A Chat With Rowan Aldean, Founder at AI Property Search Platform: Casa

Piece written by Rhys James (@r_james4)

Casa, an AI native property search platform founded by young entrepreneur Rowan Aldean, 24, is disrupting the real estate market by introducing a platform in which users can input simple English terms to find their ideal property rental.

For example, users can type, ‘three bed apartment in London with garden for less than £3000 per month’, and the AI platform will notify users of any properties within those criteria as soon as they become available.

TechRound spoke to Rowan Aldean about his journey founding Casa.

Can you tell us a bit about yourself?

“I was born in Iraq, I moved to Manchester and then studied at Swansea University. From this, I got into tech and decided to intern at a couple places to get some experience. I ended up working at Europe’s most valuable private company, the fintech unicorn Checkout.com.”

Checkout.com is a financial company that helps businesses to manage and process their payments.

“From Checkout I saw that there’s an opportunity to be one of the first building AI property searches, which we are. We are one of three in the UK, and the only one focused on rentals.”

“I have a bit of a background in real estate, my family’s involved in it, my auntie was an estate agent. I’ve seen transactions, I’ve seen over 30 sale transactions. Loads and loads of rentals, I’ve rented five times in four years, so I understand where there’s inefficiency in the process and where we can use this new AI technology to make that a more simple and painless process.”

How do you describe what Casa is to people?

“Casa is an AI native property search platform, so it reduces the time it takes to find a place to rent from four weeks to four days by making everything more efficient. You can just search in plain English what you are looking for and receive exactly what you are looking for whenever it becomes available on the market. It reduces the burden.”

Why did you decide to make Casa?

“The hypothesis is that all of our search experiences are going to change and going to become more personalised. So, you have Perplexity for Google, we are Perplexity for Zillow. We are disrupting an old model that hasn’t changed for 20 years, and we now have the technology available to change that at low cost and high scale. 

“I thought, with the experience that I had; I was in the client balances team at Checkout, dealing with high volume and high throughput, I was like cool, this is clearly a data and scale problem because technically you can build personal property search, it’s called an estate agents, but an estate agent can only serve two people. We can potentially build a companion for finding a place and managing your place, that can serve a billion people.”

What difficulties have you faced while making Casa?

“I think the real difficulty is, what looks like an overnight success is never an overnight success, and we’re figuring out how to disrupt something that works, but to make it better. Not only a little bit better but ten times better, and that’s the hard part.”

Aldean added, “So, you look at Perplexity now, what they’re doing is they’re monetising by something like, Perplexity for business, Perplexity for education, Perplexity for students, and figuring out how you can build a model that is equally as profitable, if not more so, that’s the hard part, and that’s where we are at right now.”

What does the future of Casa look like?

“I very much view AI property search as something that is inevitable.”

Aldean describes how he wants Casa to have a similar impact as Uber had on the taxi industry.

“The word Uber is a German word but now when people say Uber you don’t associate it with many of, or lots of, you associate it with a ride hailing company. Casa will become the go-to place where you associate Casa with finding housing.’ Oh, just use Casa, oh go and check it out on Casa’. That’s what we’re aiming for in the next ten years, we think we can get there. What happens along the way is probably not within our control as far as external players. It’s generally one of those things that, once you’ve built something and have proven at a very big scale that it’s working, you start to see other people are probably more interested, and so how Rightmove act, how CoStar act, how these other players act, is not within out control.”

Casa is currently accessible for the London rental market, but as I spoke to Rowan, he mentioned that he was in San Francisco, and that he would, “love to start things up in the US, but real estate works differently here.”

Aldean added that he would like to see Casa be used in New York, San Francisco, London and India, “which is a potentially super large market for us.”