by Craig C. Rowe | May 20, 2025 | Industry, News Feed
Canadian real estate software company Virtuo is bringing its homeowner-centric concierge solution to buyers, builders and agents the United States, launching in Texas.
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Canadian real estate software company Virtuo is bringing its homeowner-centric concierge solution to buyers, builders and agents the United States, Inman has learned.
A May 15 statement said that the company will launch operations in Texas.
“Although this marks Virtuo’s formal expansion into the American market, the company is no stranger to the U.S. Through longstanding relationships with Canadian builders operating stateside, including Shane Homes, Virtuo has already supported new home buyers in four states in the U.S.,” the release stated.
Virtuo brings together homebuilders, agents and buyers into a single ecosystem to ensure every stage of the purchase process remains connected. Rooted in new construction, the platform is part transaction manager and part post-close home assistant.
It uses an artificial intelligence called HomieAI to work alongside human counterparts to parse and empower construction and deal data into a wide array of productivity features, which in turn offers support, insights and reminders even after the home is built.
Plans call for the company to target homebuilders in Houston, Dallas and Austin. The construction space serves as the starting point for Virtue’s value proposition, as it marks the most logical starting point if the goal is to digitally manage a home transaction. The Lone Star State’s rapid and ongoing growth in the last 10 years continues to offer growth opportunities for any line of business in or adjacent to residential real estate.
Virtuo co-founder and CEO Casey Kachur said in a statement that Texas was a natural choice. Many of its major markets are also tech-friendly.
“From energy roots to entrepreneurial grit, the parallels between Alberta and Texas are striking,” Kachur said. “Having seen firsthand the appetite for a more connected, digital and stress-free experience, we’re excited to bring that same value to builders and homebuyers across the state.”
Inman reviewed Virtuo shortly before its formal launch in the States, noting its sharp balance between artificial intelligence and human guidance through the home transition.
“The features and benefits aren’t specifically delivered in any truly unique way, but Virtuo provides notable value as the digital source of truth for a home. It’s like being handed a CarFax as a car rolls off the assembly line, adding a great deal of authenticity to its history and, frankly, addresses what I disliked about all the other home management solutions that have come before it,” the review stated.
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by Craig C. Rowe | May 16, 2025 | Industry, News Feed
RentSpree is working with TransUnion to improve how leasing agents and property managers determine a lease applicant’s background.
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RentSpree is working with TransUnion to improve how it screens tenants for evictions and criminal records, Inman learned in a May 15 statement.
The partnership will help RentSpree improve how leasing agents and property managers determine a lease applicant’s ability to carry out their financial and general usage commitment to a property.
TransUnion’s access to state and local court records and its national reach will buoy RentSpree’s ability to adjust its screening to the ever-evolving state and local laws surrounding personal privacy, determining what data can be used to screen tenants and what agents and property managers are allowed to share and consider.
To accommodate for variable regulations, the partnership enables RentSpree to apply “conditional acceptance,” for example. This workflow will approve or deny based on traditional applicant metrics before criminal records are considered. The company said this will ensure compliance with local fair housing rules and help cut down on bias in leasing decisions.
“With these enhancements, RentSpree is reaffirming its commitment to empowering real estate professionals with tools that reduce risk, improve efficiency, and ensure compliance in an increasingly complex rental landscape,” RentSpree said.
RentSpree provides automation solutions for all stakeholders of the rental industry, including residential sales agents. It processes payments, flattens tenant screening, empowers marketing and automates the application process, among other features.
The company has partnerships in place with a large number of multiple listing services to assist real estate agents in how they serve leasing prospects and work with tenants as future buyers.
RentSpree updated its attention to tenants’ backgrounds last year, too, when it partnered with Finicity to help property management providers more accurately verify the income of lease applicants.
The company said in its statement that fraud reports in the rental industry include instances of identity theft and fake listings, as well as document forgery.
It should be noted that at least one industry report contradicts RentSpree’s data on the rate of fraud in 2024.
Citing fraud prevention technology company Snappt, Multi-housing News’ Lew Sichelman reported in a May 7 column that “the rate of fraud in the multifamily sector fell last year from 7.9 percent in 2023 to 6.4 percent in 2024. Total bad debt avoidance grew from $142.8 million to $156.7 million.”
Fraud rates, however, are market-dependent, according to Sichelman. “Memphis, with a fraud rate of double the national average, remained the market where scams were the most prevalent,” he said. “And the rates in Atlanta and Houston were four points higher than average.”
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by Craig C. Rowe | May 15, 2025 | Industry, News Feed
HqO is a software company that provides enterprise-level real estate experience solutions to the commercial real estate industry. Its newest release promises to integrate tenant lifecycle, asset management and building operations.
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Software company HqO has built and released what it’s calling the commercial real estate industry’s first “system of record for customer experience,” according to a May 15 statement.
“The new platform unifies asset management, tenant lifecycle, and operational workflows into a single, intuitive system — empowering property owners and operators to drive loyalty, efficiency, and long-term asset value,” the release stated.
Commercial real estate is historically challenged by a lack of uniformity in business operation software because of the widely disparate methods by which its practitioners function. In short, it’s still very much a face-to-face, offline referral-driven industry. Office space use needs vary widely and are subject to uniquely negotiated terms, dynamic pricing, logistical variations and other challenges that vary building to building, often on the same street.
HqO’s solution promises to eschew fragmentation by integrating that data and processes of asset management, tenant lifecycle and building operations — typically separate lines of business for commercial real estate companies.
“We’ve partnered with the most sophisticated operators across the globe, and what we continue to hear is clear: The market has lacked a holistic system to manage the full lifecycle of both the tenant and the asset,” said Chase Garbarino, CEO and co-founder of HqO, in the statement. “At its core, it’s a purpose-built CRM for commercial real estate that acts as the system of record for the customer experience. It also accelerates operators’ AI-readiness. That’s the gap we’re solving, and it’s one of the industry’s most urgent needs today.”
Commercial leasing has taken massive blows of late, largely due to remote work trends exacerbated by the COVID pandemic. Instituting modern operating systems with a focus on tenant relations should assist the industry in its efforts to win back a workforce increasingly under the expectation of high-touch vendors, including their office managers and occupancy partners.
The tenant lifecycle features of HqO promise to “digitize and streamline tenant onboarding, access provisioning, amenity usage, events, and communication,” according to the statement. Those efforts will be buoyed with management-focused systems for marrying data that historically exists in stand-alone systems, whether in individual buildings or across portfolios.
The software aims to make it easier to align transaction insights, financial performance, tenant information and vendor contracts through a single-number interface to, in the end, improve property value.
The new product will be delivered through HqO’s REX (Real Estate Experience) Framework, an underlying operating system that adheres the user to their building’s outcomes. Its mobile and browser-based UX provides access to the system’s suite of features and tools, including a vendor marketplace, building performance dashboard and real-time operation insights, among other products.
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by Craig C. Rowe | May 9, 2025 | Industry, News Feed
ARKI, a company that leverages artificial intelligence to improve how construction, engineering and architectural systems collaborate, has announced its arrival in the United States.
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ARKI, a company that leverages artificial intelligence to improve how construction, engineering and architectural systems collaborate, has announced its arrival in the United States, Inman has learned. The company is emerging into the domestic built world with case studies that claim to cut project time by at least 50 percent.
In a statement shared early with Inman, ARKI CEO and co-founder Natalia Bakaeva said that legacy systems are walled off and not designed to coalesce.
“We founded ARKI to address the critical inefficiencies caused by siloed data and the time-consuming nature of traditional AEC [architecture, engineering and construction] workflows,” said Bakaeva. “Our AI empowers design professionals to access the knowledge they need instantly, predict potential roadblocks, and ultimately create better, more efficient designs. Expanding to the U.S. market is a pivotal step in our mission to revolutionize the global built environment.”
The term, “built world” was birthed to delineate between actual, physical properties and assets and their digital doppelgängers that exist in software, rendering systems and other digital formats.
ARKI is one of six entities that are part of a cohort under the guidance of Equity Angels, an entrepreneurial advisory group aimed at unlocking access to critical resources for minority-led startups.
ARKI’s core product enables multiple stakeholders to make decisions using combined datasets from a building project’s major systems and processes. It eliminates superfluous communications, reveals unseen hurdles, eliminates delays, and thus, shrinks workflows while ensuring compliance, efficiency, and safety.
It can process 2D and 3D planning assets and use computer vision to identify and make searchable project drawings and documents generated from all stakeholders, in turn creating deep, “live libraries” of real-time data and content, significantly reducing redundant work, improving risk management practices, improving budget confidence and accelerating project timelines.
“ARKI has already garnered traction internationally, working with firms such as RAW Design, LINK Arkitektur, FWBA Architects and KPMB Architects — a world-renowned architectural practice based in Canada,” the press release stated. “This early adoption underscores the need for ARKI’s innovative approach to AEC data management.”
Equity Angels was founded in 2024 by Kenya Burrell-VanWormer and Katherine “Kat” Winston, each of whom has a diverse tenure in real estate leadership, technology and entrepreneurship.
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by Craig C. Rowe | May 9, 2025 | Industry, News Feed
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As if listing agents don’t have a hard enough time getting sellers to make a few market-friendly improvements to their home, reports from the construction industry suggest the Trump administration’s tariff policy is going to raise the hurdle even higher.
HomeAbroad, a company that provides a range of services for foreign buyers to invest in American real estate, including “fix and flip” mortgages, issued a report stating that “new tariffs will raise house renovation costs by $7,840 on average in 2025, a 15 percent increase, due to the Trump administration’s April 2025 hikes on imported materials.”
Cost to update that kitchen? Nearly 78% more
Kitchens are one of the most common areas buyers hope to see updated when touring a listing. HomeAbroad found that doing so will cost consumers an additional 77.5 percent as a result of tariffs on quartz countertops, refrigerators and stainless steel sinks imported from China.
HomeAbroad’s report on kitchens assumes a 10’ x 10’ space and uses cost of materials findings from HomeGuide.com. It lists tariff-impacted prices for
- cabinets (+10 percent)
- granite (+10 percent) marble (+10 percent) or quartz (+245 percent) countertops
- ceramic tiles (+10 percent)
- refrigerator (+245 percent)
- stainless steel sink (+245 percent)
- vinyl flooring supplied by China (245 percent)
Want a new bathroom? Expect an increase of 41.7 percent, “mainly due to a high 245 percent tariff on Chinese quartz countertops and plumbing parts,” HomeAbroad said.
The most heavily hit items — at the moment — are plumbing and lighting fixtures, vinyl flooring and appliances, which are facing a 245 percent tariff. That rate has been paused for a number of items for 90 days, including things like cement, tile and kitchen cabinets, which sit at 10 percent.
‘Buy American’ can result in shortages and delays
“These high tariffs are shaking up supply chains, with Chinese materials playing a big role,” HomeAbroad stated. “The added costs could push contractors toward domestic options, but with 27 percent of imports from China, shortages and delays loom as the market adjusts. The 90-day pause, ending July 4, 2025, holds non-Chinese tariffs at 10 percent, but if it lifts, rates could jump to 46 percent for Vietnam, 32 percent for Taiwan, 26 percent for India, and 20 percent for Spain, adding $500–$2,300 to a $5,000 order.”
The Trump administration has wavered erratically on tariff timelines and amounts, as well as on which specific materials are subject to what amount and why, making costs exceptionally difficult to forecast.
Tariff impacts on new construction and fix-and-flips
The National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) has weighed in, too, stating on its website that it estimates $14 billion of the $24 billion spent on goods for both new multifamily and single-family housing in 2024 were imported, “meaning approximately 7 percent of all goods used in new residential construction originate from a foreign nation.”
Its Westlake Royal Remodeling Market Index (RMI), which measures national remodeler sentiment, showed drops across the board, except in one metric that stayed the same: small remodeling projects (under $20,000).
Robert Fragoso is a Southern California real estate investor and coach who builds and flips homes. He was a key player in the growth of Anchor Loans, which finances new builds, renovation and flip projects.
He told Inman in an email that he is optimistic about the greater real estate market, and, as a new-home builder, he said he’s taking “the wait-and-see approach.”
As for renovations and fixer-uppers, Fragoso’s models tell him that tariffs “will have a net 5 [percent to] 7 percent increase in the cost of the repairs, notwithstanding opportunistic retailers using tariffs as a way to increase profit,” he said. “On the new construction SFR front, I expect the increase to be more like 6 [percent to] 10 percent overall increase in the cost of building.”
He also told Inman that the fear some have of costs simply being pushed down to the consumer is justified.
“Generally speaking, the ones that will get hurt on the new projects going forward is not us, the builders or the developers, but the sellers of the homes we are either tearing down to rebuild or just remodel because this cost will directly come off of the amount we can pay for the property as we will try and maintain our profit margins,” he said.
Early concerns about rising costs, hesitation from homeowners
HouseAmp is a fintech company that works with homeowners, agents, contractors and lenders to finance and coordinate pre-sale home renovations. In an email to Inman, CEO Rick Hennessey said rumblings are being heard, but that it hasn’t yet experienced any tangible changes.
“While HouseAmp doesn’t directly track tariff data, we work closely with contractors and service providers nationwide, and we’re starting to hear early concerns about rising material costs — particularly for products with international components like cabinetry, flooring and appliances,” he said.
“We haven’t seen a measurable slowdown in project volume yet, but if tariffs continue to tighten supply chains, we do expect more pricing pressure to hit homeowners and renovation timelines later this year. In particular, we anticipate increased demand for financing options as budgets stretch.”
Like HouseAmp, Revive’s tech-forward business model is predicated on agents helping sellers understand that interior updates will net more money upon a sale. It helps brokerages market services and take a hands-on approach with project execution. It also facilitates external improvements when necessary.
Revive CEO Michael Alladawi told Inman the impact of tariffs is tightening the screws on an already stressed environment.
“We’re seeing consistent 10 [percent to] 20 percent increases in costs for core materials like cabinetry, appliances and fixtures. This inflation is leading to hesitation from homeowners and risk buffering from contractors who are adjusting bids to protect against future volatility.”
The company published a report finding that presale renovations are becoming a popular method to make a listing look more inviting to the market. The report found that sellers see an additional profit of $145,000 after a home update, among other benefits.
The paper reports an ROI average of 112 percent and a home value jump 28 percent as a result of a strategic renovation. The company does make clear that individual market metrics impact its service end result and that it’s important for sellers to consider what parts of a home need to be updated. For instance, a primary bathroom re-do may outperform a dining room makeover.
Should tariffs hit as expected, agents will need to run some intricate math to determine if the added cost will result in comparable, pre-tariff ROI. If the sale price rises above comps, the house could face headwinds once on the market.
To that end, Revive is instituting cost-saving measures for clients by stockpiling common items and working as often as possible with local suppliers. If there’s anything shining along the edges of the looming tariff front, it’s that renovations are becoming more deliberate and strategic, albeit smaller in scope.
Alladawi also said that newly renovated homes offer worthy alternatives to new builds.
“The full impact of these cost pressures is still unfolding, but what we’re seeing may be the early signs of a recalibration in the renovation economy,” he said.
To make matters even worse for update-minded sellers, cost-conscious buyers, their agents and anxious contractors, there’s little certainty to any of this. The tariff rate on Chinese imports could change in the blink of a Truth Social post. Like the one this morning, May 9, moments before this article was published:
“80% Tariff on China seems right! Up to Scott B.” President Donald Trump via Truth Social, morning of May 9, 2025.
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