In our latest Members Spotlight Interview, we spoke with Richard Henshall, CEO of Recognyte, a company transforming the real estate lifecycle through unmatched AI technology, engineering, and large scale data collection, allowing them to reshape property intelligence systems and processes.

Richard shares insight into how their technology streamlines processes through a combination of process automation and data science, how they plan to illuminate the process of data sharing in the real estate industry, and his predictions for how the industry will look over the next few years…

Q: What was the inspiration for Recognyte and digitising this area of the property sector, and what are the key problems that you solve? 

A: Recognyte was originally formed to help Resolute Asset Management execute mandates for its clients involving large numbers of granular real estate assets, where the data for those assets was incomplete and inaccurate.   

To properly assess a portfolio and determine value creation strategies required remediation of data, which to perform manually was extremely time consuming, error prone and inefficient. By combining process automation and data science, our platform was built to enable Resolute to improve accuracy of data, save time and ultimately maximise the value of assets. 

Since that point, we have expanded our reach – removing uncertainty from the entire real estate lifecycle for numerous banks, investors and owners, through our unmatched AI technology. 

Q: How does Recognyte’s technology solve those problems? 

A: In commercial real estate, data sits in numerous sources, is infrequently updated, and is often filled with gaps, meaning data-led decision making is almost impossible.

To be genuinely useful, data needs to be collated from a variety of internal and external sources and then remediated, but doing this manually is incredibly time consuming and inefficient. 

Recognyte uses natural language processing, machine learning and computer vision to remediate data, and then enrich it using open source intelligence. This provides companies with a deep understanding of their assets, including their values, market position, options for value creation, and value retention.

Once collated, our virtual data rooms and workflow tools then help companies to turn that intelligence into genuinely actionable plans and outcomes. 

Q: Can we expect to see any exciting developments or new products in the pipeline at Recognyte in the near future? 

A: We are a growing company and this year we are focusing on implementing our go-to-market strategy, helping more and more companies achieve complete visibility of their assets.  

Real estate is arguably the least transparent of all major investment classes because traditionally the data is hard to obtain.

There has been a lot of information asymmetry between investors, but with increasing digitisation, availability of open-source information, and application of data science and artificial intelligence becoming more common, there is an enormous opportunity to unleash all the trapped value in real estate and reduce the imbalance of information.

We feel we are extremely well positioned to help more and more companies capture that opportunity. 

Q: Lastly, where do you see the industry headed in 2-5 years? 

A: The real estate industry has never experienced a more significant period of change. Whilst exciting in many respects, there is real demand for knowledge, insight and intelligence to help companies navigate the evolving landscape. The days of hunches and guesswork are over.

Instead, people want information at their fingertips; information that enables them to perform effectively and successfully.

Given this, my expectation is that in 5 years’ time, data-led decision making will be standard practice across real estate.

Companies will recognise the immense value of machine learning data processing and will base almost every strategic decision on the more extensive data available to them.