Last month, when former CEO of the Ontario Home Builders' Association (OHBA) Joe Vaccaro announced his resignation, he hinted that his next move would be in tech.
Now, the cat’s finally out of the bag.
This week, R-LABS Canada Limited Partnership (R-LABS), a company builder platform focused on real estate technology, and Teranet, Canada’s leader in the delivery and transformation of statutory registry services and property data and electronic workflow solutions, announced the launch of RIOS.
Vaccaro joins forces with Antoni Wisniowski, former President and CAO of the Municipal Property Assessment Corporation (MPAC) as co-founders of RIOS, a tech-enabled data and workflow platform. Together, they will work closely with the leadership teams at both R-LABS and Teranet.
Joe Vaccaro
The innovation company is designed to improve efficiencies in the Canadian real estate development industry, beginning with business-to-business and business-to-government solutions. Inefficiencies, delays, and costs in the industry are addressed by RIOS.
“The launch of RIOS is an exciting opportunity for Teranet and R-LABS,” says Elgin Farewell, President and CEO of Teranet. “This is the first real estate innovation company born out of our partnership and will focus on both business-to-business and business-to-government innovation. It is aligned with Teranet’s existing proprietary systems and supports our strategic vision to build stronger communities and economies.”
Teranet and R-LABS formed a strategic partnership in May 2021 to further support the development of Canada as a centre for innovative real estate technology companies and entrepreneurs that focus on purpose-driven solutions. Together with individual investors, the partners have invested $4 million dollars to launch RIOS.
“Working with our industry partners, our mandate is to identify problems in housing and commercial real estate,” says George Carras, R-LABS Founder and CEO. “We will do this by bringing the smartest minds together to create new technology enabled business platforms that will deliver industry innovation and transform the real estate industry.”
Pointing to his recent experience as CEO of OHBA, RIOS President Vaccaro notes that his work with the organization left him with a clear understanding of the limiting effect that inefficiency has on new housing supply. “I have always been front and centre of game-changing ideas, and this role with RIOS will provide me with the opportunity to apply my problem-solving approach and drive innovation within the housing and development sector,” says Vaccaro.
RIOS co-founder and CEO, Antoni Wisniowski, brings decades of tech-based product development, data management, and industry transformation experience with both MPAC and Teranet, and most recently as principal consultant at Stockbridge Innovation, to the new company.
Antoni Wisniowski
“I have a proven track record in leveraging disruptive innovation, technology and collaboration to deliver data and information driven real estate solutions that directly benefit government, industry and consumers,” says Wisniowski.
“My experience with client and stakeholder-facing solutions, together with Joe’s deep industry insights and perspectives, will allow us to create a sophisticated industry operating system to help address the current crisis in real estate development and position us to meet the challenges that are yet to reveal themselves.”
RIOS will bring greater efficiencies to stakeholders in the stream of new housing supply, beginning with a focus on solving the issues and challenges related to assignment fulfilment and new home warranties.
“We identified many problems in the new housing development process,” adds Carras. “These include the siloed environment in which workflows occur and data resides, and the resulting inefficiencies, delays and costs this represents for stakeholders. Through our venture building process, we have brought together a unique group of co-founders to lead this new innovation company and work together with all our partners to solve these problems.”
