“LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION” is not an address

It’s a feel. What’s outside a home can be as important as what’s inside the foyer. Big or small a backyard is its own, separate world. A sanctuary for reflection, relaxation and play. When looking for homes for sale, doing a home search by backyard provides a view into the neighborhood.

Neighborhood is part of Home

Seeing what surrounds that fantastic modern home (and all of the homes nearby), fills in important blanks what it would be like to live there and like that. In a perfect world you could visit and experience the backyards and neighborhoods of all of every home that you are curious about.

But the reality is that current physical restrictions make it near impossible to explore all of the properties that you find interesting. COVID-19 has made showing logistics more complicated. Time constraints are less controllable. Because of all of this, despite plenty of homes for sale, plenty of demand and cheap loans, time on the market (time it takes to sell/buy) is unnaturally long. Truth is, the very real worry that you find the perfect place after it’s gone, or after you’ve closed, still looms large.

Purlin’s StyleExplorer allows you to start with a home search by backyard virtually. Our AI combines computer vision and machine learning also learns what backyard designs you like the most. It makes getting a “feel” for a place imminently possible, and actually finding it and buying it more likely.

Real not hypothetical

There is a not so subtle benefit of this powerful tool beyond just a home search by backyard. It’s the power of peeking. And it applies to looking to buy, or looking to renovate (for you or prospective buyers). StyleExplorer reveals the actual exterior and interior features of homes in the actual neighborhood where you want to live. This is critical, because your home will be in the context of a “location, location, location,” not a designer’s website.

Home search by backyard will reveal a variety of results which tell a story about who lives there and how they live.
A Peek into the backyards of possible future (or current) neighbors in California

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How important to who you are is what your house is?

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

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How to find the right home without knowing what you like

You like what only you like when you see it, even when you can’t put a finger on it. That one piece of fruit or flower in a field stands out and says choose me. Multiply that idea by a thousand when looking at homes in the sea of listing sameness. Imagine if you had a tool for finding a home using style, your own personal style …

Say you are looking for modern homes in Manhattan Beach, CA. Whether you are using home search site or an agent, most often homes for sale are picked for you. Very basic queries that deliver very basic results. You are left to choose which one creates the most tingles (or any?). We think this tradition is backwards. So we reversed it.

We created StyleExplorer to help you figure out what you like before forcing the “what do you want” question. It’s more than just a way for finding a home using style. It’s the first tech tool to allow you to compare the styles and decor of homes side-by-side. You can search every room, feature and view in a specific neighborhood so that there is no question which one to pick.

Image demonstrates on of the Purlin's StyleExporer's unique features when finding a home using style: displaying images side-by-side of interior rooms of different houses.

As you explore your preferences and “Peek” cool images, StyleExplorer keeps track of the details. It learns what you like to make your home searches more productive later. This unique personal style profile gets included in the overall search calculus of Purlin’s matching algorithm. That way when you search for a home to buy, your choices are not strictly defined by rational calculations and externalities. “Finding a home by style” means your consideration set is homes that you will likely like. Your search is through the unique lens of what you like, or, finding a home using style not choosing from options chosen for you.

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