This week, we interviewed Vincent-Charles Hodder from Local Logic.

Without further ado…

Who are you and what do you do?

I’m Vincent-Charles Hodder, Co-Founder & CEO of Local Logic. We are a location intelligence platform that provides powerful insights on not just properties, but the broader built environment in which they exist. We are passionate about the future of our cities, and we believe our platform has the power to make them work better for the people that live in them.

What problem does your product/service solve?

Local Logic’s platform combines traditional real estate data, such as demographics, and market comparisons, with a vast trove of other non-traditional sources to create powerful insights and precise scores for a myriad of external factors such as noise, traffic, green space, vibrancy, and walkability. Most real estate data platforms focus nearly exclusively at the property level, but Local Logic takes that a step further to paint the full picture of a given location, offering quantifiable insights about its characteristics within its broader environment.

This unlocks massive potential for prospective homebuyers and those in the real estate industry — including agents, brokers, developers, site selection teams, and other professionals — as it provides them with the ability to accurately and efficiently identify properties that meet their search criteria. Perhaps more powerful, however, is that we can not only characterize a location as it currently exists, but also extract forward-looking insights into how cities are evolving over time.

That can be incredibly valuable in guiding decision-makers about where to invest or what kinds of assets to invest in. Using our insights, our users can gain an understanding of what is currently being valued by consumers, which is the most powerful market driver. Those indicators allow them to track and understand trends over time, giving them a good sense of what a location or a neighborhood will look like in 2-3 years, and make more precise, confident decisions about how to maximize their assets.

What are you most excited about right now?

I am really excited about what seems to be a wholehearted embrace of data and analytics across the real estate industry. The results of a recent survey conducted by Ernst & Young offered some startling numbers. There’s been a huge rush of companies that want to invest in purpose-built tools for the real estate industry, and all signs point to a huge share of these companies desiring a better way to address their data- and analytics-related pain points specifically. In fact, those tools were rated as the highest priority of any technology in the survey, and 92 percent of respondents said they were piloting some kind of programs along those lines. Despite all of that, just 20 percent of the respondents said they were currently implementing those kinds of tools.

Real estate companies are recognizing the immense power these tools can unlock, but they don’t yet know how it applies to their specific function and process. There’s a wide-open space in the industry now, and that transition is going to accelerate in the near future. As more companies fill that gap, we’re going to begin to see the change we all want to see — going from development driven by gut instinct to more data and fact-driven decision making. That will lead to better and more impactful projects capable of creating real change for cities.

What’s next for you?

We believe the next asset class to go fully quantitative is real estate, and we’re building a system to guide that. Whether you’re buying your first home or building a huge real estate project, the process is really hard. You’re forced to make decisions based on a massive amount of intuition and gut instinct. That’s a great problem for AI to solve.

We believe understanding cities gives you the ultimate edge in real estate, and so what we’ve done at Local Logic is quantify the built world so we can understand them at scale. Eventually, that will make it possible to predict the $270 trillion real estate market. For the first time in the history of the world, we have enough data and computational power to understand the most complex ecosystem, which are cities. That unlocks incredible potential for not just investors, developers, and others in the real estate industry, but consumers as well.

We are urban planners at heart, and ultimately we want to use that model to support sustainability initiatives that will build better cities. Our data paints not just a picture of a given property or neighborhood, but also what the people present there are actively seeking, and what their preferences are. If we can eventually provide consumers with a sense of how life in a certain place affects their carbon footprint, or their long-term health, that will impact how and where they choose to live. Eventually, both the public and private sector will need to take notice, and that’s how we end up with better, more sustainable communities in the long-term.

What’s a cause you’re passionate about and why?

I am a huge lover of nature and the outdoors, and I’m very invested in the idea that everyone should have access to true green space, regardless of where they live or their socioeconomic status.

Local Logic believes that data and developing a greater understanding of every corner of a city helps further that mission, but I also believe that we have to start thinking about increasing and preserving access in a more serious way. For many cities that may be about developing new parks and programs to get residents outside, but it also means conserving more of the land that hasn’t yet been touched by development.

Thanks to Vincent for sharing his story. If you’d like to connect, find him on LinkedIn here.

We’re constantly looking for great real estate tech entrepreneurs to feature. If that’s you, please read this post — then drop us a line (Community @ geekestate dot com).