Curb appeal … status, taste or just home? Some say that architectural style of a home says something about you, like your car or your clothes. Others care more about design, and less about outward impressions. It’s not far-fetched to think that either type would love to search homes by style.
Unfortunately, the search for homes for sale by style is weak at best and impacted by considerable misinformation. In other words, you never know what Google’s gonna get you because of faulty text-based descriptions of listings. The principle source of home listing, the MLS, includes architectural style only 33% of the time. What’s more, those descriptions are wrong half of the time. When you search for Modern Homes in California you will most likely get a fraction of what’s truly available. And more than a few mislabelled Mediterranean, Victorian and Craftsman homes.
Images speak better than words
Purlin fixed this using pictures of homes instead of relying on sketchy or omitted text descriptions. As a result, home styles are identified correctly 80% of the time, or 2.5X the accuracy of existing sources.* We trained our AI with millions of images to find homes for sale using a combination of advanced computer vision and machine learning technology. Home buyers (and renters and renovators) can now do home searches by specific architectural styles. They can see what those styles look like in the actual neighborhoods they live in or are hoping to move into.
We say, “a picture is worth a thousand words, but data in an image is far more reliable.” Even a thousand words is a meager facsimile for what your eye knows, consciously or not. We created technology that allow us to skip the awkward verbal translation.
*Based on over 140,000 listings sourced from California MLS
