This week we have been in touch with Natalia Rincon, CEO & Co-founder of CHAOS.
CHAOS is an urban forecasting company for real estate investors and city developers. Their solution provides a better understanding of cities’ complexity in the form of an easy and intuitive map-based dashboard. The AI-powered urban insights and forecasts enable fact-based decision-making for urban investment and development, which leads to the creation of more liveable cities around the world. By integrating urban data with crowd insights CHAOS produces trademarked indexes from city to neighbourhood level (macro to micro level) with different machine learning modelling approaches. The company was founded in September 2017 and is based in Helsinki, Finland.
I’m an Architect by formation and, while in practice, I noticed there were multiple processes, like the understanding of local residents, that were not automated. Information on how people move, where they spend time, or what are the parts of the city they like, has always been gathered manually, through surveys and old-fashioned methods of collecting data. I remember sitting in front of a cafe one time to count the passersby in a street. All these methods, I realized, can be automated through the use of big data.
AI allows us to understand patterns through the study of big data. One concrete example in which AI helps to create affordable urbanisation is by detecting market value trends and correlating those with the forecasted demand and supply of a specific location. This means that we can predict the increase in households of a specific area and understand if the area would be well supplied in terms of housing, services, and infrastructure. The gap between demand and supply will determine the price of the area. So, by understanding how these areas affect each other we will be able to anticipate and implement solutions that will create the biggest positive impact.
At CHAOS we believe that liveable, or in this case, sustainable cities can only be achieved through fact-based insights. Therefore, providing information that takes into account real estate traditional metrics and crowd insights for market analysis is crucial to make decisions that will ensure long-term value.
Planning for end users will not only improve the quality of life in cities, but for the first time residents will consider them in Real Estate decisions. This hasn’t been done before, the Real Estate has been very focused on prices, and forgotten that the only real factor that affects valuation is people (demand). Our ultimate goal is to see citizens from around the world enjoy beautiful and sustainable cities. That’s at CHAOS core.
We are speaking of the most old-fashioned industry, Real Estate; which means that the adoption of new PropTech solutions is slower than in other segments. However, this industry, which traditionally has been dominated by big companies, has started to see a shift. We now see younger people creating companies focused in real estate or joining established ones. They are the ones bringing change to organizations as they explore new ways of transforming the industry; they are eager for change.
As in every industry, Protech has experienced different adoption waves. The first one was very focused on the performance of buildings, so a variety of companies emerged which were focused on IoT systems, design softwares, or energy saving tech. After this, the construction side started to look for ways to improve safety and organization in sites and add, for example, the use of robotics for complex tasks.
Today, Real Estate is catching up and looking into new ways that improve investment and developing decisions through data analytics. This wave will only grow stronger as municipalities and governments demand more sustainable ways of building cities. Therefore, we are seeing a huge interest in data, however, there is another wave bubbling below and corresponds to forecasts and simulations that could provide much more reliable information than data alone can.
“How can we use CHAOS insights and forecasts in our organization?” – Traditionally Real Estate companies have had analysts process multiple points of data related to transactions and valuations. So, when our customers have to do a market study for a particular asset, they look into excel sheets and might make calls to brokers and their own network. CHAOS dashboards automate all these tasks and, most importantly, add non-traditional data to the mix.
A study from Mckinsey explains how big data will change the way we look at valuations. In the future, on top of the traditional factors, the market price will depend on non-traditional variables such as services, amenities, future plans, and demographic forecasts, that will influence the area in the future and that will cause valuations to change.
Therefore, the use cases are multiple and lie not only within the real estate investment and market analysis phases of urban development, but also include players interested in planning development concepts, building, handling zoning, and overall seeking a sustainable approach. The possibilities are unlimited.
CHAOS is expanding to Nordic and European countries this year, so our goal is to enlarge our network and find fruitful partnerships that will help us take the next step. Relevation has already proven a good event to do this in the past and we are happy to be here again!
CHAOS has been consistently winning the top places in pitching competitions, however, one that I’m very proud to mention is the winning of the WSA award, which is a framework of the United Nations aiming to promote UNSDG through innovation. In 2019 CHAOS won the citizen engagement global category due to the high focus we place in people and liveability of our cities.
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