Craig Rowe reviews Cloze AI’s latest, a system-wide artificial intelligence business assistant called MAIA, tasked with helping real estate agents manage tasks, people, events and business.
Cloze is a business automation platform that excels in automating sales and marketing communications. It offers deep task management, intricately connects people, events and properties, and automates marketing campaigns and transaction workflows. It has integrations with powerful systems such as Courted and Canva and offers bespoke bridges to popular industry tools to create data-connected workspaces.
What stands out
- Deeply embedded AI comms automation
- Omni-channel conversation tracking
- MAIA (My AI Assistant) powers notes, summaries, insights
- AI-prompted creative asset creation
- Source-agnostic lead capture and nurture
- Completely mobile-first
Who is Cloze?
Cloze is still seen by many — stigmatized, perhaps — as a CRM. I don’t know; maybe we lack for definitions when it comes to software providers that don’t fold neatly into typical baskets.
Upon moving into real estate around 2015, the company did position itself as such. Today they’re working to absolve potential customers of that narrow perspective to emphasize the many other business enablement features and benefits its added along the way.
I credit Cloze’s creators with realizing early on that the mere presence of software won’t make someone better at sales. It can make good salespeople better, however, and that’s who I think can benefit most from its adoption.
It aims to create and in some instances change how its customers react to new information flowing into its business, whether it comes from a document or a text. It doesn’t let you sleep on incoming leads or day-old tasks. Blending calendars with communications and to-do lists, Cloze nudges and pokes, alerts and acts — a power emanating from its ability to conduit data from a host of powerful outside software products, from Claude AI to Zenlist. (More on Claude later.)
Artificial intelligence was thing at Cloze before it was a thing anywhere in real estate, but now its leveraging broader consumer acceptance and fast-evolving capabilities to assist customers in a myriad of ways, all culminating in what it calls MAIA, My AI Assistant.
Clozing the loop on what’s next
MAIA can use either voice or text to create property-specific marketing materials through Canva, respond to an email with specific terms or summarize a lengthy email sent by an upset listing client. It’s an AI assistant that learns from the context of your business — from documents to emails.
MAIA can perform the surface level stunts, like speaker-phone note taking, appointment setting and reminding you to follow-up. Its more advanced use cases rely on integrations with tools like Cloud CMA and HomeSpotter. This is where all true AI models excel.
MAIA can be commanded to update an existing CMA with new inventory and send it to the buyer. It can subscribe people to new listing alerts, add them to segmented email lists (e.g., lakeshore luxury buyers) and even create a display ad through HomeSpotter or launch a new “loop” in Dotloop.
I was told more direct integrations with MAIA are on the way, a promise I have no doubt will be fulfilled sooner than later given Cloze’s fundamental commitment to open architecture. On that note, it’s most productive in an enterprise setting, where its many value propositions can be applied at scale, allowing it to make sense of how teams and top producers and new recruits respectively manage leads and generally work at varying wavelengths. It derives value from scattershot practices, like disparate beams of light congealed by a prism.
Readers already comfortable working with large-scale AI platforms like Anthropic’s Claude AI can continue doing so through Cloze’s use of MCP — model context protocol, basically an API for AI-specific applications. You can ask Claude to add contacts or provide content to Cloze. For now, consider this a limited use case, but one that nevertheless demonstrates to me how far ahead Cloze is looking. Watch for other consumer-facing AI platforms to be added soon.
Cloze has stood out in a sea of CRM sameness for close to a decade. It doesn’t get the same widespread, street-level attention as others because it’s not an everyman’s business application. It was one of the first to be mobile-first, deliberate with its use of AI and direct about each new feature’s purpose. It’s always ahead of the market but doesn’t outrun it. With MAIA, and from what I’ve seen on the roadmap, Cloze isn’t braking.
What I see here now is a bonafide way for brokerages to adopt AI, instead of merely applying it to fragmented use cases. It’s now one of a handful of solution providers that offer this kind of internal data empowerment and attaches it to traditional productivity needs.
I’m now of the mindset that brokerage leaders need to make connecting their business systems priority uno when choosing technology vendors. Limit logins, streamline vendors and focus on the operation, not the market. It’s really the only thing you can control.
The future is here — and it’s powered by AI. October is Artificial Intelligence Month at Inman. We’ll dive into how agents, brokerages and startups are harnessing AI to reimagine real estate, and we’ll honor the trailblazers leading the way with Inman AI Awards.
Have a technology product you would like to discuss? Email Craig Rowe
Craig C. Rowe has been writing software reviews for Inman since 2015. He started in commercial real estate at the dawn of the dot-com boom, helping an array of commercial real estate companies fortify their online presence and analyze internal software decisions. He consults with residential brokerages and agents on technology decisions and marketing and helps Inman readers understand the ever-evolving landscape of proptech.
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