🎉 As we enter an exciting year at Chimnie, we are thrilled to share some of the most significant advancements and updates that shaped our journey in 2024. Our commitment to providing comprehensive property data and insights has driven us to innovate and enhance our offerings, ensuring you have the best tools and information at your fingertips. Here’s a look back at the highlights of last year:
Exciting New Features
🏠 Free AVM: We launched the UK's only free Automated Valuation Model (AVM) API for homes. Get instant and accurate property valuations using UPRNs, with no hidden costs. This allows businesses of all sizes to access reliable property valuations without significant upfront investment. We have also added lower and upper bounds, along with confidence levels to all our valuations - included for free.
📍 Public Release of Address Autocomplete: After a successful closed beta, our address autocomplete feature is now available to everyone. This tool simplifies the process of finding addresses with partial inputs, ensuring a seamless and user-friendly experience. It helps in reducing address matching errors and improving the accuracy of property data retrieval. By providing real-time suggestions, users can quickly and accurately find the correct address, enhancing the overall user experience.
🤖 Enhanced Address Matching with AI: We have significantly improved our address-matching capabilities through an enhanced Large Language Model phase. This upgrade boosts match rates well beyond traditional fuzzy matching methods for difficult or malformed addresses.
New Data
🌧️ Surface Water Flood Risk: We now provide detailed information about the likelihood of a property being affected by surface water flooding, including the risk level to grounds and buildings, and the estimated water depth.
🏞️ Reservoir Flood Risk: We have added data on the potential impact of reservoir flooding on properties, including risk levels for both dry and wet day scenarios.
🌫️ Air Pollution: We now provide data on various air pollutants, including ozone, nitrogen dioxide, and particulate matter (PM10 and PM2.5). This data can be valuable for assessing environmental factors and their potential impact on property values and resident health.
🏡 Grounds Classification: We now show the percentage of a property’s grounds by surface type (e.g., built surfaces, lawns, tarmac, tree cover).
🌳 Tree Hazard Index: We have introduced a new metric: the Tree Hazard Index, which assesses the potential risk of tree fall based on the height and proximity of trees to the property. We also provide details on the height and distance of the closest tree within 10 metres of the property.
🏗️ Improved Rebuild Cost Modelling: Our rebuild cost models have been rebuilt from scratch (pun intended) and now consider factors like current raw material prices, local labour costs, and whether the property is converted or purpose-built, in addition to building volume and type.
🛣️ Distance from Road: We have added data indicating how far the property is from the nearest road.
🏷️ Council Tax Band Prediction: We now predict the council tax band for properties without declared data.
🛋️ Reception Rooms: We provide information on the number of reception rooms in each property.
🏢 Parent Shells and Subproperties: Gain deeper insights into property relationships, such as identifying parent shells and their associated subproperties (e.g., individual flats within a block of flats).
API Portal Improvements
⚠️ Configurable Low Credit Warning Thresholds: Customise notification thresholds for low credit warnings to better suit your requirements and risk tolerance.
📊 Compact Data Formats: We have added support for JSON-compact and CSV-compact response formats, enabling faster data retrieval and easier integration with your existing systems.
🎊 That’s a wrap on a fantastic year! We’re always working to make our data better and easier to use, so stay tuned for more exciting updates throughout 2025.
✉️ If you would like to discuss our planned roadmap for the next 12 months and anything your team needs, reach out to: hello@chimnie.com
