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TopHap, a geospatial data visualization company that supports the real estate industry in relocation, development and marketing decisions, is now in beta testing with OpenAI’s ChatGPT plugin, the artificial intelligence (AI) tool that’s rapidly expanding its presence in the industry.
The AI’s presence will assist TopHap’s users in navigating its “47 trillion records, covering 150 million parcels,” the company told Inman in a June 6 email.
TopHap co-founder Dennis Khvostionov said the plugin’s LLM (large language model) capabilities will allow users to “chat” with their map and search interface.
“You can ask questions about [a home’s] characteristics, amenities, surrounding area, and even investment-specific queries,” Khvostionov said.
Sample questions include, “Can you summarize the construction permits if there are any?” “Can you tell me about the schools and their ratings?” “Are there any hazards in the area?”
Users can also ask about weather histories, average home prices and specific home summaries to generate responses about a house’s interior features, appliances, recent updates, construction permits and potential hazards, such as records of hail damage, earthquake risk, lead presence, wind damage probability and if there’s ever been a tornado reported in the vicinity, among a number of other notable insights.
TopHap’s intrinsic advantage as a real estate product is largely two-fold: Its reporting granularity and the layering of it over physical landscapes, which largely determine where and for how much real estate can be built; it drives commercial building trends, civil infrastructure funding and in the end, property values.
TopHap was initially reviewed by Inman shortly after the company’s initial launch in 2019, noted for its compelling visualizations of land and market information.
“The most simple way to describe TopHap is to say it’s a map-based comparative market analysis tool, but goes further by offering deep data presentations through colorized maps and easy-to-adjust search parameters. Agents can use it to help buyers predict where to buy next, show developers where to buy land and help investors find hidden pockets of value,” the review reads.
In late 2021, it revealed a number of updates, including an iOS app that uses visual recognition of properties to initiate research.
Users need only point their phone’s camera at a property for the app to engage the iPhone’s GPS and gyroscope, which identifies the address to pull in its data sets and apply the many property information tools TopHap offers.
TopHap’s choice to link up with the fastest-growing AI software in the space was a good one, sure to make its resources faster to access and its users quicker to decide.
