Interviews
Floor Plans Everywhere: A Conversation with Jeff Allen of CubiCasa
May 21, 2024
By Arianna Marino
Introducing CubiCasa, the PropTech company dedicated to putting a floor plan on every real estate listing across the globe. Founded in 2016 in Finland, where floor plans are as ubiquitous as a front door, CubiCasa recognized the need for a modern approach to floor plan creation. Shifting away from outdated methods, the founding team harnessed the power of AI and smartphone technology to develop a fast and easy-to-use floor plan app on the App Store and Google Play Store. Now the global market leader in mobile indoor scanning, their technology is used in 172 different countries and has helped create over 2 million floor plans to date. CubiCasa customizes its floor plan reports by user - whether an agent, appraiser, photographer, or MLS, every stakeholder benefits from their mission to digitize real estate.
At the helm of CubiCasa’s journey stands Jeff Allen, who became the company’s President after its acquisition by Clear Capital in 2021. Allen was previously the Executive Vice President of Innovation Labs at Clear Capital, and now leads CubiCasa’s continued effort to advance property mapping technology worldwide. Pushing boundaries with each new release, the company has ambitious plans for mass adoption in the US market. Through an insightful dialogue with Allen, we uncover the strategic vision driving CubiCasa's future endeavors and its commitment to revolutionizing the way we perceive and interact with real estate listings.
The CubiCasa Story
Can you tell us the story of the founding and acquisition of CubiCasa?
The company was started in Finland in 2016. While floor plans were already present on every listing, agents and their photographers were using hand-drawn measurements to create them. These floor plans were often unreliable, hard to do, and time-consuming.
The founding team had a background in technology, and knew that with the use of AI models there had to be a better way to produce floor plans. The phone in your pocket is the most scalable way to capture data, and the Finnish founding team worked hard to build novel technology that can convert smartphone data into a reliable floor plan output and structured property data. What they built is nothing short of magic:
- So easy to use it requires zero training
- Takes only 5 minutes to scan a typical sized home
- Works on any Android and Apple devices - not just LiDAR-based devices
In 2020, the team released their smartphone scanning app in beta. Around the same time, in the US, Clear Capital was searching for floor plan automation technology to help democratize and modernize the appraisal process. Within the company’s Labs group they were testing many kinds of approaches and technologies to solve this problem. When they got wind of the CubiCasa release and saw the incredible quality of the results, it was an obvious match. Clear Capital acquired CubiCasa in 2021 and began investing into greater evolutions of the technology, as well as building an adoption strategy to achieve mass adoption in the US market.
What drives CubiCasa today?
Our entire company’s purpose and mission is to solve what we call “The Floor Plan Problem.” Specifically, we know that consumers really love floor plans and want to see a lot more of them on listings. Every year, NAR releases a survey of home buyers and sellers where they ask what real estate website features are most valuable. And every year, Floor Plans are the most highly-ranked feature after only the standard listings photos and property data, because of how helpful they are to consumers to understand the property’s fit for their lifestyle.
But the problem is that - historically - floor plans in the US have been provided on only a small percentage of listings. This is the “Floor Plan Problem.”
Everything our company does, and every decision we make, flows back to trying to solve that problem. Every design decision, our pricing strategy, our partnership approach with MLSs and Photographers, our support of all mobile devices (which isn’t easy to do, trust us) - it all flows from our passion for solving this problem.
We even have a name for this future nirvana - FPOEL.
F loor
P lan
O n
E very
L isting
We talk about FPOEL in every meeting, every Slack channel, and every All Hands.
A Customer-Driven Product
What are the key products CubiCasa offers?
From one 5-minute scan on one of our mobile applications, CubiCasa can deliver standard 2D floor plans, ANSI-compliant Gross Living Area floor plans with Fannie Mae-approved calculations, 3D floor plans with realistic materials and furniture, 3D video renders, and CAD files.
Starting in April 2024, we’ll be adding two new outputs: detailed property data reports and the ability for users to take photos while scanning to produce helpful inspection reports for property documentation. And we have even more interesting stuff coming down the pipeline too!
Can you share any upcoming features or products in development?
We’re moving beyond floor plans as our next step. From the same 5-minute scan you already know and love, over time we plan to generate for our users a whole cornucopia of helpful products and content. Imagery-based products, interactive media products, structured property data and more. We are just getting started.
To what degree does customer feedback impact your product strategy?
We think it’s essential to receive positive and negative feedback in real time, and to make sure the entire company sees it. That drives a very important ground level insight for all of us to better service our customers.
To make sure we accomplish this, we have a dedicated Slack channel called “Feedback” that the whole company monitors daily. Our Customer Support and Sales teams are posting constant quotes from customer interactions about what they like, what they don’t, and what can be improved. This is essential to our success.
What is your approach to customer service and support?
Many tech companies seem to take pride in having very little customer support, as if that’s somehow a badge of honor or indicates you’ve built the perfect product.
We take the opposite approach. We provide 24-7 support, 365 days a year, and strive to achieve near instant responses to inbound inquiries. Our product is used all over the world, so we have to make sure we have coverage in every time zone of the world. It’s a fun challenge, and we take pride in how important our customer service is to our strategy.
U.S. Go-To-Market
What new value do you plan to bring to the U.S. Market?
Floor plans are the single-best digital asset on a real estate listing that provides consumers with an at-a-glance deep understanding of whether the home is the right fit for them. We plan to bring transparency to and enhance the consumer experience in the US housing market, just as it has been successfully achieved in other countries like the UK, Australia, Finland, and Sweden. Along the way, we’ll create a new layer of transparent and reliable property data the industry has never seen before. This approach benefits both consumers and real estate professionals, leading to a more informed and efficient housing market.
What has CubiCasa done to drive U.S. adoption?
In 2023, CubiCasa started two critical new programs that have been instrumental in delivering massive growth.
First, the CubiCasa MLS Partnership program enables MLSs to work with CubiCasa to bring special access to discounts and features for their subscribers, at no cost to the MLS. CubiCasa has signed 50 MLSs in the year since the program began, with more to be announced soon. Some of the largest MLSs in the country have joined up - including CRMLS, Bright MLS, Georgia MLS, Houston MLS and others. These MLSs share CubiCasa’s vision that floor plan adoption creates a better functioning real estate market, and enhances the value of the MLS data compilation.
Second, we began the CubiCasa Preferred Photographer Program. In this program, photographers receive access to special product benefits and discounts - and enhanced placement within CubiCasa’s app and customer experience - in exchange for including a floor plan on every single photo shoot that they perform. This helps advance the mission of making floor plans a default standard, as opposed to a high-dollar add-on choice. CubiCasa now has more than 1,000 photographers nationwide participating in the program, with more being added daily.
What would you say is the company’s biggest achievement to date?
In February, we reached a major new milestone - we now estimate that CubiCasa is attached to 15% of the New Listings in the United States. Two years ago, that number was 2% - so reaching this number reflects incredible growth. However, we think we’re just getting started. As word spreads about how easy our product is to use, we continue to see large numbers of new customer sign ups.
Ultimately, our goal is not that CubiCasa is attached to every listing in the US. It’s that some kind of floor plan is attached to every listing in the US, ultimately creating a much better consumer real estate experience.
The CubiCasa Team
How would you describe the culture at CubiCasa?
- Have big, ambitious, inspiring missions.
- Believe deeply that hard things can be accomplished.
- Have a bias towards Action over Talk.
- Put in relentless effort and creativity to solve problems - don’t just assume the idea won’t work after the first failure.
- Constantly experimenting and learning - don’t be afraid to fail.
- Make decisions quickly, without over-deliberation. A good action today beats a slightly better action 6 months from now.
- Clear communication amongst the whole team.
- Tight focus - avoid distractions that don’t advance the mission.
- Efficient use of resources: Every dollar/minute the team spends needs to return strategic or financial ROI.
- Having fun: the team really enjoys what they do.
What are you most proud of regarding your team?
We are ambitious. We believe very hard things can be accomplished, and will be, with enough elbow grease and focus.
What are some key lessons learned and how do they guide your vision for the future?
Everything we do has to be focused on our primary mission. Our vision of creating FPOEL is so ambitious and hard to achieve, that we cannot afford to take detours or side routes. This is a really hard instinct to build - it can be very enticing to chase product features or customer opportunities that emerge that deliver short-term revenue or incremental growth. But there’s a big opportunity cost to taking your eye off the ball.
And you have to have a level or urgency and pace that makes you feel a little uncomfortable. We can’t optimize ourselves around being happy and stress-free - we have to optimize around speed and execution as goal number one.
Finally - keep your teams small. The biggest advancements tend to come from small groups of people working together on a big problem. Hiring a million people and expecting faster results is a recipe for a headache and less throughput, counterintuitively.
Industry Impact
What impact does CubiCasa aim to have on the real estate industry?
We want to create two lasting pieces of positive change.
First - we want to be the straw that stirs the drink to create FPOEL for the US real estate market.
Second - we want to create an entirely new layer of “Ground Truth” property data that helps the industry make more informed decisions. Public Records and MLS data are fantastic, but they are somewhat limited in some fundamental ways. How long ago was the Assessor inside the property to calculate square footage, for example, and what methodology did they use to calculate the Gross Living Area? There is a lot of flawed property data floating around in the world, and we’d like to be a force for positive change to address that.
Who in the industry, past or present, do you admire most and why?
I’ve always admired people in the industry who not only excel at their professional role, but are industry mentors as well. People who are willing to give their time and energy to help out new founders and companies be successful. I’ve been so fortunate to interact with a ton of these kinds of people, too many to count or name all of them, but some that immediately come to mind are Greg Robertson, Amy Gorce, Brian Boero and Sam DeBord.
CubiCasa’s motto?
No sleep ‘till FPOEL