Bayut & dubizzle’s Antonello Supino on harnessing the power of data

How would you describe the growing relevance of data to business, particularly the property sector?
Data is the new “oil” at the intersection of business, product and technology. Technological developments have profoundly impacted nearly every sector, with new technologies changing the way markets communicate and do business. As a result, these disruptive tech innovations are powering new business models across classifieds, financial transactions, healthcare and other areas.

The real estate sector is no exception. Proptech is a portmanteau of two terms: property and technology. It refers to the disruptive new technologies and innovative ideas that seek to revolutionise the real estate markets. Proptech is reshaping the ways property is bought, sold, leased, designed, managed and marketed.

Tell us how your company has leveraged the power of technology and data.
As a proptech-based, data-led company where almost every decision made by the business is backed by detailed market intelligence, we measure success with financial and non financial KPIs in every initiative we venture into. But having data is very different from understanding how to use it as well as maximising its input in the growth and success of a business.

What we do differently is that we start from understanding the world around us, the business environment and our customers, then we collect all the raw information in one place, clean up any gaps and outliers, and standardise and summarise it to make it available for analysis and machine learning. In the background, we have a skilled team of people who’ve mastered powerful technologies that cover everything from data collection to advanced analytics and deep learning.

We’ve been committed to using data both internally and externally to generate business value and solve real business challenges with products that have a tangible and direct impact on the business. Bayut has even signed an MoU with Dubai Land Department (DLD) recently and started exchanging exclusive stats to our users in order to enhance the real estate marketplace in Dubai.

We have enriched our existing Checked and TruChecked listings with validated data from DLD, increasing property buyers’ trust in what is advertised. We use information sourced directly from the government to verify listings in conjunction with an in-house confidence base model.

This result has been achieved in a short time by integrating information from multiple sources, creating a simplified model, abstracting the complexity of the real estate market within our cutting-edge cloud-based enterprise data warehouse and then exposing the information to our business and customers through Bayut.

Price transparency is another example worth mentioning. We use tremendous amount of information available to train machine learning models that allow us to provide price valuation for properties and eventually predict future market trends. These tools are available to all our customers and partners.

What are some of the challenges you face when it comes to dealing with such a huge volume of data?
We have access to various data points, pertaining to consumer interest and preferences. Having said that, knowing we have the biggest property database in the country, with large amounts of data to process brings its own challenges. Working through these challenges and identifying ways to use data in an effective way is crucial for the growth of digital businesses. To achieve this in a cohesive manner, it’s very important to evaluate, study and process data.

What does the future of data involve?
Big data is essentially a collection of information from various sources, often characterised by what’s become known as the ‘5V’: volume (amount of data in terabytes), variety (types of data, structured, unstructured etc.), velocity (speed at which it is generated), veracity (degree to which it can be trusted), and value (business value of the information collected, how it can be monetised). Quality and depth take priority over breadth and volume.

In my opinion, the future is all about trust and accuracy, which brings us back to the component of ‘veracity’. Also, most companies do not invest enough in data warehousing, they want to have quick wins with analytics and artificial intelligence projects applied on raw data. I think that’s where the biggest opportunity lies.