through listening to the market, the market has actually demanded that we rebrand.”
According to a report by The Real Estate Conversation, there are more than 500 proptechs in Australia. To be leading the charge is no easy feat. Remaining at the top of their game and moving with the ever-growing industry is the goal for the entire reHeroes team.
As Dom points out, rebranding opens up endless possibilities in an industry that is yet to be fully discovered.
Listing portals, virtual reality, digital logbooks, AI asset registers, apps, and of course chatbots are just some of the proptech services the world will continue to deliver, and positively impact the fragmented real estate industry. Among them will be reHeroes’ groundbreaking offerings that will remain focussed on using conversational AI to break down communication bottlenecks.
“Could our AI become the reception desk of the future? It certainly might be the case for inbound phone calls,” Dom says. “You might not speak to a receptionist, you might speak to our bot first. We’re not just serving one subsector in real estate anymore, we can also cater to real estate in insurance, banking or social housing. Our new brand ‘reHeroes’ enables these possibilities.”
And while reHeroes will have a wider range in terms of customers as well as product innovation, their core competencies remain the same.
“We wanted to keep the speech bubble icon on our logo. That was never negotiable,” Ben adds. “The reason for that is we focus exclusively on communications as a proptech. We want to make sure that the new brand also reflects that.
“One of the biggest pitfalls of proptechs that we see all the time is that they try to be everything to everyone. And we want to ensure that our rebranding doesn’t misrepresent a loss of focus. We are the top AI chatbot and natural language solution, and that’s something we continue to do. We’re just serving a wider range of use cases across real estate.”
In true reHeroes form, the team has taken its product service to the next level and is set to unveil its new ChatGPT-powered bot ‘AiVa’. You can find out more about ‘Alex’s’ new friend on the next blog.
In the meantime, check out the new website at www.reheroes.ai and follow us on social media for more updates or to book a time to chat to discuss how reHeroes can help your agency.
