ListedKit Founder: Automating Real Estate Deals with AI

Karan Khanna (00:00)
Yeah, thanks Freddie for having me. I’m happy to be here. ListedKit is something I’m extremely passionate about. We’re a transaction management platform where we’ve built an AI assistant named Ava. Ava can read your contracts, build timelines for you, read your inbox, pull information in, fill blank forms for you, and just keep you on track end to end. So you can double your volume, triple your volume.

without making mistakes and keeping your client communication still stellar. We serve all 50 states. We have active users right now using us across the United States and Canada. And we help real estate teams increase their efficiency, improve their communication. We help independent TCs control the chaos that they’re seeing when they’re doing really high volume. And we help real estate agents stay on the road selling instead of staying on their computer managing their back office.

Freddie Steen (02:27)
welcome to the Investors Fuel podcast by Real Estate Pros. I’m your host, Freddie, and today I’m joined by someone I’ve been looking forward to chatting with, Karan, who’s been making serious moves in the transaction coordinator space of real estate. Karan, glad to have you here. I think our listeners are really going to take something away from how you’re approaching.

⁓ transaction coordination through an AI lens. So let’s dive in. First off, for people who may not be familiar with your world, give us the short version. What’s your main focus these days and what markets are you operating in?

Karan Khanna (03:10)
Yeah, thanks Freddie for having me. I’m happy to be here. ListedKit is something I’m extremely passionate about. We’re a transaction management platform where we’ve built an AI assistant named Ava. Ava can read your contracts, build timelines for you, read your inbox, pull information in, fill blank forms for you, and just keep you on track end to end. So you can double your volume, triple your volume.

without making mistakes and keeping your client communication still stellar. We serve all 50 states. We have active users right now using us across the United States and Canada. And we help real estate teams increase their efficiency, improve their communication. We help independent TCs control the chaos that they’re seeing when they’re doing really high volume. And we help real estate agents stay on the road selling instead of staying on their computer managing their back office.

Freddie Steen (04:52)
Research team sent me a note on this, Karan, on on on ListedKit. And one of the things that they mentioned was.

The gap you saw in the space in real estate in transaction was that every tool in the space stored files or managed checklists, but none of them actually did the work. Can you dig in on that just a little?

Karan Khanna (05:12)
Yeah, if you look at it’s funny because a lot of a lot of growth comes from self reflection. So if you look at how the old ListedKit worked, as well as a lot and most of our competitors today look, their whole system of transaction management software was you have to come in first, you have to set up all of these rules that would take three weeks, five weeks. I heard someone say it took them eight months to set up their transaction management software.

To then, when you get your contract, still manually have to type in all the information for it to do its calculation, all of that, to then just give you a checklist of things to do with maybe some preset automated emails going out. You know? So you’re spending all of that time and effort setting all of these rules. And at best you’re getting a checklist out of it, a to-do list. You still have to do all the work.

Freddie Steen (05:54)
Yeah.

Karan Khanna (06:04)
That just to us seemed like such a backward way of operating, given we are so in the future with with the kind of work AI can do for you. And that affected very early on how we built Ava. We looked at her as an AI-powered, you know, source of truth that has different skills and tools that can actually take away those jobs of repeatedly having to read the contract, write the email.

Fill the form and empower our users to do more like crisis management, one-to-one client management. And that’s kind of where the vision for Ava was. And we’ve actually kind of gotten so close to that now compared to when we started. But when we started, the first thing we knew that took the most time consistently was reading the contract. And that’s where we started. You all you had to do was upload the contract. Ava would automatically read it, calculate those dates, understand the contingencies.

Figure out is the seller a trust? Is it the signee of the trust? Or is it somebody else who owns the trust? Does all of that automatically for you. So you don’t have to repeatedly get stuck in the weeds of reading a contract when you could be getting new clients, being more efficient, being there for your manager, whoever you’re working with, reporting to, whoever that the other human that actually matters in the scene. And that’s kind of how the journey got built of no more glorified checklists. We want

a assistant that does the work for you.

Freddie Steen (07:35)
That’s not easy, especially in this climate. ⁓ what’s been the key to keeping the machine running smoothly?

Karan Khanna (07:42)
Customer feedback. Without our users, we wouldn’t exist. But I don’t just mean as the the the the monetary side of them paying us. I mean every single user that we have, we have followed up with. We have had discovery calls, design calls. I always look at myself as a translator more than this product builder.

I have engineers on the team who are phenomenal at building solutions. And I have customers who have very deep problems. I sit in the middle and I translate their pain into solutions. And so the single most important thing from this experience has always been: what do our users think? How do they feel about this feature? Do they get it? Do they like it? Does it make sense? Anything they don’t, we scrap it immediately. Anything they like, we make it better. We double down on it and we improve it.

And it it’s gotten to our point to the point where users, you know, they our customer, they know me by my first name. They they know I know about their personal life, they know about mine. Like we are partners almost now building this together, more than just a transactional relationship where for some reason I would like decide what to do and they have to get on board and my team has to get on board. That’s that’s not how we operate. We do the opposite, where I’m just the facilitator to

The problems that they have.

Freddie Steen (09:04)
Every operator I know has a moment when things where things got real. Maybe a deal that went sideways or a time that had to that you had to pivot fast. You mind sharing one of those moments for you?

Karan Khanna (09:19)
Yeah, I mean, I think we had a very scary moment like that maybe a month or two ago where we we wanted Ava to be this fully automatic, you know, running on her own assistant for you. And for some reason we felt it would be better to just kind of put aside development like improving the current application.

actively to spend some time on the side building all these new things and then releasing all of them once so it feels like, you know, my God, Ava two point is here and ⁓

This new assistant is here. As we did that, we actually built all the new features we needed. But if you know anything about building products, you should ship as soon as it’s ready. You should not hold features. We did end up shipping a bunch of our all those features that we did, you know, hold up. We we released maybe let’s say two out of the 10 that we built. And immediately on doing that, we realized, my God, there’s so many.

Like stability issues, bugs, because we were literally building a second version of the product. And then when we merged our old product with the new product, things kind of got out of hand and we had a lot of upset users. So I we me and the engineering team were on the phone for 12 hours a day, mapping all these issues out, fixing them, making sure they were good. And ⁓ that I think was a s a scary time, not for the future of the business for sure, but scary in that.

Anytime a customer is upset, I feel that pain very deeply. And that was very emotionally challenging to see our customers upset when ⁓ all of this started from a place of we want to make their experience even better. So definitely a a learning moment there.

Freddie Steen (11:48)
The kind of stuff people don’t talk about enough. And honestly, it’s what separates the folks who just dabble from the ones who stay in the game long term. Let me ask you this What are you most focused on solving or scaling next? What’s the next real goal for you, Karan?

Karan Khanna (12:07)
So I think there’s there’s two kind of lanes I’m looking at. One, we want more teams to be using us and we want that team experience to be better. It’s a bit of a snake eating itself of only when you have so many teams can you get the feedback you need to make it good for teams to get more teams. So I think the the snowball has started rolling with the teams that are coming and using us, and now we wanna double down and make sure that if you are a team using ListicKit, it is flawless, it is smooth.

It you don’t need to use another tool in parallel with Listicit because Ava can do everything you need. And then the second lane that I think we’re focusing on a lot is eSign and document management and compliance visibility. Ava is powered by documents already. All we need to do is make sure those documents are tracked cleanly, which we have right now. We have a compliance checklist.

We need to make sure new documents can be filled and sent for e-signature inside ListedKit. And as of today, I’m not sure actually what the date is, but as of today, form filling has been released. So Yeva can fill your forms and then e-sign should be releasing in a couple of days very soon. And then once she’s able to pull ⁓ see in your inbox that, no, closing has gotten delayed, fill out an amendment, send it for signature, get it signed.

I think we have actually closed the loop on the transaction management end-to-end. And we’d be moving into showing the compliance officers, the brokerages, the team leads, how compliant are we? Out of all the docs we need to have in our hands for all the deals we’re doing, where are we? This document is not signed. This document is still pending. We already have all that info. So it’s just switching on a dashboard that shows you. I think that’s going to be a really cool experience because we want.

the brokers, we want the team leads who are actually invested in the business to get value from Ava as well, because we have that information already from the deal level down to the last document.

Freddie Steen (14:10)
That’s that’s big, especially when we’re already in an environment where some of the big big box companies that we know, Fortune 500s, are really leaning toward the blockchain and smart contracts, not just because of the e ease of use, but also because of the push toward risk and compliance. A very famous risk manager once told me that there’ll always be someone who writes the system and there’ll always be someone who protects it.

The next move, especially when you have this transaction coordinator piece, transaction coordinator piece in in locked in, and ⁓ your focus on risk management, I think is huge. The next move can either compound things or create chaos depending on how you play it. Now, I know a lot of people listening, a lot of our real estate pros are either early in their journey or looking to level up. And I think they benefit from hearing this.

When it comes to building relationships and growing your network, what’s made the biggest difference for you, Karan?

Karan Khanna (15:58)
I I hope people like this answer, but it’s been listening. I feel like real estate as an industry in very interesting ways is is quite emotional for a lot of people. And not just sad, but angry, happy. There’s a lot of persistence that you need to be a successful agent.

You’re handling clients who are emotional about purchasing homes. A broker is anxious about deals getting delayed. Everybody in this industry, in a in different ways, is the owner of a business. Whether you’re an agent running your own, you are your business or you’re a TC with your TC business. There’s not a lot of employees here. Everybody’s almost like a mini CEO and everybody knows how stressful that is. Everybody has a lot of stories to tell.

I think it’s been really easy to go out there and meet people in the industry, make some solid connections. Cause everyone has a really, really interesting story to tell. So if you’re trying to learn, if you’re trying to go out there and make connections and expand your network, put yourself in an environment where one, these people are around, whether it’s a networking event, a mixer, a webinar, no webinar. There’s so many real estate webinars. Just hop in the chat, you know.

Ask insightful questions and listen. If you make people feel heard, especially here when everyone is so stressed all the time, you’re gonna feel like someone they can talk to, in my opinion, and get out there and and make connections. I am very against the opinion that you should pay any money to get into any secret club. You could if you have a lot, but if you’re just starting out and you wanna make organic connections, do it organically.

Freddie Steen (17:45)
Can’t fake that. relationships are everything in this space. All right, before we wrap, if someone wanted to reach out, connect with you, maybe collaborate or learn more about what you’re doing, yeah. What’s the best way for them to reach you?

Karan Khanna (18:03)
Go to listedkit.com. L-I-S-T-E-D-K-I-T.com. There you can sign up or book a demo with me and I will talk to you personally. we, as I said, are a small team, so you’ll be able to talk to me one-on-one. And if you want to sign up, your first transaction in ListedKit is completely free. So go in and just try out Ava as much as you want to. And we’re also on all socials at

Listedkit.

Freddie Steen (18:28)
Perfect. Well, listen, I appreciate your time, Karan, your story and your perspective. We need more people in this space who are doing it the right way. And thanks again for being here. And for those of you turning in, if you got value from this, make sure you’re subscribed. We’ve got more conversations coming with operators just like Karan, who are out there building real businesses. We’ll see you on the next episode.