Revolutionizing the floor plan with CubiCasa

CubiCasa, a Finland-based floor plan automation solution, lets anybody with a smartphone scan their home and receive floor plan and property data in return. Founded in Finland but acquired by US-based proptech giant Clear Capital last year, CubiCasa leverages cutting-edge AR technologies to transform floor plan design and appraisal into intuitive processes. But, although floor plans are becoming more popular among US homebuyers, they’ve yet to be fully adopted by real estate and mortgage industries in their sales pipelines. CubiCasa hopes to change that. 

In an interview with The Financial Revolutionist, CubiCasa President Jeff Allen outlines CubiCasa’s growth strategy, announces the company’s latest pricing features, and shares his vision for the future of floor plans. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Financial Revolutionist: You recently took the helm at CubiCasa. What about CubiCasa compelled you to do so?

CubiCasa is at the nexus of providing value to the real estate, insurance, mortgage, appraisal, and interior design industries, and it’s just getting started on its growth journey of exploring how we add value to those verticals. My role as President is a really exciting one. I didn't found the company. The company was founded in Finland several years ago by some computer-vision gurus—I'm just the interloper from the US who found the product and fell in love with it. I was honored to be asked to run it by Clear Capital, CubiCasa’s parent company, and help it really get kickstarted in the US market.

Why do you think it's taken so long for a product like this to reach the market?

First, the work that CubiCasa is doing—in terms of computer vision, managing what's a very difficult dataset to pull in from all these different mobile devices, including Android devices—is a hard technical problem to solve. CubiCasa’s founding team was at the frontier of solving it. Second, in the US, properties are a lot bigger and the culture is a little bit different than it is in Europe, so floor plans have typically been more of a niche product in real estate than they have been in Europe. 

How have you gone about pitching the need for CubiCasa to real estate developers or individual homeowners? What has that go-to-market strategy involved?

We emphasize the fact that literally anyone can use CubiCasa. That solves the biggest hurdle that people have. A lot of people just assume they can’t get their hands on a floor plan unless they pay an appraiser or a surveyor a few hundred bucks to come out and measure their home, or get some expensive special hardware to do a full tour. Our pitch is more about why consumers find this really valuable. They're super valuable to the appraisal process, the insurance process, and more. The fact that anybody can do it with a smartphone and no training has kind of cut this hurdle out. That's really our primary pitch.

Who is using your platform?

Our primary users today are real estate photographers. They were our first and most loyal set of customers, because oftentimes, they're the ones working with agents to put together marketing packages for listings when they go on the market. They’d often get asked to do a floor plan, and photographers didn’t know how to do it, or would struggle to do it, so they wouldn't offer the service. Now they have something they can make part of a marketing package to an agent. 

The second group is real estate agents themselves because it is so easy to use. We can also support roughly 50% of the market—meaning agents—who take their own photos for their listings. 

Then the third big one is in the mortgage space like appraisers and appraisal management companies. A floor plan is a requirement in the appraisal process, and our technology is used a lot in the new space of desktop appraisals and hybrid appraisals. Our tech can fit in that process really cleanly.

So CubiCasa was acquired by Clear Capital in 2021. What were the conversations like to acquire CubiCasa?

The appraisal process in the United States has been on a journey in the last couple of years of modernization and digitization. Appraisers have been doing their best to keep up with the volume of appraisals, but it's a really hard thing. There's so much volume and there's not a lot of appraiser capacity. So the days of sending the appraiser to every single property and having them do every part of the process are starting to phase out. 

Clear Capital was at the forefront of proving that model with the Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs) that you can send somebody else to the property to get data for the appraiser. It became our mission at Clear Capital to lead the industry as much as we could toward proving that model out. As we started actually doing the work of these hybrid appraisals, we had to train appraisers on how to go get good property data. The single hardest thing to do is to teach somebody the old-fashioned way with a tape measure and graph paper of measuring the house down to the inch and getting it done right. It's really hard. So when we were looking for different floor plan automation tech we could use, we then found CubiCasa. It unlocks the single hardest part of property data collection, which unlocks the transformation of the industry we operate in. Floor plans seem like a small thing, but they’re actually massively important. 

So we decided, “Hey, if we purchase CubiCasa and we invest further in the tech, hire more developers, and really make it even more solid, it can scale and help transform the appraisal process.” Our industry then wins in the long run.

About CubiCasa’s latest announcement—

CubiCasa’s acquisition by Clear Capital, which is privately owned, has offered the company resources for investment in terms of go-to-market, marketing, sales, and further investment in the tech. While the rest of the market might be retrenching and figuring out how to make it during current volatility, we’ve realized that now is the time for us to create a market for it and make it happen. 

We're in a position now to start offering a free floor plan option, and a wider variety of different pricing options for people to customize different things. We want to change that paradigm in the US to make floor plans possible on every single listing because the tech is so easy to use and because we’ve reduced the pricing barrier. 

What we're offering now is a wider spectrum of options—again, including a totally free floor plan if you just want a simple, accurate floor plan for marketing and listing. And then the other options are optional per-order add-ons you can purchase if they meet your specific needs, including gross living area calculations, being able to put your logo on the floor plan, and so forth. We're going to try and let the whole market know that we have this available, try to make the US a lot more like Europe, where we're giving buyers the experience they want, which is to be able to see the property before going in and understanding its flow.

With that strategic shift in mind, where do you see CubiCasa a year or two years down the line?

I would love for CubiCasa to be synonymous with floor plans. We want everybody in especially real estate and mortgage spaces to have made it a standard part of every one of the properties that they visit. If we're able to be successful with that, then we can continue growing on that. We are adding new features or new products that we can deliver to these user groups. So right now it's about users, getting more people into our ecosystem, and seeing how easy it is to use.

Any final advice for The FR’s readers?

I would say as much as possible, try to work for a company that is able to think long term. Being able to find a situation where you're part of building something for the long term—whether that's at a startup or you know, a company that is able to think with those types of longer horizons—is the best career advice I can give.