5 examples on how open data can help you find a home

One of the economic sectors that is experiencing a high growth in our country is the real estate market. Deciding on a property involves a lot of small decisions: Rent or purchase? In what zone? What services do I need nearby? What is the market price?

As we saw a few months ago, open data can help us make this decision in the most informed way, based on evidence and proven information. In Spain, this trend is also spreading, and more and more public bodies and companies are creating products and services based on public information to facilitate the search for housing.

A business with future potential

In the era of technology and information, real estate agencies are having to incorporate tools that allow them to know the market situation, something that is giving rise to new business models: companies that combine open data with analytics and Big Data to show in a simple way (through visualizations, dashboards, etc.) the market behaviour. Let's see some examples of Spanish companies that are emerging in this sector:

• Urban Data Analytics (uDA) is one of the companies that has emerged in recent years dedicated to segregating and geolocated knowledge of the real estate sector. Through Big Data and Business Intelligence tools, it provides a service of 190 indicators through APIs and an application. These indicators allow instant knowledge of both market and portfolio of a company´s real estate, and are very helpful to real estate agents who seek to make their investments profitable.
• Clicpiso, for his part, is a Spanish startup specializing in homes sale, with a peculiarity that differentiates it from its competitors: Clicpiso carries out the transaction in less than 7 days. For this, it use a valuation algorithm based on Big Data, which also automatically learns from itself to ensure that the processes and valuations of each property are optimized with each new registry.
• Another example is Strabi, who offers dashboards to keep track of home sales in Spain, both free and protected. Thanks to its web quevalemicasa.es citizens will be able to know quickly if their home was well valued at the time of purchase and in what situation it is now (above or below its reference price). This application relies on the use of open data and Business Intelligence tools, based on Open Source technology, for model development, data loading and analytical exploitation.

The involvement of public bodies

But, despite the positive growth data of the sector, we must also take into account the difficulties of a large part of the population in accessing housing, a concern that affects young people above all. The society is demanding measures from public agencies and these measures go through knowing how supply and demand are being managed. The Government of Aragon and the Madrid City Council, among others, have launched tools in recent years that allow integrating all this information:

• Inmuebles de alquiler, Aragón is the application created by the Government of Aragon in 2017 to know the prices of house and premises renting throughout the Autonomous Community. Thanks to it, citizens can search by street name or geolocation, as well as make comparisons through historical data. The objective: that the citizen knows if the price they offer adapts to the reality of the market.
• The Puerta de Alcalá Urban Planning Platform was created by the Madrid City Council in 2018 to collect all the information related to the different areas of the city and manage its urban cycle, from planning to construction. In this way, citizens, companies or administrations have more accessible, transparent, reliable and up-to-date information on municipal action in urban planning.

It is clear that we are facing a complex market, whose future is to boost economic growth while respecting the basic rights of access to housing. The knowledge of the sector, analyzing historical data and preparing future predictions, will allow to better adapt the offer to the demand, promoting a housing stock that responds to the needs of all citizens.