Description

Camphor has published its AI Property Search tool for all homebuyers, real estate agents, and real estate brokers to learn more about properties using our own AI assistant built on top of a proprietary datalake. Check out search.camphor.co to try the product! (Note that we are launching this product in a public beta. New releases will be coming out every week!)

Created

October 25, 2023

Created by

Roshan Srinivasan

Category

Feature

Imagine you are looking to buy your first home. You want to learn more about the neighborhood you are buying into or maybe you’re interested in learning more about the local school districts or how far you are from the local grocery store. Most buyers are using Zillow or Redfin for this today. You have to look up a property or specific area based on your budget, criteria for bedrooms/bathrooms, but you have have 30 other things on the back of your mind to find your perfect home. But how do you search for things like how I can remodel my kitchen or how much this home will appreciate over time, or any other question I have in the back of my mind? 🧠

Now what if you are a real estate agent or broker? You are working with a buyer in a more consumer-centric world. More importantly, with interest rates going up, the number of homes you’re able to close on per year has been down in 2023 compared to 2022 or 2021. How do you get more information about a property or similar properties to one I am selling in a neighborhood to help close the deal as an advocate for either the buyer or the seller? 📈

Buying a home is personal. It may be your first home, second home, a vacation home, or maybe an investment - and the decision-making process for finding this home is incredibly unique to each person. Solving this problem is why my co-founder Shawn and I (Roshan) are building Camphor! 🏠

Our path so far…

Prior to Camphor, neither Shawn nor I had any background in real estate or proptech. I started looking for real estate investments to semi-passively make money, and while Shawn’s family has made investments in commercial and residential real estate, both of us came into this space as product and engineering hackers. I had previously worked in the automotive space at a startup backed by a16z, NEA, and Energize Ventures as their first product hire and was previously a product manager at Roblox while Shawn had worked in engineering (hardware and ML) at Google and Uber.

We both had a lot of mutual friends from college at UC Berkeley, which is how we got introduced to each other, and both had a shared passion for solving this specific data problem given our exposure as small-time real estate investors and by proxy to investments by our families.

What is Camphor?

Camphor’s mission is to expand access to residential property information. We look at this information across zoning, parcel info., transaction history, property financials, mortgages, neighborhood sentiment, weather, property hazards and more. To learn more about our data and competitors in the space, check out this blog post here.

Our product is our data and we’re exposing it in two ways:

1. AI-powered property search for buyers, agents, and brokers - see below to learn more about this tool. Feel free to check it out at search.camphor.co!
2. An API for developers to work with - if you are a solution provider or proptech company that has a product component dedicated to real estate acquisitions, home equity, or inspections, check out our API documentation here.

Our goal is simple: we want to help real estate professionals and consumers with making smarter decisions through data. This can take many forms: real estate acquisition groups interested in adding more alternative data to improve AVMs for investment strategies, real estate agents looking to surface more information about a property for a buyer to close the deal sooner, or help buyers with figuring out what they are looking for when it comes to buying their first (or next) property.

We’re also venture-backed but we’ll be making a more detailed post about this in the coming months!

How our property search tool works:

Camphor’s AI property search is built with the intention of giving any user with the ability to write a question or statement in natural language format—whether it be a qualitative or quantitative question—into a property search query. You can check out our property search tool at search.camphor.co!

There are two levels in which a user can query data:

1. Querying a list of properties based on various attributes - currently, you can write queries in a natural language format searching for a property based on a:
• specific neighborhood, county, city
• MLS number or address
• when a listing was posted or updated last
• property type (single family, multi-family, condo, or townhome)
• year the property was built, internal square footage, and lot size (in acres)
• number of units (if multi-family), number of bedrooms, number of rooms (including office space), number of stories, and number of bathrooms

See example queries for a list of properties below:
2. Querying more information about a single property - once you query for a list of properties that meet your criteria, you can also click into a property and filter for more data about a specific property. Example queries include:
• Asking more information about a neighborhood a property is located in
• Asking what the best modes of transportation are. (If you are in NYC, you can also ask about the closest metro lines to the property)
• Asking about school districts in the area
• Asking about the best restaurants or grocery stores

Why would someone ask these questions? These questions provide more context on the value of a property, property appreciation, convenience, and safety which are all valuable to different homebuyers as well as property owners looking to compare their existing property and value to neighboring properties in a specific zip code.

See example queries about a specific property below:

Currently, property search is only available in the Bay Area, CA and New York City, NY, but we will be expanding into more cities/regions in the coming months!

This is just the first step of Camphor’s property search tool. We’ll be launching more features for filtering based on more data attributes, improving reliability and performance, and expanding geographic regions we operate in.

Stay tuned for more more updates! We iterate quickly so we will be releasing new features every week! 🏎️

Why launch in a public beta?

We’re building this tool for consumers (buyers), real estate agent, and real estate brokers. We believe this is a good way to solicit feedback from a broader community. More importantly, there may be some other use cases for our tool outside of the intended use cases and we want to give you the opportunity to check it out! 😉

Get involved and give feedback!

If you are a homebuyer, real estate agent, real estate broker, or head of a brokerage in the residential space that is interested in joining our private advisory group, we will give you access to early product updates and the opportunity to give feedback before we release new updates. Fill out the form below to sign up! 📄

Spread the word!

Share this article in your network with friends, family, or others you know who are looking to buy a home or are real estate agents/brokers or work in an operating capacity at larger brokerage! Feel free to also follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter to see more updates. 🙂