Former Zillow Executives Launch Ai Assistant Used Entirely Over The Phone

Three former Zillow executives want to give real estate agents a personal assistant who can handle the administrative headaches that waste time they could use to do what they do best — sell houses.

Luis Poggi, Spencer Rascoff and Alex Kutner on Tuesday launched HouseWhisper, an AI-powered assistant integrated into an agent’s calendar and customer relationship management (CRM) system to do things like schedule appointments and provide notes throughout the day.

The crazy part? Agents interact with the assistant entirely over the phone — no apps, no logins and no tech-savvy needed.

“Keeping an agent’s CRMs up to date with the latest information of every client and where they are in the funnel and what they said in the last time is gold for them,” said Poggi, who was previously Zillow’s vice president of product and engineering. “So this is one of the things that agents love about this product, because then suddenly their databases and their past clients and the past leads are becoming a lot more valuable for them.”

Agents can interact with HouseWhisper in a number of ways. They can have it call them whenever they want with the agent’s schedule and provide reminders. Or the agent can call it and request tasks and ask for followup information.

The founders have run a beta version of HouseWhisper for eight months and gathered feedback from more than 4,000 agents throughout the country. The founders believe that because it’s just a phone number it will help even agents who aren’t techies.

“That’s what we’re actually seeing with the people who are using it today,” Poggi said. “Because it’s a phone number it opens up to everyone, and it’s conversational.

HouseWhisper received $10 million in seed funding from Mayfield, PSL Ventures and 75 & Sunny, a venture capital firm founded by Rascoff.