Amid Canada’s ongoing national affordable housing crisis, an emerging property technology company has unveiled a platform that promises to revolutionize affordable housing delivery.
Established in 2024, Vancouver-based Meton AI is behind UNLOCKLAND, an artificially intelligent platform that aims to bring clarity, accessibility, and fairness to what chief executive officer Stephen Wong describes as “the most uncertain industry.”
“Real estate development might be the most experience-dependent and least standardized field in modern business,” explains Wong.
The primary feature of UNLOCKLAND is reducing site evaluation time by orders of magnitude—from an average of 10 weeks to as little as 10 minutes.
“Over 30% of potential housing projects in North America are abandoned before launch, not because of poor market conditions, but because preliminary analysis costs are prohibitive and risks difficult to quantify,” says Wong.
This breakthrough enables small and medium-sized developers to compete with industry giants who traditionally monopolize development opportunities through superior resources and expertise, according to the entrepreneur.
“This technology helps translate policy intentions into built homes,” Wong posits.
UNLOCKLAND deploys a multi-agent AI architecture, Wong says. These agents collaborate across Planning, Design, Market, and Finance to simulate an experienced development team. This team can perform zoning analysis, risk assessments, financial projections, and more.
Beyond efficiency gains, UNLOCKLAND also intends to foster improved collaboration between municipalities and developers. For example, Vancouver’s planning department is exploring the platform as a front-end service to streamline approvals.
“When municipalities implement zoning reforms aimed at increasing density and affordability, our platform helps ensure these policies actually result in housing on the ground by making implementation transparent and accessible,” said Wong.
Meton’s mission is “to leverage AI solutions to address real-world challenges, creating homes with high energy efficiency and environmental sustainability.” The UNLOCKLAND platform has so far evaluated over 35,000 sites across Canadian cities, with expansion to U.S. and Australian markets underway.
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