LightBox Taps First Street Foundation for Climate Risk Info

LightBox, a proptech company that provides commercial, geographical, spatial, and environmental data for specific buildings, is expanding an existing partnership with nonprofit 501(c)(3) research and technology group First Street Foundation to incorporate climate risk information in its products, “making it easier to identify and measure climate risks ranging from floods and wildfires to extreme heat,” according to a press release.

LightBox has products for location intelligence, brokers and investors, due diligence, and lending. The systems all use a unique property identifier called a LightBox identifier, or LID, that enables “seamless indexing across property-centric relational databases,” Zach Wade, vice president or data science at LightBox, tells GlobeSt.com. “This suite not only uniquely identifies properties, but each of the constituent pieces including structures and addresses.”

LightBox provides such property data as “parcel boundaries, building footprint boundaries, granular addresses, tax assessor records, and deed and recorder data” to First Street through the former’s SmartFabric software, which integrates the geospatial data to provide mapping, Wade notes. “Before LightBox released our SmartFabric solution, it was a complex process for consumers of these data to stitch them together. The SmartFabric product attaches unique identifiers to each component, integrating all data points back to a property.”

First Street has flood, wildfire, and extreme heat models that help identify and calculate risk at the property level. The LightBox data helps First Street estimate specific impacts on properties in the US based on different climate scenarios.

“The LightBox data platform provides access to a wide range of data through a unified API which is built on a consistent data model and connected with a single identifier,” the release said. The LID helps identify relationships and perform analysis “across LightBox’s property graph consisting of public, private, third party and LightBox data.” Sometime in 2023, Lightbox expects that the First Street risk models will be available as a connected data layer to LightBox’s SmartFabric product.

“The data that LightBox supplies is all true to source, or reflective of what one would find if they went directly to a local building or tax assessor department and requested the parcel or tax information,” Wade says. “Much of the data is gathered from the public domain,” but standardizes the data structures and formats that enable them to link together and permit analysis.

The arrangement is not an exclusive one, so other companies could license the data for their own use, including climate impact modeling.