2017 REBNY PropTech Challenge (1st Place)
WINNER: Sustainable Maintenance and Operations category
A team made up of Prescriptive Data engineers, Augmented Estates, also won in the Sustainable Maintenance and Operations category. Their product allows for augmented-reality-enabled IT, operations, and facilities management. Basically it allows a smartphone to operate as a scanner for a room, letting users see a building’s sensor and factual data in real time while walking around the space. The app uses a powerful search engine (Algolia) to localize relevant data points and a stand alone wireless sensor network (Wireless Tags) for spatial data acquisition. Sensor data is posted to the cloud and sent to Algolia from where it is served to users.
The Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY) launched the REBNYTech Committee, whose stated mission is to ensure that New York City remains the leading edge of the global PropTech ecosystem. To further that goal, the organization just hosted their first PropTech hackathon, bringing together more than 100 of the brightest minds in the property and technology industries to hack cutting edge solutions to real-world challenges faced by the world’s leading real estate companies.
The hackathon, part of NYC Real Estate Tech Week, took place at Grand Central Tech — an incubator that provides office space and other resources to startups. Hackathon participants were allowed to compete individually or as part of a team of up to five people and were provided access to APIs and datasets from REBNY and other sources. The teams worked across six challenge categories—AEC (Architecture, Engineering, Construction), Brokerage, Cybersecurity, Geospatial Intelligence, Sustainable Maintenance and Operations, and Open Hack—to compete for a total of $75,000 in cash and prizes.
What resulted was an outpouring of innovation incorporating cutting edge technologies like drones, virtual reality, sensors and machine learning. The event began on Friday and by Sunday evening participants were presenting products ranging from broker marketing solutions, to interior scanning software, and even an emergency response tool.
The panel of judges included real estate experts Sandy Jacolow, Valerie Rosenberg, Duke Long, Leila Collins and Damon Hernandez. Entries were judged based on originality, creativity, innovation, analytical skills, strategic thinking, and practical implementation. The entry that earned the highest overall score in each of the six categories won the REBNYTech Hackathon challenge for that category, receiving a $2,500 prize, and qualifying for the three month “Gauntlet Challenge”.
