Introducing: Total Home Score
Problems, problems, problems…
When trying to create an innovative product or service, it’s crucial to start with a clear and compelling problem. As an entrepreneur / innovator, the “best” problems are often simple, and seemingly obvious once you define them. But until you do, they remain hidden in plain sight. The world turns, people go about their daily routines, and no one questions why something inconvenient or painful persists. Uber transformed transportation because they questioned why you had to raise your hand to hail an over-priced taxi that provided poor service. It wasn’t difficult to diagnose that as a sub-par experience. Why did no one try to solve the problem earlier?
There is much, much more to say on this topic; check back later for a separate blog post devoted to it. With this context in mind, let me tell you about a problem our team is trying to solve.
If only I knew about this before moving in…
If you’re in the market to buy or rent a home, you are heading towards a high-stakes decision. This is a major financial commitment — probably the biggest one in your life. But more than that, you will be choosing where you, and perhaps your family, will be spending the majority of your resting hours. You want that time to be comfortable, allowing you to re-charge so you can take on the challenges of daily life.
Part of our normal routine for selecting a place to live is a ritual known as the “open house”, where you visit a home in-person, walk around for 15–20 minutes, and extrapolate that experience as representative of what living there will be like. There is a huge, hiding-in-plain-sight-flaw with this approach. 15–20 minutes is not enough time to truly give you knowledge of the factors that will impact daily living. It’s equivalent to kicking the tires on a new car, and then deciding to buy it without actually doing a test drive.
What kind of stuff might you miss? How about the railroad crossing a half mile away, where passing trains blow their air horn every hour? You visited on a weekend, but now realize that on weekdays your street becomes a local commuter road; enjoy starting every morning with car horns in the background. Perhaps you didn’t see any grocery stores on your drive over, but you were sure there must be one close by. Nope; the closest one is 15–20-minutes across town.
Chances are high that you, or someone you know, has experienced some form of livability surprise after moving somewhere new. You have two unattractive options when this happens: get used to it, or reboot the search-and-move process. Until now, we’ve accepted this as luck-of-the-draw randomness that comes with moving to a new home. There must be a better way.
Option Three — A New Hope
We are working to provide a third option — the Total Home Score (THS). THS measures multiple “hidden” livability factors using a combination of data and advanced analytics. By making hidden livability factors more transparent, you can prioritize your home search based on what matters to you. If you do choose to move somewhere close to a railroad crossing, or 20 minutes from the nearest grocery store, you’ll be making that decision with clear expectations about what you’re getting in to.
Total Home Score livability factors range from 0–100, with 100 being a perfect score. All livability factors start at 100, and decrease based on hyper-local data around the home.
Okay, I’m interested. What “hidden” livability factors does Total Home Score measure
Glad you asked. Total Home Score currently covers two livability factors: Road Safety Score: Built on Liberty Mutual’s proprietary data on daily driving patterns, Road Score measures areas where aggressive driving (e.g., speeding, hard-braking) are more common. If you want to move to a place where you can feel comfortable walking your dog in the morning, or letting your kids ride their bikes, Road Score is for you.
Road Safety Scores in the Boston Metro — red indicates lower scores.
Quiet Score: Peace and quiet are priceless. This score reflects the noise levels in the surrounding area, taking into account busy roads, highways, and trains. Check out the red line that runs through the center of “Beacon Hill” below — that is literally the Red Line subway. Living on the line can yield a Quiet Score in the single digits, while a few buildings over, you’re in the mid-50s. We know people who live above this subway — and it rumbles their whole building every time it passes.
Quiet Scores in the downtown Boston — notice the red line between Beacon St. and Cambridge St.
We also provide information about the “why” behind a score. For example, for the address pinned above in the Quiet Score map, we provide the following “Score Details”:
As noted above “Distance to subways” is a major factor in the Quiet Score’s decline from 100. Distance to local and high-traffic roads have only minor impacts.
By sharing the context behind a score’s value, we believe users will have greater understanding of, and confidence in, the estimates Total Home Score provides.
What’s next for Total Home Score? As Total Home Score moves forward, there are four things we want to accomplish:
- Getting feedback from users!
- Check out Total Home Score for yourself at www.totalhomescore.com and let us know what you think. Drop us a line at shineapi_general@solarialabs.com.
- If you’re a developer and/or a business, THS data is available through our Shine API marketplace, located at https://developers.solarialabs.com. We’d love to work with you to see how THS can help your business add value for our customers.
- Improving Quiet Score and Road Score to make them even more sensitive and accurate. For example, we have a team that just finished hitting the streets of Boston with decibel meters to help us fine-tune the Quiet Score. We’re also adding more sources of nuisance noise, like flight paths and fire stations.
- We are working to add additional “hidden” livability factors to measure. More to come on this soon!
- Scaling Total Home Score to new territories. We’re currently live in Massachusetts and Chicago, with more territories on the way. If you’d like Total Home Score in your area, please email us so we can try to get there sooner!
Signing off, for now We hope you enjoyed this overview of Total Home Score. There’s a lot more to talk about, so bookmark this blog and come back soon to learn more about other projects taking place in Solaria Labs, and how we approach innovation. Any and all feedback on Total Home Score (or this blog post) are greatly appreciated. Please check out the THS product and let us know what you think!
Happy Home Hunting!
(This blog post was originally published on January 8th, 2018)
