SCROLL TO THE BOTTOM FOR TLDR The idea started in 2020 with a simple frustration: why can't you buy or sell a property from your phone the way you buy or sell a stock? I spent years pressure-testing that thesis, talking to agents, brokers, property managers, lawyers, and landlords across Canada and the US. What I kept running into was the same wall: the infrastructure doesn't exist to make that possible. The MLS system, controlled by the National Association of Realtors and the Canadian Real Estate Association, is structurally designed to gate that kind of direct access. So I realized the only path forward was to rebuild the tooling from the ground up. That's when the scope of the problem became clear. A one-click transaction isn't just a UX problem. It's a data problem, a compliance problem, a jurisdiction problem, and an infrastructure problem all at once. Every layer of the stack had to be owned. That's what Tochi is: real estate intelligence and infrastructure, built so that transactions, property management, and compliance can all be handled in one place, eventually by AI agents operating on your behalf, across any asset class, residential, commercial, or industrial. The deeper motivation is personal. I grew up homeless in Canada. Not because of drugs or dysfunction, just circumstance, the kind that doesn't make the news. In a country as wealthy as Canada, that shouldn't be possible. It stuck with me. The north star metric for everything we build is reducing and ultimately ending homelessness, starting with the digital layer: giving property owners and tenants sovereignty over their data, lowering the cost of real estate transactions, and increasing the percentage of listings where the owner can transact without needing an agent at all. A 100% self-serve transaction rate is the ideal. Every point closer to that is a point of real empowerment. As we move into a world of physical intelligence, robotics, sensors, telemetry, 4D spatial data, your home environment will generate enormous amounts of data. Right now that data flows to large platforms that consolidate it into bigger monopolies. Tochi is being built as the open, interoperable layer where that data lives and operates cohesively, where you can swap models, switch providers, and not be locked in. Property ownership should mean owning your data too. This launch is not a finish line. It's the first public iteration of something that will keep being built until the problem is solved. The web app comes first. Then the API layer opens for CLI and MCP surfaces. Then the marketplace. It's a long road and we know that, but the thesis has only gotten stronger since 2020. If you're a property manager, owner, or operator, or just someone who thinks real estate infrastructure is broken, I'd love to hear from you. TL;DR — Grew up homeless in Canada. Built Tochi to make real estate transactions as simple as buying a stock, give property owners data sovereignty, and work toward a world where the cost and complexity of transacting real estate is no longer a barrier to housing access.

Tochi Exchange

The real estate intelligence and infrastructure platform

The real estate intelligence and infrastructure platform