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Comment by jareklupinski | Hacker News Reader

that's fantastic! for a second i was thinking facetiously about zipping a camera-equipped drone up and down the streets as fast as it can to hoover this up automatically...

but you could probably get an entire city's worth of information at once using a private small craft at altitude with a good lens?

this would be an expensive capture, but if there are enough people interested, the costs could be split...

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Find the NYC assessors office's website and dig around until you find where they're dumping scheduled exports from their ancient cores. The format might be tab-delimited ebcdic but the data will be up to date. See if you can cross-reference dark windows with anything. Or just ask a commercial real estate agent.

interesting, i've been combing the permits and dept of health sites but I didn't think to check the assessors office... will do :)

yup the real estate agent will always be the last step anyway, there's just so many I want to be really targeted with my approach

A good Commercial Real Estate (CRE) agent will understand why the lights are out and know if there's anything in the data that'd let you predict or make use of that information. There could literally be a column called MiscExplns that flags what you're looking for but you'll never know.

Find a CRE who'd enjoy breaking their domain down for you over dinner or a beverage, or find one who also wants to ask questions about your domain and hang out a bit. It's difficult to self-educate in this area thanks to all the noise online.

if you are offering or know someone, i'm always down for beverages :) my emails in my bio

It's really a local profession and their ideas about data views will be personalized for their specific clients, regions, or niches.

If you're actually physically going around to each building and collecting data not available online, someone nearby will be interested in having that data and will have suggestions on what else you can collect while you're there. Driving around and eyeballing properties is a large part of some CRE agent's jobs, and they would pay you to avoid it if they could.

From my perspective your best bet would be walking in to local CRE offices and seeing if anyone's available to talk about new data sources. It's a personality-driven field and they value face-to-face interactions quite a bit. Maybe throw out a few lines in your local facebook area or subreddit?

In NY, do units pay for their own electricity? The utility company could look at the consumption rates and suss out what addresses are occupied pretty easily without having to do any extra work like flying drones/planes. One wonders if they already package up and sell such data..

There is a small cottage industry around submetering. Generally a unit has to include utilities in the rent or it has to be metered. The billing companies all have the data you want. But very unlikely they sell it.

Do it on a consistent enough basis and you could sell the data to hedge funds no problem.

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