Keller Williams Makes Substantial Investments in New Technology

Keller Williams has acquired SmarterAgent, a platform that connects more than 650 multiple listing services and allows brokers and agents to create branded real estate search apps, Inman reported.

It’s part of a larger effort from the company to invest in technology, Josh Team, Keller William’s chief innovation officer, told Inman. He said the firm has acquired other tech platforms in the past four months.

SmarterAgent serves more than 300 other brokerages, and Keller Williams is now its largest client. The move increases Keller Williams’ competition with Zillow and Redfin, whose shares moved lower on the news.

In a related development, Keller Williams also announced it is teaming up with Austin-based artificial intelligence firm KUNGFU.AI, according to Housing Wire.

The first project KW and KUNGFU will work on together is a program that can read and help generate business insights from PDF-based real estate contracts, which contain a mixture of text and handwriting. The KUNGFU software will use computer vision technology to make real estate contract data readable for computers and usable for data sets.