Launch HN: Modern Realty (YC S24) – AI Real Estate Agent for Home Buyers

Hey HN! We're Raymond Xu and Raffi Isanians, the team behind Modern Realty (https://modernrealty.io). Modern Realty is an AI-powered real estate buying experience that helps you purchase homes without relying on a traditional realtor. Demo: https://youtu.be/VhsWSVn5blA

Our mission at Modern Realty is to make home buying easier, faster, and far more enjoyable. We interpret real estate data, giving you an edge on other home buyers.

Since 2024, there has been a growing need for innovative solutions in real estate, especially with tools like Zillow making it easier than ever for buyers to find the right house at the right price. However, the process still requires an agent, even though buyers are doing most of the work themselves. Modern Realty changes this by offering an AI self-service solution.

Raymond and Raffi came face-to-face with this technology's potential while working on AI at Google and handling billion-dollar asset transactions as an attorney, respectively. The AI tools we've built guide users through every step of the home-buying process, from scheduling showings to making offers, all without the need for a traditional agent.

Before we expand further, this summer we've built our core AI real estate agent, which can handle everything from disclosure summaries to competitive market analyses. You can see our platform in action at https://modernrealty.io. We're particularly proud of our offer generation tool, which creates offers that are then reviewed by an attorney at no additional cost.

We're excited to be launching here on HN and would love to hear what you think! If you're in the market for a new home or just curious about the future of real estate, visit our website or schedule a call with us to get started.

Trademark, but yeah, that was my understanding as well.

Who is your target market? I've certainly always wanted a product that lets me cut the realtor out of the loop. When I bought my house, it seemed if anything the realtor just got in the way. I had picked out the house on Zillow, and really just needed to see it once and put in an offer.

Then of course the realtor wants you to look at houses they represent (as a comp), and also introduce you to their inspector/mortgage/lawyer friends. It seems like the incentives just aren't aligned at all.

I imagine a lot of people in the tech scene feel the same. i.e. would love a "buy now" button that skips all the people steps. But I wonder how much that sentiment is shared by the broader real estate market.

Agents are there for the edge cases. We had a contract dispute that required negotiations and even a brief discussion with a lawyer. At one point, our agent was calling title companies in the area to find the _other_ escrow account.

How are you planning on handling cases that abruptly require complexity? At first glance, it looks like using a service like what you are describing would have been an unmitigated disaster and would have cost us a ton of money, and we wouldn't have known that at the start of the process either.

Raffi, my cofounder, is an attorney himself along with having a Realtor license.

Most Realtors are not attorneys. You said you needed to talk to an attorney but what if your realtor.... was an attorney?

So we have more ability to handle edge cases, not less!