REA Group who run Australia’s number one address in property, realestate.com.au, has revealed that it’s been investing in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) for several years.

The investment is now resulting in a new suite of AI-powered enhancements, which include Generative AI ChatGPT integration. The feature has been rolled out across the Suggested Properties on the platform’s home screen.

REA Group chief product and audience officer, Melina Cruickshank, said the Group invests for the long term and will actively pursue the use of AI where it makes sense.

“Our product, marketing and engineering teams are continually innovating to make it easier for the millions of Australians who engage with our platforms. The successful launch of our realEstimateTM automated valuation model, now being used to track over 35 percent of Australian households,  illustrates how critical machine learning has become in our product development process,” says Melina of the new tech advancements.. 

“I’m excited to see the scale and pace of work being produced right now. Recently we sent a group of our ML and Data Scientists to join AI industry leaders at a Global Hackathon at Princeton University in the USA. New technology is allowing us to make a genuine difference in how Australians buy, rent and sell property in the coming years. In addition to what we currently have in market, we see significant opportunities ahead,” she finishes.

REA Group tracks nearly four million homes

Almost 4 million Australian homes are now tracked on realestate.com.au via the newly launched realEstimateTM, powered by PropTrack. With the backing of a multi-channel marketing campaign earlier this year, a new property is now tracked on the platform every 20 seconds. AI innovation powers image tagging which looks at a listing’s images to identify attributes of a property that help increase the accuracy of realestate.com.au’s valuation feature. This significantly contributes to the high level of accuracy of the valuation model.