PropTech Solution Development

Shelia

Sheila is a land prospecting tool currently being developed by the PropTech division at Value Living. Sheila was conceptualized to serve a specific need, allowing real estate developers in the UK to easily find the right site for their next project. This is done by combining the power of a large dataset the team has built and maintained, a user- friendly interface allowing users to seamlessly select different search criteria for their sift, a powerful API backend ensuring security and performance, and third-party integrations with leading technology providers.

Sheila also has a specific focus on optimizing locations for the affordable housing sector (S106), to find out more get in touch.

Dataset

A key feature that leverages Sheila’s performance is the large dataset powering its different functionalities. This dataset was created using a variety of data sources, data crawling techniques, and data processing and validation scripts, giving Sheila access to a variety of housing data, demographics data, economic indicators, etc. Some of the sources of this data are the ONS, the Land Registry, well-known real estate aggregators, etc. Moreover, this dataset is protected by different layers of security and is constantly being maintained and expanded manually and via crawling scripts based on pre-determined time intervals.

UI/UX

Using Sheila is a straightforward process, thanks to its user-friendly interface and its well-established user experience. Its interface consists of filtering tools, allowing the user to visualize on a map different LSOAs that meet the user-provided criteria (commute time, rental price, sale price, population, employment, etc.). The user could then use the LSOA lookup details to check the details of a specific LSOA. This allows one to check the different data available on this LSOA such as the rental and sale prices of different real estate unit types along with AI-provided predictions on how these numbers might vary (feature currently being developed), demographics data, greenbelt areas, brownfield areas, and much more. Moreover, integration with the UK land registry is being undertaken which would provide the feature of checking ownership and planning information of a specific plot of land in the LSOA in question. Other UI/UX features include creating user accounts, assigning different usage permissions, and authorizing different lookup requests such as a general commute time query to a specific centre point.

APIs and backend

Working with geospatial data requires high computational resources due to the complexity and nature of the data involved. To tackle this challenge, Sheila was built on top of a powerful architecture and data processing techniques and scripts, hosted on powerful cloud-based servers. The backend technology stack uses the latest technologies available to guarantee performance, security, and expandability. This was necessary since Sheila provides classical data interaction, but also introduces deep learning and advanced computational features.

Third-party integration

To guarantee the best performance and most accurate results, Sheila has leveraged the power provided by well-established third-party solutions providers of which one could name: Google Maps (for map visualization), Google Places API (for geospatial data and computation), and the land registry API services (for accurate planning data from official resources).