In a drastically evolving real estate market, the role of big-data and AI have never been more top-of-mind. With a sea of tech players entering the space and an agent base reevaluating their own relevance, we take a deep dive with the founders of TopHap, the one platform proving AI and agent go hand-in-hand.

When top producing real estate agent Anton Danilovich and seasoned software engineer Dennis Khvostionov set out to revolutionize the data analytics platform space for real estate, they had a data-geek’s tenacity to build a powerful tool to change the industry. Today, they are making headlines in Forbes, Inman and our pages for their runway-ready app, TopHap. An everyday business-decision tool, TopHap is empowering agents, brokerages, developers and real estate investors alike to dig deep into meta-market data and regional analytics to track where values are headed. It’s also empowering home buyers to put themselves in the best competitive position while allowing home sellers to understand pricing and true market value. With its virtually unmatched interface that’s slick, colorful and user-friendly, it’s clear TopHap has arrived.

“We need to embrace technology with one hand and the client with the other.”

We sit down with Danilovich and Khvostionov to learn more about their vision, their game-changing platform and the future of AI and the agent in real estate:

G: Tell us why TopHap is needed in the industry now from an agent perspective.

TH: Many agents are waking up to the fact that they must use technology to boost their credibility, provide real value and build a trusted relationship that clients can rely on. With the increasing availability of public and private data combined with machine learning and AI insights, we can show clients more than just fancy bells and whistles. We can empower them to turn what may be their largest transaction ever into their wisest transaction ever.

G: There is often resistance or fear of AI replacing the role of the agent. Tell us why an agent would develop a tool like TopHap? How will you stay relevant and how do you harness the power of big data?

TH: The answer isn’t exclusively about data. It is also about how we analyze, understand and present that data. The most powerful force on earth, the human mind, is limited in its ability to process mountains of data simultaneously. If someone asks you to figure out the cubed root of Pi, you’ll immediately turn to a calculator, a machine, to help you out. And that’s OK. We need to embrace our limitations and partner with technology.

AI can do much more than this. It can use machine learning to take a series of changing data points, compare them with historical trends, uncover correlations that we might never have seen, and tell you what a house is actually worth—and how much it will be worth next year and the year after that. Machine - learning algorithms can observe both static and evolving trends and factor them into calculations of a property’s value in real time. Similar methods can reveal neighborhood trends, how they shift and how they may change in the future. They can reveal how much to invest in a property or how to renovate it to maximize the specific preferences of a neighborhood.

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G: So it’s “power to the people” with TopHap?

TH: Yes, as a group of committed professionals, we can and should provide our clients more than just surface information; we can provide the deep information they need to make an informed decision. For buyers and sellers, it will become a right, not a privilege, to have access to this information.

G: Tell us more about the platform and what makes you different from Zillow, Realtor.com, Homesnap and others.

TH: What makes TopHap different from the existing online real estate platforms is that they all focus on search, while we focus on research. Their value is promoting properties while our value is providing data-driven market insights. Our far superior and unmatched interface colorfully processes critical comparative market analysis (CMA) information. There’s a plethora of data points we have that other platforms don’t. For example, proximity to schools and walkability scores are merely surface-level data points and the easiest-to-understand value indicators. Homes get more expensive when construction restrictions, such as a sloped lot, earthquake zone and other environment concerns enter the equation. Our software considers land use, government policies, municipal infrastructure, geography, traffic and noise pollution—to name a few—to determine home values. Real estate analysis tools of this depth simply do not exist and there isn’t another product like TopHap.

G: How do you do that?

TH: TopHap breaks it all down according to several key data points: value, property, region, hazards, market, investment community and school. Each of the categories has a growing list of searchable data points which a user can filter according to common MLS-type data. It’s a deep dive and it’s hyperlocal.

G: Given the powerful tool you’ve built, how do you see the role of agents’ evolving and staying relevant?

TH: Agents must accept this reality: data matters. The modern agent doesn’t need to become a data scientist, but we do need to deliver the data-driven insights that clients want. To make this happen, we need to embrace technology with one hand and the client with the other. If we use data to help buyers and sellers make the best decisions of their lives, we can do better than make money—we can deliver the trusted advice clients deserve.

Anton Danilovich
anton@tophap.com
TopHap.com

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