Company: houzen
Website: https://www.houzen.co.uk
Business: Offers tech-powered reports that enable smart improvement decisions for planners, governments, investors, lenders and buyers.
About Saurabh and houzen
Property sustainability in the UK becomes more and more important: around 20% of all CO2 emissions in the UK are contributed by residential real estate.
The real challenge is going to come from retrofitting and changing the existing properties – especially the victorian houses that haven’t been renovated in decades. Houzen offers tech-powered reports that enable smart improvement decisions for planners, governments, investors, lenders and buyers – all parties involved to make decisions instantly.
Saurabh, houzen’s founder, has an extensive professional background including senior investment positions at Accenture UK, IBM and others with 12 years spent focusing on mergers and acquisitions, private equity and operations.
Houzen was set up in 2017, as a brand that enabled fast leases for residential properties. It was doing well, and its services were enjoyed by the largest residential operators and real estate agencies in the country.
During COVID, however, many tenants decided to stay put and just extend their leases to wait for the pandemic to pass so the market slowed down significantly. At the same time, there was another part of the market, which was growing really well – property sales and retrofitting.
Houzen has diverted its business model and created a Computer Vision and AI-based technology that allows for fast assessment of any UK property and its value as well as potential sustainable improvements or retrofit ideas. Saurabh led or worked on collective investment deal value of more than £20 billion, working across 20+ industries over three continents.
Saurabh has a combined engineering + statistics academic background, which made him a perfect innovator in the field of AI and computer vision – tools that might pave the way for a cleaner, greener real estate.
