Funda, Netherlands largest property website with over one million visits a day has started using big data to develop homes that buyers want.
The portal which attracts more than 4.3 million unique visitors a month says the Dutch dreamed of living in castles, and many wished they could afford a detached house, but end up settling for a terrace homes instead.
Based on this information Funda asked two architects Jeroen Atteveld of Heren 5 architects and Dingeman Deijs of Dingeman Deijs Architects to design homes using their insights to create the perfect home that would appeal to the people in Netherlands.
“People are searching for homes on Funda are looking for larger houses than they can afford. We thought it would be interesting to take this a step further, would it be possible to combine dreams with reality? How would you be able to achieve this visually? We have used the data we collected as building blocks. The fun thing about all this is that the data is less abstract than you might think. You can use it to design a house,” Funda data analyst Jurriaan van Gent said.
By interpreting the data, architects Atteveld and Deijs made ‘space and freedom’ the foundation of their design for the Funda house.
“We think that a feeling of spaciousness is incredibly important. That feeling can be created by other factors than simply square meter plot size or living area, such as, for example, the ways in which you can look and move through a home, the views and amount of natural light. That’s why we took the spacial qualities of a castle as a starting point and applied them to a terraced house,” Deijs said.
The Funda house is a terraced house, with three floors, pointed roof and dormer, but on the other, it differs in some ways. The dwelling also comes with an open landing, and the stairs meander through the house, connecting all the rooms with one another.
“Especially now the real estate market in the Netherlands is picking up again, and houses sold at a faster rate, it is important to continue to listen to the housing needs of the Dutch people and create innovative homes. The purpose of the Funda House is to start a discussion about how the Dutch want to live and what the role of big data could be,” Atteveld said.
To date, Funda has had one billion views on its website for last year alone from its population of over 17 million people in the Netherlands.
