Rechat, the AI operating system behind Douglas Elliman and SERHANT., is opening up its platform to outside developers, allowing brokerage firms, technology partners, and vendors to build and launch their own branded apps on top of it.
The announcement comes at a time when vibe coding and AI development tools have sped up building custom apps, but as Rechat founder and CEO Shayan Hamidi sees it, they’ve done little to help solve the more difficult problems that lie beneath the surface.
Build on top of it instead of building it from scratch
Rechat says that by making its platform open, it can bundle hundreds of third-party integrations, core intermediary systems, artificial intelligence, and enterprise-grade security into a single platform, giving intermediaries what they need to build and launch custom applications.
Shayan Hamidi
The company says many brokerages are looking for technology that feels like their own, rather than off-the-shelf software. But building one from scratch is expensive and outside of most companies’ core competencies.
Rechat’s open platform allows brokers and partners to launch branded applications on Rechat’s infrastructure without having to rebuild the underlying plumbing of their real estate business.
“Thanks to that foundation, brokerages and partnerships will be able to create production-grade apps in weeks or months instead of years. They will just build on an idea and not rebuild the underlying infrastructure,” Rechat Chief Technology Officer Emil Sed said in a statement.
Developers can now build custom interfaces that load directly within Rechat. Each app resides on the developer’s own server and is rendered natively within the platform at runtime, with no bundling required.
Instead, it leverages what Rechat already provides: live data such as contacts and users in your views. Actions such as updating records. Ready-made UI components such as email composer, date picker, and multi-step forms.
The result is an app that is fast to build, lightweight, and visually indistinguishable from the rest of the platform, Rechat said. Once registered, agents will appear on your home page and in your contact profile where they already work.
AWS for real estate
Hamidi said he privately opened Rechat about three years ago as a platform for building these types of specialized apps. Our large enterprise clients needed custom workflows and experiences specific to their business, but it didn’t make sense to build them for everyone.
“So we introduced an app platform,” Hamidi told Inman. “You can create a custom solution on top of Rechat, build it yourself, or get help from us.”
Douglas Elliman was the first. They wanted to streamline commission processing and reduce it from 18 days to a few hours. Rechat built it for them. Rechat also built custom solutions on top of the system for Porchlight and Nest Realty.
The challenge is you still have to be a programmer, Hamidi said. Rechat tried to be as simple as possible, but it wasn’t simple enough.
“Let’s take all of this and juxtapose it with what’s happening in the world with AI,” he said. “The cost of creating software will be zero. Anyone will be able to build apps quickly. That’s the big change.”
But there’s a catch, he said. That means the application layer is becoming a commodity. What’s important is what’s underneath, the foundation.
According to Hamidi, that’s exactly the gap that coding isn’t solving. It’s the distance between a cool prototype and all the sophisticated products needed for an enterprise product, including security, compliance, and data layers.
“You can spend a weekend vibecoding an app,” Hamidi says. “You can’t bring it into a company.”
This gap is one that Rechat spent 10 years building. Hamidi said this foundation has been in place, but the difference now is that people can quickly build software layers on top of it themselves.
“This is the same idea that Jeff Bezos applied to AWS,” Hamidi said. “He was building all this server infrastructure to run Amazon. And he said, ‘We’ve spent millions of dollars on this. Everyone else needs it. Why not turn it into a service? That foundation has enabled a whole generation of companies. Shopify did the same thing with e-commerce. That’s what we built for real estate.’
What securities companies are actually building
When asked what brokerages have built on top of Rechat so far, Hamidi said: “At the heart of it is personalization.”
“For 20 years, the industry has been pushing brokerages to adopt the tools available to them,” he said. “We are moving into a world where tools adopt what brokerage firms actually do.”
Hamidi said Ryan Serhant has built a suite of solutions for his brokerage firm on Rechat.
“He runs a full-service brokerage firm and doesn’t want his agents to say anything,” he said. “So he created an experience where agents place orders, routes requests to the backend, and AI handles the rest. It’s very customized to how his business works.”
Nest Realty is another example. These are built around relationship-based, high-touch marketing, such as gifts, personal support, and things that don’t fit into typical CRM drip campaigns.
“This has been their strength for 10 years, and now it’s digital and available to agents in one click,” Hamidi says.
There are also long-term changes worth noting. Hamidi said the fastest growing software users are not humans, but AI agents.
“The products that brokers build today will increasingly be used by AI tools that do their work autonomously,” he said. “That makes the conversation around fundamentals even more important, because fundamentals are what give AI agents the access controls and guardrails to operate securely. The most important UI in the next few years will probably not be screens, but APIs.”
Guardrails already included
Hamidi added that building on Rechat’s foundation also removes some of the cybersecurity risks inherent in vibecoding.
“If you’re building a website that charges people money, and you’re not using Stripe or a similar infrastructure to process payments, there’s a good chance it can get hacked,” he says. “You can spend a weekend writing code for that product and charge thousands of dollars through it. And it’s secure, because the payment processing part runs on a secure foundation. We didn’t have to build that part.”
The same principle applies to what Rechat is doing, he said.
“Everything in Rechat is stipulated. Lucy, our AI agent, can do a lot of work within the platform, but there’s no way to give her access to another agent’s data,” Hamidi says. “She’s got access controls. She’s also layered in MLS zoning rules, fair housing rules, association rules, things that out-of-the-box models have never been trained on. That’s why people get in trouble just by pointing out real estate issues to a common AI.”
From purchaser to builder
Hamidi said Rechat decided to open up its platform for this use because business customers who have been using Rechat have paid a lot of money.
“It required engineering and we often worked with them to build it. Now anyone can build it themselves,” he said. “There is a growing movement among brokerage firms to want to build their own tools, but they always run into a wall when it comes to delivery.”
Currently, Rechat offers a sandbox that you can quickly build and launch into production. Distribution is built in, and a broker with 1,500 agents doesn’t have to deal with hosting, onboarding or rollout, Hamidi says.
“You turn it on and it goes live to your entire roster,” Hamidi said. “Otherwise it would take months.”
According to Hamidi, the real estate industry is moving from being a software buyer to a software creator.
“We want to enable that transition so they can build quickly, build securely and build on a foundation that can actually support it,” he said.
He says much of this process has been made possible by advances in AI.
“Was it possible to go from New York to Paris 100 years ago? Yes, but it was expensive and very few people did it. Now you can do it with a long weekend. AI did it for software creation,” he said.
But what’s going on here, he said? Someone can vibecode up to 80% of a project in a month, and then the last 20% (basic integration work) takes over a year.
“I heard exactly that story at an event a few weeks ago,” Hamidi said. “That’s the gap. That’s what we’re solving.”
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