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by loftyai 2500 days ago
Thanks!

1. A few of the top and more intuitive things we found in the bay area to be indicative of an upswing include an increase in food trucks and vietnamese restaurants. As well as increases in the number of social media postings about pets.

2. Yes, we believe it will. We have backtested on a ton of different markets and been tracking our models predictions in these markets over the past year and it seems to apply for most cities where these alternative data sources are present. Obviously (and perhaps interestingly) the things that seem to drive revitalization do have some constants between cities but they do also vary a decent amount by geographic area.

3. This was somewhat tricky. Obviously some of the sources we use like home prices and sales are more readily available and have existed for a long time. Others, not so much, especially for alternative data sources. We tried to choose sources that had been around longer (around a decade was a proxy) and had historical data that could be accessed via an api or scraping. This limited the list of sources we could use but we are quite happy with the list we ended up having that met this requirement.

And yes, we had looked at that competition Zillow ran and drew some inspiration from it. We do currently use satellite and street view data and are actively adding more uses for it, although we currently do not have the sunlight measurement per property integrated. I noticed that (i think?) as a new feature for homes when you look at them on zillow which was cool!