The buy side hadn't seen the data. Justin McGee Odger built it, then sold the business.

Justin McGee Odger did not come to real estate through real estate. "I've got a background in data science, actuarial science, and management consulting," he says — three disciplines that share a habit of asking what the numbers actually support.

That habit is what he brought to Deedable, and it shaped which end of the property market he pointed it at.

Justin describes the problem as an imbalance rather than a gap in technology — one side of a transaction seeing more than the other.

"Deedable was focused on the buy side of real estate, but that was either buyer's agents, people buying homes, people renting as well, and renting agents," he says. "And what we wanted to provide was a more equitable insights into the property market, which the buy side hadn't seen before."

The first was built for professionals: a tool for buyer's agents "understanding how house prices might grow into the future".

The second is the one that says most about the company. It was "an AI-enabled product that used rental insights to negotiate rent increases on renters' behalves" — and the renters he had in mind were specific. People "maybe who didn't speak English first, maybe didn't have the availability of data to them, or were just very busy professionals that didn't have the time for that kind of thing."

It is a narrow, unglamorous use of AI, pointed at people for whom the alternative was simply not having the time.

Ask most founders what drove them to AI and you get a bottleneck. Justin rejects the premise.

"I think for me, it wasn't so much a challenge that AI brought and needed to solve. It was an opportunity," he says. He had been "experimenting with AI in some of my data science work, and I saw that there was a ton of opportunity here to capitalise on, which I think led to some early adoption and being part of one of the early cohorts of the Pathfinder program."

Early adoption has a cost that does not show up in a roadmap, and Justin names it precisely.

"When you're building with AI, it can be sometimes a bit isolating," he says, "because rather than being a group of data scientists or a group of developers, it's you and the machine, and you're building and you're bringing out information and it's getting you along the way, but you're not really talking to a person."

That is the gap the Pathfinder cohort filled. "And having a group of people that were also building with AI at such an early stage was really cool. It kind of helped me feel like I was onto something."

Justin's account of what the program did well is not about curriculum. It is about temperament.

"To be an early adopter of AI, I think you need to have a bit of curiosity about the technology," he says — and the team running it matched his. "So, they were available to meet your curiosity and bring forward some ideas and really encourage you along the way to stoke that curiosity."

Deedable was acquired. "The business has been acquired, so it's part of Homer now," he says — the property app he now points people to, "especially if you're on the buyer side."

Justin runs a different business today, and the habit stuck. "I use AI every day, absolutely," he says. "The expectations of the market have changed, and my clients expect to have results a little bit more quickly and a little bit more comprehensively than they ever have before, and AI really helps with that."

He is careful about where he thinks the value actually sits. AI has "really accelerated the way business is done", he says, and what that buys is room: "It's helped us lean more into our creative side of things, our critical thinking and our problem-solving in a creative way. And the things that are a bit more mundane or repeatable or have just been done many times before, we can rely on AI to accelerate, so we can really keep that magic available for our clients."