Episode 2, Game Changers and Transition makers: How data is transforming the neighbourhoods we live in

Elena Lambros:

Hello and welcome to ESG Matters at Ashurst. I'm Elena Lambros, the Ashurst Risk Advisory, Climate Change and Sustainability partner. Welcome to today's episode of Game Changers and Transition Makers. In this series, I'll be speaking to entrepreneurs around the globe who are the forefront of driving the sustainability agenda through innovative business ideas and company start-ups.

In this episode, I'll be joined by Jessica Christiansen-Franks, CEO and founding director of Neighbourlytics. Jessica is an award-winning technology leader, unlocking the power of big data and social analytics to transform cities around the world. As CEO and founding director of an urban analytics company, Neighbourlytics, Jess has combined the cutting edge data science with decades of experience in urban design to reimagine the future of city making and property development.

Welcome, Jessica. Thanks so much for joining the podcast today.

Jessica Christiansen-Franks:

Hello, thank you for having me.

Elena Lambros:

Yeah, we're delighted to have you here. So Neighbourlytics, I thought it would be good just to give people an overview of your background, yourself, the business, what is Neighbourlytics and just give the overview there.

Jessica Christiansen-Franks:

Fantastic. So Neighbourlytics is a data platform that provides the property sector with real-time analytics about the lifestyle of the neighbourhoods that they plan, create and manage. So we have platforms across Australia and we've worked across 12 countries, measuring the lifestyle of neighbourhoods.

So my background to get into this is that I'm a landscape architect, which makes me entirely unqualified to run a start-up tech, but I just was a very passionate community creator through my life as a landscape architect. Landscape architecture town planning is about making neighbourhoods people love and feel connected to, and through that work it was very difficult to actually track the change that we were making. When we rolled out a project, how much did it actually change people's lives? So that naturally took me into the data space.

Elena Lambros:

Yeah, wonderful. And it's such a fascinating area because I know there's this really kind of focus at the moment on the concept of community and place and what that means to different regions, also, thinking about the impact that climate change is or people's expectations around how they live and work in the future will be. So there's quite a lot in there. Was there any kind of driving influence around why you thought that that data would be particularly important in terms of that planning for the community?

Jessica Christiansen-Franks:

Well, there's certainly two major problems with the existing data that the property sector use, is at the moment, the stuff that we make the most decisions on about the community is their demographic. And when that was all we had access to, pre-digital world and all we really had was the population census very few years, you sort of had to look at somebody's gender and age and income and then assume things about their lifestyle, but that just isn't appropriate. It's not appropriate to assume that all 35-year-old women want to have kids and all people who are newcomers to Australia want to eat a particular type of cuisine. Instead of that, let's just look at what they actually do and what they actually love and use that as a way to understand a place.

The other problem with existing data is that it's usually not hyper-local. So we're so used to, in property development, making decisions based on the trends of a whole suburb and suburbs are enormous, but it's very important when understanding how people live to see what is happening in their hyper-local area around them. And so that's a really big part of what we do, and certainly it's possible with tech these days, is data can be extremely geospatial and so there's no longer it needs to be an excuse to roll everything up into these aggregate suburbs. Instead, we should look at what is immediately happening in the 10-minute walk around this particular site.

Elena Lambros:

Yeah, absolutely. So would you like to just expand just so people can understand when you say geospatial data and immediacy of 10 minutes, what does that look like? And then if you could try and draw from the data that you collect to the change that would make in a neighbourhood.

Jessica Christiansen-Franks:

So what we're really obsessed with is anything that can tell us in real time what communities' value and who they are. So rather than measuring what physically exists or looking at the demographics of those people, instead we look at where there is data being left behind every day by people using a neighbourhood. So the sorts of inputs that we bring in is mobile phone movement data. So when people are actually out and about moving around, we can get that mobile de-identified, mobile phone movement.

We also use what we call crowdsourced maps. So something people don't think about is that Google doesn't actually make Google Maps, that map is being added to all the time by people using the neighbourhood. So it's genuinely a wiki of what the community are doing and what's in the neighbourhood, and the same is true of OpenStreetMap and various other mapping systems.

We also use what we call social chatter, which is the posts that people make publicly about their neighbourhood. So what is beautiful about that is that what Instagram is, is what people want their friends to know about their lives. And if you look at that at a whole neighbourhood level, you get these trends of in certain neighbourhoods what lifestyle values are really important to local people. So in some neighbourhoods it's picnics in the park with your kid. In other neighbourhoods it's new eyelashes and cocktails at night. In other neighbourhoods it's dogs and jackets. So you can get this really strong sense of what is important to local communities at different times of the year. Our users use that information through our platform to help them understand how to position development projects.

So what is already really strong and powerful in a neighbourhood, so say Footscray in Melbourne has a really distinctive local identity. Developers want to tap into that and not ruin it when they create a development. So they can immediately understand what are the top local restaurants around here, what are the top activities that locals are participating in and how can I put those amenities in my apartment building that I'm developing or in my build to rent asset that I'm releasing, but also then tracking over time.

So once they make a decision to put a, for a little while there, hot yoga was the question. Do we need hot yoga? We don't know. So some neighbourhoods have it and it's really popular and other neighbourhoods don't have it. But certainly once they make the decision to put that in, we can track for them how popular that is. And so sometimes what happens is it starts off really popular and then over time the trend moves to something else and so our data's a really great lead indicator of that. Are people interacting with it less or is that less of a thing that's a factor in the neighbourhood and what might the new trends be?

Elena Lambros:

Yeah, that trend analysis is certainly something that changes over time, I imagine. And if you think about the people that are being attracted to the neighbourhood and living there and the way they kind of interact with it. Are there any kind of key trends that you're seeing across neighbourhoods at the moment that are unexpected or something that you hadn't seen coming?

Jessica Christiansen-Franks:

The most exciting thing that happened in our data was the lockdown. And so I know as a Melbournian that was one of the worst times of my life being in lockdown for two years, but that time across the world changed the way that people live and it is fascinating from a data perspective because you can see it playing out in the data. So what it meant is that firstly, people used to regularly leave their home location every day to go to work and so it was tolerable that your home location didn't have everything that you needed because you went to work in somewhere else. And so that could have the doctor and the fresh food and the park because you were there most of the day. Now because of this, having to stay at home to work for many jobs and then the tendency that's stayed around to work from home, it's put a lot more pressure on neighbourhoods to meet daily needs where people live.

And that is the ultimate town planning goal anyway. That's what town planners are trying to do is create these compact hyper-local communities that meet people's daily needs where they are without them having to travel, but lockdown massively accelerated people's expectation of having that. So we've seen a huge amount, that the neighbourhoods, particularly say Greenfield out on the edge of suburbs, often they don't necessarily have all of those things that people need and so we've seen in the data that the communities that do have a whole lot of things that meet their needs are really thriving, people are staying really local and you can see that playing out in the data and in the neighbourhoods that had a lot of amenity gaps, people are leaving and are extremely dissatisfied with.

Elena Lambros:

Yeah, that's kind of been just an amazing transition the way it's happened. And on that, I was just thinking about the lack of travel or limited travel and being hyper-local now and really having that sense of community. Is there a focus more on some of those more greener thinking around that, whether it's having more green space or less emissions? Are people really wanting that now or thinking about it in terms of where they live?

Jessica Christiansen-Franks:

Certainly what we see in the data is that people valuing access to green space or access to green amenity doesn't necessarily correlate with how much green amenity there is. So what I mean by that is, is it's easy to assume that people who live in areas with lots of trees and parks value trees and parks more. That's actually not the case. We looked a couple of years ago in the midst of lockdown at the neighbourhoods across Melbourne where people were valuing greenery the most, and one of the top ones was Cremorne. And I don't know who's listening that knows Cremorne, but you will have had a chuckle because I don't even know if Cremorne's got a tree. It is very post-industrial, it's all the tech hubs there, blah, blah, blah.

But there are a lot of moments of ivy growing up a wall or planter boxes on the edges of windows, and it was almost like the neighbourhood where people had the least access to green areas where people were showing they wanted it the most and were really craving that greenery. So that's a sort of roundabout way of answering the question, but we definitely see that neighbourhoods where perhaps something is at a scarcity like that, they do actually value it quite significantly. Certainly the old town planning logic might've been that if people who don't live in a suburb with lots of trees, they probably don't care about trees very much, but that's actually just not the case.

Elena Lambros:

Absolutely. I actually love seeing greenery on buildings these days, I think it makes it feel so much nicer regardless of what suburb you're in. Obviously in my job I focus a lot on ESG, but I'm always very conscious that ESG is much broader than there's the environment and emissions. So a very important part of it, there's all sorts of other things under consideration, particularly around the "S" in the "Social". Is Neighbourlytics focusing more on the S as well as the E in terms of ESG?

Jessica Christiansen-Franks:

Yeah, absolutely. And this is the really important thing is that not only do great neighbourhoods reduce the required travel needed and have an emissions impact, if people can stay really local, that's obviously a really important environmental aspect. But the fact is that the best property assets like a shopping centre that's doing really well, or a main street that's doing really well have an amazing social impact as well because they create places for people to come together, to feel like they belong, to have social contact, bridging capital, bonding capital are really important parts of how communities work.

And so again, say a shopping centre, if that's doing a really good job, it is also providing all of those things for the community. But so often in the property sector they're not measuring that. When they think of the social impact of their assets, they're looking at supply chain and women on boards. And so while it is important to focus on those types of issues, they are critical. It is often missing the real impacts, the biggest impacts that those assets can have on the community, which is how they strengthen and often become the heart of the social connection that's present in neighbourhoods.

Elena Lambros:

Yeah, that's excellent because I imagine that that social quantification and being able to have actual data around that is very difficult to do, which is probably why historically it's been more at that top level because people feel like they can track and maybe somewhat control.

Jessica Christiansen-Franks:

And it's crazy to me because of all of the verticals that are now thinking about ESG, it really strikes me that healthcare and property are the two that really are about social impact at their core, yet they're not really using social impact as one of the main things to sing about.

Elena Lambros:

So would you like to just expand upon how people can access your data or what users would be looking at and how they can get access to your tools?

Jessica Christiansen-Franks:

Yeah. So we work across the property sector, which is a very vague thing to say. What that means is that anyone that owns a property asset, so they own a shopping centre or a carpark or they're managing a main street, they need to understand what's happening in the area around that main street or local governments, for example, that are managing those places and want to understand what is happening in the catchment around there and how they can make sure there's a really good visitation pool, there's lots of good tourism reasons to come, the local economy is ticking along.

So the way that customers engage with our platform is we have a whole lot of tools available under a free account, users sign up. Because it's a different type of data than what they've had before, we want people to be able to experience it at low risk before getting ready to use it on a project. So we are B2B, but our users can log in, have a play around with some of the metrics under a free account, and then when they want to set up their actual main street or their shopping centre or their apartment building in the data, they can request a geography that's custom to them and that's when the billing starts. The goal there is that they log in, start playing around with visitation metrics, where are people coming from, where are they spending time and become comfortable and familiar with thinking about this type of real-time data in their decision-making so that then when they do have a project and some budget, they can request the data then and then start tracking that asset over time.

Elena Lambros:

It's such a great business idea, and you've obviously got a lot of data and you've been doing it for some time now and you're becoming a global leader in PropTech, which is really exciting to see. What does success look like for you?

Jessica Christiansen-Franks:

Yeah, one of the big challenges that we've had since we started six years ago is that although we have data that is a game changer for the property sector, the status quo is asking a consultant for their opinion and then taking action based on a consultant's opinion. So it's a very difficult customer dynamic to interrupt. So they're not necessarily looking to buy data, they're looking to be told what the answer is.

So for the first five years of our model, we did a level of consulting and advisory on top of the data to help users take action with it. So that was a great way to get our name established and to grow our brand and get across companies, but it was not a good way to help the industry make better decisions with data. It were just basically as bad as them asking a consultant.

So we've made quite a significant product shift this year to be a product platform that is using product-led growth as a strategy to get the sector using the data. So now what success looks like for us is of course about revenue in, but it's also much more about number of users, frequency of logins, sharing the content. We want to be the tool that all property assets are going to be using on all of their developments. Just like you pull up an aerial photo of a site, let's look at the Neighbourlytics data of that site. So it's entirely changed our pricing model. It's a massive risk, but it's already paying off. So that's what success looks like for us, is this bet working, and continuing to help us scale our visibility in the market. But it also then is incredibly scalable. As soon as we've nailed this, we can very intentionally roll out to other geographies, and that's what success is for us, is data like this becoming the mainstream on property projects.

Elena Lambros:

Yeah, I think that's a pretty exciting goal and really impressive what you've done so far. So what would be your key to reimagine the kind of current systems and changing the game then in terms of your new shift? Anything else that you can think of that would be really key to that?

Jessica Christiansen-Franks:

Yeah, we want to demystify data. There's been a lot of evangelising about data in the property sector, and a lot of the big companies have sort of got a data person and tried to do some data. And the problem with that is that they don't necessarily get much value from it. And we liken it a little bit to the Emperor's New Clothes where the property sector are all talking about data and everyone's kind going, "I don't really know what that means. What does that mean? Everyone else seems to know what it means. I'll just pretend I do."

And that's a big problem because they then do something data but don't get value from it and then go back to the old ways of asking their mate what he thinks and taking that action. So what we are really actively looking at is how to educate the market and help them self-onboard and really feel that data and insights are very, very accessible, rather than data being something that a company has to invest millions of dollars in and really intentionally get a data team. And that's just not a great way to make great evidence-based decisions because silo-ing data into one part of a company. Whereas we hope that the property sector can really start using it as just right across all of their staff become data literate and think about platforms like ours as part of their daily work.

Elena Lambros:

Yeah, absolutely. I think that would be a good game changer. One thing that I am always talking about, and I am focused on climate change and sustainability, which is why I love the focus on neighbourhoods and I love the focus on greenery, and I think that that's kind of really a more important thing as we shift towards moving towards climate commitments. Do you have your own personal commitment to what net zero might look like in the next 12 months?

Jessica Christiansen-Franks:

Yeah, so we live out in the countryside actually, outside Melbourne. And so my husband and I, we can very easily accidentally have a giant carbon footprint being out there. And so in choosing that life, that gives us in some ways more flexibility to use solar power, we have septic on the site. There's other things that we can do to minimise our impact, but it's tough that as a consumer there's often not a lot of choice for us to retrofit a property.

But that is, being from the planning sector, I have a very intentional focus on choosing a community that has all the things I want to have, so we don't need cars on the weekend, we don't have kids that are used to being strapped into cars every day. So even though we live out in the outskirts of Melbourne, we can walk to everything we need when we leave our house on the weekend. So for me, it's that compact living and how to achieve that. Not just I talk the talk, but walk the walk in my life as well, which is a risk. Moving out to the outskirts of Melbourne with two young kids, can you actually walk to everything you need? And so far it works.

Elena Lambros:

Oh, really? I'm impressed that you can walk to everything you need. I also actually live in the countryside and have two small kids, but I can say that we don't walk to everything. So I'm actually very conscious of that.

Jessica Christiansen-Franks:

The rain is the bigger problem actually, the reason we get in the car being in Melbourne is perhaps more because of the weather than the distance.

Elena Lambros:

That's a bigger issue to solve, right?

Jessica Christiansen-Franks:

Yeah.

Elena Lambros:

If you would like to provide our listeners with one action to take away, what would it be?

Jessica Christiansen-Franks:

I think the challenge for everyone listening to this is how to embrace change and not just be happy with the status quo. Anyone thinking about changing the way that they work, the issue with data usage is that there's a lot of availability bias, people tend to just try to measure the thing digitally that they used to measure manually, and I just encourage everybody thinking about using any type of data to think about really changing the way that you work. Use it as a way to transform the way that you think about solving problems, not use digital data as a way to a faster method, achieve what you used to do manually. So really take digital transformation as a way to fundamentally change the way that you work.

Elena Lambros:

Well, thanks for joining us today. That was absolutely fascinating and I really enjoyed having you on here. So thank you for your time.

Jessica Christiansen-Franks:

My pleasure, thanks.

Elena Lambros:

Thank you for listening to this podcast. I hope you found it insightful. To learn more about our podcast, visit ashurst.com/podcast. This series follows on from our 30 For Net Zero 30 series, and if you haven't listened to all 30 episodes, click on the link to find out more.
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