Ten Questions with Rowan Aldean, Founder of Casa Platform

As anyone who has ever tried can tell you, finding somewhere to rent in London is hard. Rowan Aldean (pictured below) is a founder on a mission to change that.

After speaking to Rowan, it seems clear that his team's ambitions don't end with just making it easier to find an available apartment in London. They're daring to dream about building a new breed of AI-driven property listing sites capable of sweeping away the incumbents...

Hi, Rowan. Tell us about Casa. What is it and what’s the business model?

Casa Platform is an AI proptech startup that focuses on making the annoying parts of finding a rental faster by giving an AI personal assistant to everyone. For renters today Casa Plus provides real-time notifications for all rentals on the web that you care about - which we know helps users after we revealed that the average London rental is gone in 46 hours now!

As far as our AI personal assistant for estate agents, we’re working to automate administrative load on their end and are looking for three more agencies to pilot alongside in Q1.

Casa is free. Casa sells productivity, not attention.

How do you get your listings?

We’ve built a highly scalable and resilient pipeline that tracks the web for rentals, and removes low-quality and scam listings before forwarding them to our “LLM enricher”. Our partners can also list directly for free via data feeds.

The experience of searching on Casa feels quite different from searching on other marketplaces. What was the thinking behind the UX?

The Casa journey will soon change drastically to simplify even more. Project Duolingo, heavily inspired by the lessons on the language-learning app, was a core element of our recently launched Casa Plus feature.

The entire experience stems from a basic principle—how can we build a single point of interaction whilst optimizing ‘time to first listing’ for our users?

You and the team seem to have a background in AI. How has that helped and how do you use AI on Casa?

We spend a lot of time at the frontier, speaking with experts, tinkering, and at events and hackathons. Casa uses AI to label and categorize listings from across the web. Casa also uses AI to support plain English search for users with a foundational (and improving) system for matching you with optimal listings. All of these AI-first components power the real-time notifications behind Casa Plus and its successor which I'll mention shortly.

Building a challenger in this industry is notoriously difficult (especially in the UK). What gives you the confidence that you can succeed?

I could talk for an hour about this one question. For brevity let’s say two things hold...

Firstly, the big players have an innovator's dilemma.  If we 'casino betters' are correct about the death of the attention model, which serves nobody directly, then they will have to wean themselves off their primary revenue stream and they'll end up with a 'build or buy' decision.

Secondly, other early-stage players are in the rear echelon of this innovation, with products that lack technical complexity or a high vision-execution ratio. For context, we built our core infrastructure in 15 weeks. Put simply, Casa is simply better.

Who are your backers and are you currently looking to raise money?

We’ve been bootstrapped thus far and began testing Casa Plus, our paid feature, in December. Its formal launch is planned in Q1 2025. Currently, we’re seeking strategic investors ahead of beginning our raise effort. As they say in Silicon Valley, ‘never not raising’.

What is Casa’s biggest challenge?

The most pressing concern is The Bitter Lesson. Our challenge is focusing on a revenue-generating and growing product today which we must position to not die to raw compute gains in the next 3 years.

If AI computer use matches a regular house hunter (the ultimate prize) then the game we’re playing changes entirely. Not only will this kill classified ads entirely, but beyond reaching that point is unknown so we want to maximize when we’re right and minimize if we’re wrong.

What is one thing our readers might not know about but would probably find interesting about the London rentals market?

Ahead of announcing Casa Plus we ran a market analysis on London and found that on average rental listings are snatched up in one day and 22 hours! Using just daily email alerts you don’t stand a chance anymore.

What is Casa currently working on?

We’re proud finalists for the AI Agents Global Challenge, where we’re the first known proptech to have an AI personal assistant for renters.

We're also looking to partner with estate agents trying to increase productivity and profitability as we build a similar AI personal assistant for them. We’re looking to run pilot programs with three more organizations this quarter.

Are there any companies in the global real estate marketplace industry that have inspired you or who you pay especially close attention to?

As a team, we’re more inspired by product-led, design-led and operator-led companies. I keep my finger on the pulse of everyone but Buena and Airbnb spring to mind. I think marketplaces as a concept (technology aside) are going to fundamentally change as user behaviour moves to this 'service-as-a-software' society, yet we’re conscious that genius has the fewest moving parts. And the industry today has a lot of moving parts.