About Cribs

Cribs is about delivering advanced analytics to everyday users with meaningful data so that they can make an informed decision about their property investments.

What’s in the word Cribs

According to the Cambridge dictionary, someone’s Crib is their home or the place where they are living at present. We’ve chosen this slang term for our App to refer to our homes and everything about it. As the song Home goes, ‘This is Home, Truly’. Gives me goosebumps just thinking about the lyrics.

Our Journey

It’s taken us 4 years to get here, from our first version launched in 2020 in the midst of COVD-19 Circuit Breaker in Singapore. At that time, I was looking for a property to buy, having lived abroad for the better of 20 years. Having spent more than a decade in Data & Analytics, I started to look into the data that’s available in the market. Apart from the property platforms that provide basic information about a property, there wasn’t anything that could tell me if a property was a good investment.

In the business world, we are accustomed to Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and they would guide the business in everything that we do in the business. We had to ensure that the data was accurate, concise and meaningful. This was missing in the Singapore property market. It was either too complex, or too simple. Nothing in between for everyday users who want a little something more.

When we first started building the app and pulling various data sources together, it was apparent that everything was built on different classifications and hierarchies. To name a few problems, URA‘s sales data is different from it’s own rental data on classifying property types. HDB data is different from URA’s data. URA classifies regions as market segments such as Central Core Region (CCR), Other Core Region (OCR), and Rest of Core Region (RCR), whereas HDB’s data is only about Towns such as Hougang, Serangoon, etc. In addition, to make matters a little more complex than they already are, the major listings platforms have a different way of classifying property types, and property agents tend to get creative with their marketing. Deciphering property names from listings can be quite a task programmatically.

We believe we have made progress. Unifying the data, its classifications and cleaning it has resulted in a dataset of property data that is a great basis for Data & Analytics. We can now build dashboards and KPIs across the entire dataset for every property in Singapore. HDB data can now be viewed by market segments and districts, and yield can be searched across all properties to find the best deals.

Some users have given us feedback that the data is slow to get updated. Cribs is not a transactional system and a record of sales or rentals. It’s a Data & Analytics tool, and we look at the broader picture of the property and market in mind.

Also, we have developed a Convenience Index that scores all properties based on conveniences around it. This method of scoring is unique to us and we have applied it across Singapore. It’s interesting to see how properties compare to each other on the Convenience Index. We’ve gone further by introducing a personalised Convenience Index that is based on user’s choices of lifestyle attributes. Everyone is different and has different daily needs. Recognising this, the Convenience Index is calculated based on the user’s choices and compared against other properties in real time.

About the Advent of AI & Machine Learning

The foundation of AI & Machine Learning is a dataset that is clean, well organised and has the right ingredients for training AI models. As they say in the Data & Analytics world, “Garbage In Is Garbage Out’. We’ve been able to build prediction models in the very beginning, based on the data that we have built. In addition, because we are able to unify the various government agencies’ datasets, we are now able to find unparalleled insights, and for a start build better dashboards and KPIs across all properties, and building better models for them.

Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) are an amazing leap forward for the tech world. If you’ve not ventured into it, you should. It has been a massive productivity saver for many who have been using it. Not only can you generate summaries of texts with large amounts of data as input, you can also build models that recognise images and the context behind the images. The basis of all of these new capabilities is good data and precise prompt engineering.

AI summaries and analysis are part of every function in Cribs such as Property Details, Property Valuation, Rental Estimates, Latest Transactions/Rentals and Conveniences. Data is sent to the LLM and real-time analysis is made and streamed to the user. For example, when viewing all the listings of a property, AI parses all the listings and generates an analysis, determines which listings are recommended, duplicated across different platforms and identifies those that appear to have errors. This saves users an immense amount of time in determining which listings one should explore.  

We have just scratched the surface about what can be done with Generative AI and the journey will continue to unfold for us.

Scalable Infrastructure

Cribs is built from the ground up on the cloud and delivered on IOS and Android for Phones and Tablets. Because of how we’ve designed the App, it can support massive amounts of data, serving a large amount of users in an elastic and expandable way. This is something that we are very proud of. Users rely on us to provide updated information everyday and on the go.

Personalisation is About You

With high sky prices of properties in Singapore, especially HDB flats now surpassing $1 million, it’s not surprising that many properties are out of reach for the everyday Singaporean. With property cooling measures introduced by the Singapore government over Total Debt Servicing Ratio (TDSR), Mean Servicing Ratio (MSR) and loan to value (LTV) limits based on income and debt, it’s exceeding challenging for anyone to understand affordability. We’ve made it simple. Enter your details and properties that you can afford will be recommended. Every time you view a property, it will remind you of your affordability.

We have built the entire experience of Cribs around Buyers/Sellers, Renters, Investors and Agents. Each property has a financial profile and it is layered over a user’s profile to give users a picture of affordability. With personalised Convenience Index, users save a lot of time finding the right home that fits their lifestyle needs and fits their financial profile.

The goal of Cribs is to provide deeper insights for the everyday user – data that means something to everyone. We have one of the highest home ownership percentages in the world. We have over 77.8% home ownership in Singapore. That is to say, that over 77.8% of Singaporeans who are living in Singapore, are staying in a home that the family owns directly. The wealth of many everyday families are tied to the property market, and it is the aspiration of young people to want to own their own homes. Making an informed decision is an important one, especially for first timers or those looking to sell their first homes, with the current property valuations and prices.

Prices alone do not tell the story of a property – it is everything else. And we are hoping to bring this to everyone with our Free Tier – LITE. For the more experienced user, we have the PRO and ULTRA tiers that suit the sophisticated user that is accustomed to boardroom style KPIs, dashboards and reporting. The investment that you make in Cribs per month costs less than a meal for two in a mid-tier restaurant in Singapore. For agents who use data for their livelihoods, they spend more on listings than ever before. Agents will be able to service their customers, give them deeper insights and close deals faster.

Exciting Times

As we look forward to getting your feedback on our latest app, we are busy in the engine room building more advanced AI and Machine functionality into the App. ULTRA users will be the first to benefit from these upgrades. Explore our comprehensive user guides on what Cribs can do for you.

Thank you for supporting us in the past and we look forward to your participation in the future in making Cribs the most advanced analytics app for properties in Singapore. Through your paid support, we will be able to advance our mission in democratising data for everyone.

Kind regards,

Alan, CEO/Founder of Cribs