HARNESS announce Estates Gazette partnership

HARNESS Data Intelligence, a specialist in CRE digital transformation, and EG, a provider of data, news and analytics products and services for the commercial real estate market, have worked together to develop a new tool called ‘PDF Instant Upload’, as part of the EG Radius product. 

The technology is adapted from the ground-breaking PDFx product by HARNESS, which has set new standards in CRE data extraction capability from PDF documents.

This landmark collaboration between two progressive real estate data businesses is driving forward innovation in the sector and demonstrates how technology can be used to transform data sharing.

EG Radius clients can save significant time over manual input and uploading of property data into EG Radius via a simple “drag and drop” of their particulars or marketing brochures to pre-populate the forms required for contributing deals and availabilities to the EG database. Since launching at the end of October 2020, over 1,500 listings have been contributed via PDF Instant Upload across 39 companies, with over 10,500 images extracted.

HARNESS has developed proprietary data science and machine-learning to extract and structure data from complex PDF documents including investment brochures, landlord agreements, legal documentation, property marketing brochures, tenancy schedules and more. The automated intelligence within PDFx allows multiple documents to be extracted all at once and the outputs standardised into a singular, combined dataset that instantly converts into Excel or CSV formats, and which in turn better data analytics at the point it is most needed.

User testing demonstrated the tool can extract 1,200 PDFs with complex tables in the time it takes a human to extract one, bringing with it notable cost savings and unlocking valuable commercial advantages. For EG Radius, this means an automated, standardised data entry of market intelligence that increases the opportunity of significantly more sharing intelligence for mutual benefit among its clients.

Ben Mein, Founder at HARNESS, says: “This is a significant step forward, not just for our PDFx technology and the wider HARNESS vision, but also the commercial real estate industry as a whole, accelerating the adoption of new tech across businesses through collaboration. So much valuable commercial property data is locked in siloed formats that can now be instantly released for significant commercial gain.  We are looking forward to expanding pdf extraction capability in collaboration with EG’s extensive client base and reaching a new market with our market-leading technology in data extraction and digital transformation.”

Michael Marciano, Product Director at EG, says: “Through working with HARNESS we have been able to deliver an incredibly exciting, innovative and cutting-edge piece of product development with PDF Instant Upload. This initiative enables our clients to share data with the EG Radius community in a matter of seconds, instead of the many minutes required when manually entering data or speaking to researchers”.

Find out more about how the PDFx can help you unlock valuable information from CRE investment brochures by contacting us for a demo at team@harnessdata.ai, or download our brochure here.