As you may have heard, REACH has launched its 2024 Canada cohort. If you’re familiar with REACH’s programming, this time you can expect some new people, fresh ideas and innovative solutions for the country’s real estate value chain. Here’s some background on the growth accelerator and what you can expect coming up.

What is REACH?

REACH is a bespoke program. They choose companies and design programming for any given cohort independently from previous cohorts. The main focus for all REACH programs is on solutions that drive value through the real estate ecosystem to ultimately benefit you – the real estate practitioner.

How does REACH choose companies?

Selection is typically around these elements:

Founder-fit: focused on excellent people with extraordinary passion, talent and a high degree of intellectual honesty.

Alignment with theme: each cohort is designed around a theme based on industry trends, consumer demand and/or perceived economic environment in the next 3-7 years.

Cohort synergy: maximizing alignment and cross-pollination between solutions, founder/executive team expertise and experience, and/or shared market approach.

The 2024 cohort

Canada’s 2024 cohort is led by a diverse group of founders with expertise across several industries, geographies and ideologies. These folks are focused on addressing some of the most critical real estate challenges, including security and compliance, affordable and equitable access to housing, enhancing supply and streamlining the realtor and consumer experience. 

Approach

For 2024, REACH has taken a “value-chain” approach in securing the cohort, still focusing but moving further upstream from the transaction or practitioner.

Solution categories and participants

This translates to a few different solution types:

1. To help address larger socioeconomic factors like home affordability via reducing costs at the development or construction phase, which drives more cost savings and efficiencies that address critical supply and housing cost issues.

Participants:

• Maket – levering AI to generate fast and cost-effective new home designs and floor plans
• Collegium – digitizing the design-to-build phase of construction, lowering costs and empowering delivery of mass frame timber (NetZero) at less than traditional construction costs
• Proxima HQ – a virtual pre-construction sales centre empowering real estate developers for significantly less, further driving down costs 

2. To enhance the agent/consumer’s ability to narrow, refine and simplify the search process based more directly on consumer-driven input than ever before.

Participants:

• ProptTexx – empowering consumers to curate their home tastes with an AI home shopping companion on any digital platform
• Infinite Creator – unlocking high-end video production for real estate listings without the added costs of a professional production studio

3. To address housing affordability in the rental space by maximizing efficiency at the property management level.

Participant:

Propra – democratizing affordable enterprise-level property management automation for landlords

4. All underpinned by the increasingly important and as-yet untested requirement for enhanced compliance in the process.

Participant:

Iluminai – an AI-enabled FINTRAC compliance sentry ensuring that any high-risk customers are dealt with during, before and after the transaction

Programming

The programming components that founders or companies experience are tailored to them, driven exclusively by the unique needs, stage and focus of each company and broadly focused around these three pillars: 

1. Access to market/industry expertise
2. Access to capital
3. Access to expertise

Depending on the growth objectives and priorities of each company, REACH delivers on these pillars by connecting their teams with the North American and global real estate industry through many mentors and a network of industry partners (brokers, boards/MLS executives, franchisors, asset owners, investors, etc.)

This is done partly through affiliation with the National Association of Realtors (NAR) and its resources, and via the global presence of five other REACH programs (two in the United States, one in Latin America, one in Australia/Southeast Asia and one in the United Kingdom).