Welcome, prop.text readers!

In issue 39, we cover a new startup looking to map detailed data from the outside world.

the.pitch → Ensense
industry.chatter → Tower on ‘Billionaires Row’ facing challenges
beyond.the.curve → data on the housing market

Ensense Plans to Map the Outdoors

Online tools have transformed the process of looking for a home or an apartment. Remote buyers or renters can tour a property online with 3D technology, look at dozens of photos, check a property’s walkability score, find out its price history, research local schools, calculate payments, etc, all from the comfort of a couch.

But it’s almost impossible to get an idea of what the streets outside the property are like at different hours of the day without making multiple visits.

The startup https://ensense.ai/ was founded with the idea of filling that void. The company plans to attach its sensors to vehicles that roam the streets of urban areas to build a data set of neighborhood characteristics that include noise, air quality, traffic, retail locations, street parking availability, etc. 

“The idea is to create a virtual outdoor experience for buyers and sellers,” said Michael Trudeau, the co-founder of Ensense. “If you ever look at an apartment or a house at 3 p.m., the birds are chirping and the sun is coming through the leaves. But what is it like when that bar around the corner lets out at 3 a.m.”

The founders imagine their company could become the Matterport of the external world. Matterport pioneered 3D digital twins to provide 3D tours of properties; it was acquired in March acquired by CoStar in a cash and stock deal worth $1.6 billion. So far Ensense has raised $1 million in venture capital.

Ensense plans to start collecting data in Los Angeles with some 300 or sensors — off-the-shelf hardware that costs about $100 — then use AI to organize the database for Chatgpt-type queries. 

“The long-term vision of the company is to model cities in all their complexity, enabling us to identify the most promising neighborhoods for investment,” said Shahram Farhadi, Trudeau’s co-founder.

Farhadi compared it to a “Carfax for the neighborhood.”

Trudeau said that many people don’t know much about a neighborhood before they move there, and their primary concerns are crime and noise. Crime statistics are publicly available, but noise, and other physical characteristics are moving targets.

“Google maps updates infrequently, once a year at best,” Trudeau said. “Physical infrastructure does not change much day by day but what happens on the street corner changes by the hour.”

The data that Ensense is collecting is aimed at filling in the gaps to provide a fuller picture of how a neighborhood changes over the course of a day.

“What we’re trying to solve here is how to drop a person into a location at a particular time,” said Farhadi, who has a PhD in engineering from the University of Southern California and has worked on delivering AI products. “When you buy a house, there are a lot of experts that you use to look at the house, but for the neighborhood it’s mostly anecdotal.”

Trudeau calls it a “Chatgpt of the neighborhood tour” and used his exercise routine as an example.

“I like to run in the mornings,” he said. “How safe is it at 4 a.m.? How well-lit are the streets?”

Other folks might have more practical concerns, particularly germane to cities like New York, San Francisco or Boston. “How many parking spots are available at 6 p.m. that are a 5-7 minute walk from this apartment?” Trudeau said. 

These are questions that real estate sites like Zillow or Redfin cannot answer.

“You tell us what you care about and we can ask the data,” Trudeau added.

The company is working with scientists from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech who helped design the hardware, which has a sensor that can analyze air chemistry. This data can also be marketed to the Department of Defense, said Trudeau, whose background includes strategy roles at Google and Intel. He has an MBA from the University of Michigan.

The technology wave was supposed to make this type of information readily available by now. “We’ve been promised smart cities for a decade but the reality is that less than 1% have sensors in place,” Trudeau said.

The data is all out there for the collecting, and Ensense’s founders think they can get information about noise, construction and what other activities are going on in any particular neighborhood and they are working with MIT’s Senseable City Lab at MIT to figure out how many cars it takes to map out to get coverage of about 90%. 

Farhadi thinks that number is a lot less than one would imagine, given these sensors can be driven around cities 24 hours a day.

“We don’t need millions of sensors to cover the U.S., maybe tens of thousands,” he said. “We can do a lot of fun things with this data given the state of AI these days. We are taking steps to simplify this data and collapse it into a report.” 

A tower on billionaires’ row overlooking New York City’s Central Park is full of cracks and needs repairs that could cost up to $100 million that need to be done or the building could eventually become uninhabitable or endanger pedestrians, The New York Times reported. Some of the world’s wealthiest buyers paid tens of millions for the apartments in the 102-floor tower near 57th Street, and within months they were complaining about water seeping through some ceilings, the elevators breaking down and living rooms swaying in the wind. 

The government shutdown is jeopardizing thousands of home transactions by limiting access to insurance coverage for buyers in flood-prone areas, and cost the already struggling housing market billions of dollars in delayed contract closings, data showed on Tuesday. The report from HomeAbroad, a real estate investment technology platform, estimated that about 3,619 home closings were at risk nationwide daily, meaning a loss of $1.59 billion based on the current $439,278 median home price. States like Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida are particularly impacted. 

Just Because

For those unsellable homes, Jason Saft is apparently the man to call, according to The New Yorker. A longtime real estate agent, he went full time with Staged to Sell Home, which he founded to turn drab New York City properties into subjects for glossy interior-design magazines. Saft highlights his before-and-after transformations on his Instagram page, showing how fresh coats of paint, new furnishings, and attractive art can lure buyers. He’ll take on anything from a dark and dingy two bedroom to a fusty limestone mansion, and specializes in estate sales. Here’s a list of his advice, which would work for any property:

• Start with a little sage, “to get the ghosts out,” and then begin to envision whom you’re staging for.

• Paint. He prefers Farrow & Ball, the high-end British paint.

• Change the lighting. No flickering Bates Motel bulbs.

• Bring in good-feeling furniture: a richly textured armchair, a cozy bed with plump pillows, a mohair sofa. 

• Add accessories, like enticingly battered books, stoneware vases, a vintage foosball table or a bronze bust.

• Find the home’s special feature, maybe the view from a window or some woodwork, and do what you can to highlight it.

New York real estate agents say he works magic and is really in a league by himself.  “Give me your tired, your poor condition huddled messes yearning to be chic,” he recently wrote on Instagram.

(Jobs section will return next issue)

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