By: Elowen Gray
In real estate tech, most platforms pride themselves on efficiency, automation, and inventory. But Nesti, a rising proptech innovator, is taking a radically different approach—by focusing not just on the technical side of homebuying, but the emotional journey behind it.
“Real estate is personal. It’s about dreams, identity, even fear,” says Ravinna Raveenthiran, CEO and founder of Nesti. “When people move across borders or buy their first home, they’re not just making a financial investment—they’re entering a completely new chapter of life.”
That philosophy is shaping every product decision at Nesti, a platform that’s steadily gaining traction among global buyers and sellers looking for more than just a search bar and a chatbot.
From Listings to Listening: Understanding Real Buyer Pain
Many real estate apps look the same: filters, maps, listing photos, and maybe a mortgage calculator. But Nesti’s team realized that for international buyers—or even just anxious first-time homeowners—what’s often missing is guidance that speaks to how they feel.
“There’s this hidden emotional friction in real estate,” Ravinna explains. “It’s not just about price and paperwork. It’s about confusion, isolation, and fear of making the wrong choice—especially when you don’t understand the system or the language.”
For buyers navigating foreign markets, the anxiety is often twofold. First, there’s the fear of being taken advantage of. Then there’s the overwhelm of managing cultural, legal, and financial complexities without support.
Nesti’s mission, then, isn’t just to streamline the process—it’s to humanize it.
Building Tools That Understand Emotions, Not Just Actions
To address that, Nesti is leveraging AI—but not in the way many tech companies do. Instead of focusing solely on automation, Nesti’s AI is trained to detect emotional friction points during a user’s journey. Are they hesitating at the loan pre-approval step? Are they revisiting listings repeatedly without reaching out? Are they stuck between choosing location safety over pricing?
Using these behavioral signals, Nesti nudges users with the right kind of help—whether that’s a video walkthrough, a live consultation, or educational content tailored to their situation.
“It’s not about pushing people to convert,” Ravinna says. “It’s about being present when they hit a wall—especially the emotional kind.”
This emphasis on empathy is a deliberate departure from traditional UX, which often treats buyers as datapoints. For Nesti, each user is seen as someone with hopes, fears, and questions they might not even know how to articulate.
A Support System, Not Just a Platform
What does a true support system in real estate look like?
For Nesti, it means blending automation with real human touch. The roadmap includes intelligent agent-matching that factors in communication style, cultural fluency, and empathy—not just transaction volume. It also includes self-paced educational modules designed to walk users through complex topics like cross-border financing or neighborhood zoning laws, using plain language and visual storytelling.
Perhaps most notably, Nesti is developing a built-in emotional support toolkit—an interface layer that surfaces calming content, community-driven advice, and affirmations during high-stress moments like bidding or financing rejections.
This is not a gimmick. It’s based on behavioral science and market feedback from hundreds of users who said the hardest part of buying property wasn’t finding a place—it was staying sane during the process.
Empowering Agents, Not Replacing Them
While many tech platforms position themselves as alternatives to real estate agents, Nesti sees agents as collaborators—not obstacles.
“Our philosophy is: the right agent is a guide, not a gatekeeper,” says Ravinna. “But they need better tools too.”
To that end, Nesti is developing features that help agents understand not just what their clients are doing on the platform, but why. Emotion analytics, user sentiment tracking, and tailored communication prompts help agents check in with empathy and context—so follow-ups feel more human and less transactional.
There’s also a growing library of soft-skills training, designed to help agents become more emotionally fluent with diverse clients, particularly international buyers who may be navigating cultural sensitivities or communication barriers.
Thinking Globally, Designing Locally
One of Nesti’s boldest moves is its focus on international buyers—an audience often underserved by North American real estate tech.
“Most platforms assume a domestic user journey. But for someone moving from India to Canada, or from the Philippines to the U.S., the pain points are totally different,” Ravinna explains.
From inconsistent document standards to neighborhood safety concerns and even visa implications, global buyers face hurdles that few platforms address. Nesti is building localized onboarding flows, neighborhood insight dashboards, and country-specific buying guides that are curated—not crowdsourced.
This hyper-considerate approach makes Nesti feel less like a tech tool and more like a digital companion—one that understands both the logistical and emotional reality of finding home in a foreign land.
A New Real Estate Philosophy
If Ravinna had to summarize Nesti’s philosophy in a sentence?
“Homebuying is not just a transaction—it’s a transformation.”
That belief has turned Nesti into more than a listings site. It’s a platform that believes you don’t have to sacrifice empathy for efficiency, and that technology should ease emotional weight, not add to it.
For global buyers looking for more than just another app—for something that gets what they’re going through—Nesti might just be the real estate partner they didn’t know they were searching for.
