Visualizing a Home's Real Surroundings, From Open Data

When you buy a new-build home, it's surprisingly hard to picture what will actually stand around it. Floor plans and configurators show the house itself in loving detail; the surroundings — the neighbouring buildings, the trees, the street — are usually left to the imagination.

We've been looking for a good way to give buyers that context for a while. The most obvious option is Google's photorealistic 3D map tiles, which are genuinely beautiful. The catch is cost: at any real scale the API bills balloon fast, and a buyer configurator generates a lot of views.

The Netherlands quietly solves this with open data. Two public datasets do most of the work. 3DBAG models every building in the country in 3D. And PDOK publishes vegetation data — where the greenery actually is. Both are free and openly licensed.

The trick that makes it usable for a specific project is the plot. Using the project's plot boundary, we automatically remove the buildings that are being replaced — the existing or to-be-demolished homes — so the new design sits in a clean, accurate version of its real surroundings instead of on top of what's being torn down.

To test it, we visualized a demo on Amsterdam's Museumplein: the surrounding buildings from 3DBAG, the trees and greenery from PDOK, and the plot cleared where a new home would go. The result reads as the actual place, not a generic backdrop.

Inside the Alpha house viewer, this means a buyer no longer sees their configured home floating in a void. They see it where it will actually stand — with the neighbours, the trees, and the street in place. That context is a big part of what makes a choice feel real rather than abstract.

And because it's built on open data, it scales. Every project, every plot, every buyer can get accurate surroundings without a per-view bill attached. We shared the first demo on LinkedIn, and the question we asked there still stands: which open datasets would you add?