Despite being one of the richest countries in the world, and the overwhelming preference of investors for the property market of the country over stocks, Saudi Arabia remained data-poor in the real-estate sector until relatively recently.
That was something Ahmed Bukhamseen wanted to change, and his company Quant set out to transform the property investment market and open up pricing information to buyers, speculators, and investors.
As you might expect, at the core of Quant is data – advertised and realised prices, mapping, details of proposed and ongoing construction, geo-spacial data, imagery, and much more. We spoke to Ahmed at the recent MWC (Mobile World Congress) in Barcelona, to talk about the company’s vision and its journey to date. But first we asked what his chosen data platform of choice was – the basis on which the business runs.
“Our main challenge was to first comply with data protection. So, Saudi implemented new regulation laws about data protection, similar to GDPR, run by the Saudi Data and AI Authority. And for that we needed to have a local host for data protection. So that was our main driver for moving from Azure – Microsoft here in Europe – back to Saudi.”
Saudi Arabia, the Middle East, Africa and the APAC are target markets for Chinese tech giant Huawei, but it wasn’t an immediate given for Quant. “We discovered that Huawei offer cloud services late […] about this time last year. We started comparing Huawei with others.”
As Quant’s business model developed, so too did its requirements. The company started out just supplying information it drew from the Saudi municipal data registries, but has since enriched that core information with local data, and high-res satellite imagery.
“We were using a data centre [here] and the data had to go from Saudi to Europe and back. We were running AI on the edge, on images without storing them. But now we have different use cases, so we needed to store data before and after processing, after enrichment or maximisation. There was a huge cost, and we didn’t expect it at the beginning.”
Part of the issue was the imagery the company was pulling down from satellites to get up-to-date pictures of existing buildings on the ground, and those in the process of construction. It was grabbing detailed images once every two weeks, and is about to go live with a daily satellite photography cadence.
“We started testing Huawei in terms of latency, especially, because we streamed high volume data, and would like the individuals using our mobile application to get a seamless experience, and start navigating in-app.”
The app released by Quant opens the property market to anyone: individuals buying their first place, portfolio managers scoping new possibilities, investors of all sizes, landlords, and those – like Ahmed was once himself – hoping just to find a place to rent without the massive variance in prices that was the norm before Quant began its service.
Quant combines different data sources such a property prices, maps, satellite imagery, and government-approved planning documents among them to give its app users everything they need to find property or land to buy and sell.
The future will see Quant revising its data, further enriching it, and adding value for its clients. “We need to develop specific feature detection or object detection. For example, municipality data could state a company has zoning for a warehouse or extension, and we don’t know which one the owner decided on. But from space, we can build models and see the exact the building plan.”
Although Quant likely has the technical ‘chops’ to build its own models, it’s turning to Huawei:
“With our new development, computing the model [ourselves] would take us six months to deploy. Now when we run it, it takes four hours. And last time I checked with the team, we run it every week,” Ahmed said.
Quant’s plans include a service for retailers that will advise on the best areas to site their stores, given the known demographics of a neighbourhood – all data it collects, collates, enriches, and presents. Plus, there is a project on the table that extends the data scope to take in the rental market.
Given the speed at which Saudi Arabia develops, Quant and delivery partner Huawei need to move at least as fast. “We want to see you in Saudi, and see the return on real estate! We don’t talk about 2% or 5% growth: We’re talking about multiplying investments similar to the Bitcoin market. Foreign investors will be able to buy property or land with just the touch of a button, and they need data for that. They need to know the growth areas, how much it costs in perspective, before making decisions.”
You can download the Quant app, read more about the company on its website, and check out Huawei’s service offerings for Saudi and beyond.
(Image source: European Space Agency, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO.)
