PropEco are a start-up on the Geovation Scotland Accelerator, and we’ve been working closely with them in the Geovation Tech Team. As a new property tech company, they were established in response to the growing climate emergency. Dave from the  Geovation Tech Team tells us more about the startup and how the Tech Team are supporting them. 

Using data sources such as energy performance certificates, flooding, planning history, satellite imagery, broadband, and climate, they are able to create a complete assessment of a property in the UK. This can then be used to assess and improve that property in terms of climate resilience, energy efficiency & liveability.

Having just received a beta ‘Climate Resilience Assessment’ for my own property, I can say it’s an extremely useful guide for me to consider as a homeowner, and likely for anyone considering purchasing a home.

Chris from PropEco has been very keen to streamline their processes, and use data to its full potential in developing and automating these property assessments. He also wants to push the data further, such as by developing flood prediction models, as well as looking at future climate predictions, and anything that can bring additional context and insight to the assessment.

How the Tech Team are helping PropEco

To help with this, the Geovation Tech Team has been developing a climate database and accompanying API to quickly look up climate values across a variety of climate measures: rainfall, sunshine, temperature, wind speed, ground frost, and more.

The Met Office publish climate models for the UK, in some cases going back to the 1800s, at a 1km grid level of detail. Extracting data from these has been a challenge, as we wanted to create a lookup that would provide instant access to a large number of climate values, pre-processed and assigned to all property UPRNs. That included scanning over data many terabytes in size.

We also needed to provide data lookups that provided context to the climate values for a property. For example, it may be interesting to know the average annual rainfall for a property, but you also need to know how that compares to others. This involved ranking all properties based upon certain measures, such as average temperature over a ten-year period, and returning that rank whenever doing a property lookup. This hasn’t yet been incorporated into the assessments, but when it is it will provide a really useful level of additional information.