Is It Really That Simple To Find Rural Properties? How Terrascope Is Making Rural Real Estate Easier

Terrascope is a company that’s making rural real estate easier. Rural properties are often the best deals, but finding them can be tricky. It’s a matter of finding the correct information and having the time to do it! This episode will discuss the major challenges of buying and selling rural property: location, distance, and information. We will also share tips for finding rural properties and why they may be the best investment.

Terrascope is the first AI real estate agent for finding and browsing rural properties online. Terrascope uses a cutting-edge machine learning algorithm and intelligent design to provide a brand-new online property search experience by reimagining the rural real estate search process. Our search algorithm learns each user’s unique preferences to recommend the best listings like an expert real estate agent.

Learn more about us at: www.terrascope.io

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Is It Really That Simple To Find Rural Properties? How Terrascope Is Making Rural Real Estate Easier With Kehan Zhou

On this episode, we have Kehan Zhou, the Cofounder of Terrascope, the world's first AI rural real estate agent. Welcome to the show.

Thanks so much, Zain. It's a pleasure to be here.

How did you get started? We'd love to learn more about your story and your focus on rural.

It's funny because I’ve always been a city boy but always with a rural dream as well. Me and my cofounder, unbeknownst to each other, were looking for rural properties online. I was searching in Canada. I ended up flying to Saskatchewan to visit a farm and it was an interesting experience. My cofounder was looking in Montana, US.

We both faced the same pain point, which is finding rural properties online is such a difficult task. Using the current tools was not very efficient. First of all, you end up seeing tons of redundant listings that don't fit your criteria, and then you have to manually sort them through. I was spending hours and eventually, I gave up online. I called up a real estate agent and he was able to introduce me to the right properties. The inspiration behind it is moving the real estate agent experience to an online platform and to understand users’ preferences more deeply so we can make better recommendations.

What is it about this dream? Everyone wants to be back in nature and, for some reason, wants to leave the concrete jungles. Often, it’s the rural boy dreaming about going to the big city. We're seeing a reversal here. I felt that need, by the way, even prior to COVID. I don't necessarily think it's a COVID thing. COVID is helping. Deep down inside, we will have this desire. What are your thoughts? Talk to us about this rural versus urban mentality?

We see a revival of the rural lifestyle, and part of it was to look for an escape when people were cooped up during quarantine.

Everyone was having this dream of owning a ranch. It’s this revival of the romanticism of the rural lifestyle. Part of it was to look for the escape outside of your apartment when you're cooked up during quarantine. The media picked up on that and they spun the story to be like, “Because of COVID, people are looking for rural properties.”

When you look at the phenomena more closely, you can see that, even over the past decade, the rural property market has been booming both in terms of the number of deals that go through every year and the price. There's something going on in the market that's pushing people to search outside of their comfort zones.

The way we have observed that is that it comes from a couple of different sources. One is that urban living isn't satisfying people's needs anymore. With unsustainable housing prices, a lot of people cannot afford the space they need. It ends up with a big family cramped into a small apartment. Pollution and the crime rate are pushing people to think, “Do I need to be in the city anymore?” That is what's happening over the past decade.

People are looking outside of their city and thinking outside the box to find properties that can cater to their growing families or their aspiration of having an organic vegetable garden. What's interesting about COVID is that even though it's a catalyst, the impact in our minds is irreversible. What happened with COVID is that it popularized remote work.

You and I are working from home, as a lot of people are doing right now. Originally, once the offices were open, people could rush back. Unfortunately, that's not the case. People are still working remotely and many companies are allowing their employees to work from home indefinitely. What this does is that it essentially decouples the place people live from their workplace.

Before, it was like, “If I want to work in time, I have to be in San Francisco. I need to live there so I can be close to my company.” Due to the separation, because of the remote work option, people can still pursue their careers while living in Montana. A lot of people we've seen, what they're doing is, before, they want to go fly fishing in Alaska once a year. Now, they can live there full-time and still do their job very well. This decoupling is, in our mind, the most important factor that's going to continue to drive a booming market for rural real estate for the years and decades to come.

PTVC 145 | Finding Rural Properties

How do you define rural and urban? Where is the line drawn? What's your definition?

That's a great question as well because there are a lot of blurred lines. The way we define rural properties is anything that has a large piece of land. It's quite diverse and all-encompassing. It can be a ranch, a hobby farm, or a vacant lot. It can be a lake house or a cabin. We have a huge wide array of properties in our database. The true definition is it’s anything with a substantial amount of land to build on and live up.

Going back to this trend and talking about COVID especially, there are some interesting stats to share here. The housing supply in rural areas is down 44%. At the same time, in urban areas, it was only down 16.9%. There is clearly a shortage of homes. Supply and demand, what happens is a shortage of homes means prices go up. The prices are up 16% year over year as of January 2021. I don't have the latest stats at my fingertips.

Is this trend sustainable? This is a big if, not even as but more if. Do you feel that this might reverse if some companies start to mandate workers to come back to the office? People perhaps get disillusioned with the lack of amenities and the reality of living a rural lifestyle as people come flooding back to urban areas. I'm exaggerating here. It doesn't happen overnight like that. Is there a threat of a reversal of this trend? What are your thoughts on the asset class overall?

We are bullish on rural properties. The growth is not predicated. It’s just remote work. Even before COVID, the asset class had been performing really well. That's a great question. On the back of this resistance to go back to the office is this urge to find meaning or find more freedom in their lives. The reason companies are not mandating that it's that people don't want to go back. Let's say companies are coming on their employees very hard and be like, “You have to come back to the office.”

The other phenomenon we're seeing is this great resignation. People are looking for meaning. People are looking for freedom. This is the same driver that's motivating people to search for rural properties. These people are starting to become a freelancer. They're starting their own companies and they want to do it in an environment that's beautiful, healthy, and friendlier than they’re used to. It’s a combination of multiple factors, but it's all driven by this generation’s pursuit of meaning and freedom.

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About Zain Jaffer:

Zain Jaffer is an accomplished executive, investor, and entrepreneur. He started his first company at the age of 14 and later moved to the US as an immigrant to found Vungle, after securing $25M from tech giants including Google & AOL in 2011. Vungle recently sold for $780M.

His achievements have garnered international recognition and acclaim; he is the recipient of prestigious awards such as “Forbes 30 Under 30,” “Inc. Magazine’s 35 Under 35,” and the “SF Business Times Tech & Innovation Award.” He is regularly featured in major business & tech publications such as The Wall Street Journal, VentureBeat, and TechCrunch.