16/06/20 • Pietjan Vandooren
Corona Direct, a direct insurance company, operating in Belgium, launched its new home insurance product this month. Customers no longer have to complete a long list of questions, but instead can get a risk premium by merely providing the address of the property they want to insure. It is an ambitious step towards making their home insurance underwriting process frictionless. Rockestate delivers the data and technology, enabling Corona Direct to simplify the life of their customers without making any compromises from a risk management perspective.
28/05/20 • Pietjan Vandooren
Like most sectors, the coronavirus also impacted the Belgian real estate market. Due to social distancing measures, a traditional sales process had become temporarily impossible, which led to a significant decrease in real estate transactions in March and April. The impact on house prices remains difficult to estimate, but there is no doubt that buyers and banks will be more cautious in the coming months. With a publicly available history of real estate transactions, the government can, more than ever, offer a transparent reference framework to the various actors in the housing market.
25/09/19 • Kasper Van Lombeek
Zimmo's Prijswijzer has been running in production for a week. The analysis of the user statistics led us to several interesting insights.
17/09/19 • Kasper Van Lombeek
Zimmo has launched, in collaboration with Rockestate, a new website to help its users to estimate the price of a house. Rockestate has built the model behind the website. This blog post explains the basics of this predictive model.
17/09/19 • Pietjan Vandooren
The what, the why and the how with a particular focus on open geo-data
15/07/19 • Kasper Van Lombeek & Pietjan Vandooren
Home insurers tend to focus a lot on the reconstruction value of a house to calculate its risks related to a fire insurance. This value suffers from a number of serious flaws, while some more objective building characteristics remain un(der)used.
23/05/19 • Pietjan Vandooren
Publicly available transaction prices can make the real estate market more transparent. France is showing the way with their recently launched open data portal containing a price history of the past 5 years. Other European countries have similar initiatives. When will Belgium follow?
26/03/19 • Kasper Van Lombeek
Although heatmaps come with many pitfalls, we believe it is a good idea to interpolate listed asking prices and turn these interpolations into a heatmap. In this blogpost we go over the concept of a heatmap a bit more in detail, and explain our favourite interpolation technique kriging.
16/01/19 • Mathieu Carette
A WMTS (Web Map Tile Service) journey in the belgian coordinate system
07/12/18 • Kasper Van Lombeek
Depending on the context of the exercise, different metrics regarding adres matching are important. For some exercises you want to match 100% of the addresses. But in most of the Rockestate exercises, we don't need a 100% matching ratio. We need to be a 100% sure of each match. We illustrate this diffference with some examples.
15/11/18 • Mathieu Carette
Why 2D needs 3D: correcting building perspective in orthophotos
19/10/18 • Kasper Van Lombeek
Although automated feature engineering is hot today, we still highly value feature engineering based on background knowlegde. We demonstrate this approach with an example.
21/03/18 • Mathieu Carette
Challenges encountered while computing volumes and how to cope with them.
05/02/18 • Kasper Van Lombeek & Mathieu Carette
Fosdem gets better year after year. It's fun to see lots of known faces at the geospatial devroom, and this time we also gave a talk. We share a link to the video of the talk, and list some talks we liked ourselves.
18/01/18 • Kasper Van Lombeek
Thousands of people clicked on hundreds of names on our recommender system NamesILike.com. The result of applying matrix factorization on these user clicks reveal an unseen structure in our first names.
29/11/17 • Kasper Van Lombeek
Can we estimate the potential for solar energy for each roof in Flanders based on our 3D models for buildings? And what about the Zonnekaart of the Energie Agentschap Vlaanderen?
10/11/17 • Mathieu Carette
Quickly make an interactive presentation with two lines of CSS
26/10/17 • Mathieu Carette
Combining the strengths of pdal, ipyvolume and jupyter
08/09/17 • Kasper Van Lombeek
Using open aerial images, a list of 1000 addresses with swimming pools, and gdal, aws and scikit-learn as data science tools.