Eric Tsai

Eric Tsai runs a company that sells a strange promise: take the most expensive part of real estate photography - the gear - and throw it away. Asteroom, the business he co-founded and now leads as CEO, lets an agent walk into an empty house, clip a phone onto a small rotating mount, and walk out with a professional 3D virtual tour. No tripod array. No specialist. No invoice with a comma in it.

The company's line for what it sells is almost poetic for a software firm: let buyers and renters "be there without being there." It is a mission statement and a market in one breath. And it is the thing Tsai left a comfortable seat at Facebook to go chase.

Today Asteroom serves more than 20,000 real estate agents across the United States, and it has quietly become something bigger than a listing tool. It is now plumbing for the appraisal industry - the first 3D tour platform to collect property data for Freddie Mac's ACE+ PDR program, and a supplier for Fannie Mae's value-acceptance workflow. The empty living room, it turns out, is a very interesting dataset.

From finding signal in feeds to finding it in floor plans

Tsai did not arrive in real estate by way of real estate. He arrived by way of numbers. At Northwestern University he double-majored in industrial engineering and economics, and he has said the combination is what kept him "sharp with numbers." It is the kind of thing founders say in interviews, but in his case the receipts back it up: a master's in management science from Duke's Fuqua School of Business, a summer at BlackRock, a consulting stint at Accenture, then data roles at Square and Facebook.

At Facebook he was a data scientist - paid to find patterns in one of the largest behavioral datasets ever assembled. Then, in 2019, he left. The more interesting dataset, he decided, was sitting inside houses that agents could not afford to photograph well.

Most PropTech companies dream of selling more software to more agents. Tsai's company found a second act that few saw coming: the people who decide what a house is worth.

Appraisal modernization is a dry phrase for a real shift. The government-sponsored enterprises - Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac - have been moving toward inspection-based appraisal waivers, where trained collectors gather standardized property data instead of a full traditional appraisal every time. That requires consistent, accurate, affordable data capture at national scale. Which is exactly the machine Asteroom had already built for listings.

In 2022, Asteroom became the first 3D tour technology partner to offer property data collection for Freddie Mac's ACE+ PDR offering. A year later it extended the same capability to Fannie Mae's value-acceptance plus property-data workflow. The tool agents used to sell a house quietly became infrastructure for valuing one.

It is a tidy arc for a former data scientist: build a cheap, fast way to turn a room into reliable data, and let the institutions that run on data come to you.