skyline with text boxWhen real estate tech entrepreneur Chris Drayer (see LinkedIn) gets started on something, WAV Group is always willing to take a look. Today we connected with Chris to get an inside look at Revaluate, a big data resource that pulls property attributes from 2000 data sources to tell a property story.

Today, Revaluate is in Beta and only available to New York City properties. There is great news and not so great news about this. The great news is that they tackled one of the most challenging cities in America to collect property data. The other great news is that New York City has an insane amount of housing spread across lots and lots of high-rise buildings, some of which have higher populations than small towns across America. It’s a big market with lots of consumers and real estate pros. It is free today, but they will charge in the future. The bad news is that it only works for New York City today, so you cannot see how the data will look in your market yet. Look at the sample report here.

When we look at products, we try to understand what is different. In this category, there are a number of property reporting tools available, including Realtor’s Property Resource, OnBoard, TLCengine, Realty Trac’s HomeFacts, MOVE’s Find, CoreLogic’s Realist, and a bunch of category killers like WalkScore. For the most part, Revaluate has stayed clear of those solutions., for example, there is no AVM.  But in some ways, they pick up some important home attributes like Flood Zone, Crime, and air traffic noise that you do find in other applications.

Some of my favorites were

  • Heating System Interruptions – I guess that many Manhattan building lose heat often.
  • Energy Efficiency – Apparently many of the buildings are not very energy efficient.
  • Rats, Cockroach report anyone?
  • Elevators Up Time – Elevators break, and if you live on the 50th Floor – you want to know how often.
  • Litigation Records – How often and what is the context for legal battles in the building.

To stay on point, they have a lot of data that I have not seen before but find very interesting. It is presented with a thoughtful UI. Check it out.

If you think it is interesting, reach out and talk to them. I think that it may make sense for an NYC brokerage firm or a portal that covers NYC to put the application in front of a bunch of consumers to see the net impact. They are also talking to a number of technology companies’ about additional partnerships.

Property Reports leveraging big data is an exploding area of lifestyle search.