Flip out your phone, tablet or computer and you have all the answers you need.

That’s the idea behind DREA, a digital real estate assistant that focuses on giving you readily accessible real estate insights that are relevant to the everyday buyer, seller, tenant and landlord to help them make smarter decisions.

Founded by former investment banker, Yuet Whey Siah, the idea started two years ago when she was looking to buy a condominium that was 10 minutes away from her office but would also give her at least a 3% yield if she rented it out. It seemed a basic ask but there was no easy answer to that. It would require crunching through thousands of data points on Excel, a daunting task to many.

“When I finally found the right home, I wanted help negotiating the price down. I bought data and reports online to find negotiation points or some leverage but there was more homework to be done. I could not imagine going through this process 10x to find the right home at the right price” said Yuet.

In 2014, she set out to create the first ever digital real estate assistant in the market (hence the name DREA), designed to provide users with better information, better analysis and better tools for property negotiation. “Today, real estate data is available, real insights however are not accessible” says founder and CEO, Yuet.

“DREA is designed to address questions and information needs which are constantly evolving” 

If you were exploring homes on-the-go, DREA would show you the number of relevant listings nearby (yes, DREA remembers what you are looking for!), the showflats nearby, open homes nearby, prices in the area, and even things like whether prices have softened and if there is risk of further price softening. If you were doing your own analysis at home, it was about equipping you with all the insights and analytical tools for it”

For users, DREA sets out to change the way people think about buying, selling and renting homes and how they can use these insights to differentiate a fact from a sales pitch, ask smarter questions and negotiate intelligently. “We have created a whole new set of features and analytical tools – immediate negotiation points for every home viewing you go to, location-based insights on the go and instant comparable condos. We have also created the very first Excel API in the market for enterprise users to run their own analysis. These features have proven to be invaluable tools for our users.”

“This will be a game changer in terms of how agents acquire leads and serve clients”

However, DREA isn’t just working on addressing the needs of consumers. The goal is to make agents’ lives easier too by equipping them with the ability to answer every client question, efficiently and on the go. “If a client asks about pricing and yield of comparable condos, agents can instantly pull these information off his tablet”. Not only will this save time, it will help agents better serve their clients.

To help agents in acquiring leads, DREA’s Lead Finder platform offers the ability to search for leads based on housing preferences and then actively reach out to them using DREA’s instant messaging system. “This will be a game changer for agents because it is no longer about reposting listings and then passively waiting for a response”.

Understanding what a lead wants is at the crux of it all. DREA wants to help agents better serve their leads (be it existing or new clients) by helping them stay on top of every lead’s home preference. To achieve this, agents can now connect with their leads through DREA, view each lead’s current home preference and understand how to better serve them. “On a single-page, agents can see a list of all existing contacts and their housing preferences which are constantly updated. Agents can then triangulate this list against their latest listings” Yuet highlighted.

“We are effectively marrying two concepts together, real estate insights and real high-quality leads” says Huan Song, who is part of the founding team.

DREA is also taking a stab at solving some of the real issues agents face. Today, real estate agents pay to post and repost listings. “Unlike existing real estate portals, we have moved away from a paid listing business model. We see real estate classifieds as a commoditized service with no viable commercial model. Listings should always be free because there are many other revenue streams that we can pursue. This is a business model unique to DREA and has allowed us to be revenue generating pre-launch”.

“This is a real leg-up on today’s classifieds technology and search platform…”

To execute on DREA’s vision, DREA has shown users and agents how it can innovate on both sides of the stick. “It’s not just about creating a sleek and modern interface, but a whole new ecosystem of technology”.

DREA’s patent-pending SmartAds technology dynamically tailors listings to every individual user. “Today, listings are static. When an agent posts a listing, every home buyer or tenant sees the same sales pitch. However, each user has unique preferences and there is no one-size-fits-all listing model”.

Instead, DREA’s SmartAds automatically inserts and rewords listing description to appeal to each individual and improves click-through rate for agents. DREA’s SmartAds algorithm is capable of rephrasing listing description and also inserting information such as drive time for users who drive (By the way – this unit is 7 mins drive from your office..). “This is ad personalization made possible by deep profiling and this is a system that gets smarter and smarter over time, whilst maintaining the highest level of anonymity” commented Yuet.

“An intuitive search experience modelled after how people decide on homes”

DREA has also revolutionized the way one searches for homes. Instead of searching for homes by district, tenure and MRT, DREA lets users search for homes based on things that really matter – walking time to the nearest supermarket, livability in the area, number of train stops to their workplace for instance. The challenge with this however, is in streamlining the wide range of search parameters into a simple and intuitive user experience.

“We found our answer in natural language processing. We believe that this will fundamentally change the way one finds and decides on a new home” says Yuet. Users can simply type in questions like “Freehold 3 bedroom units with yield of 3% within 10 mins drive to Biopolis” and find property listings matching their criteria. This is unique to the DREA platform and is not currently available in the market.

Today, DREA is the only web 3.0 personal real estate assistant in the market and is accessible at DREA.sg on mobile and web (There are no plans to develop an app as the team believes that the future is in creating shareable insights and content, without restricting it to native app users). For now, DREA will be focusing on condominiums in Singapore with other cities and asset classes to follow.