Chatting with Stacey Mosley in a small coffee shop opposite Philadelphia’s City Hall, we are interrupted by someone insisting Mosley be introduced to a companion. Slender, soft-spoken and affable, Mosley finds herself in an usual position: She is a 30-year-old female entrepreneur and data scientist disrupting an aggressively old-school industry — real estate development. But her self-assurance and intelligence — and command over her newfound specialist subject — enable her not only to muscle in on this boys-club, network-based industry, but also to embrace it.

As all good startup stories begin, Mosley’s inspiration hit out of nowhere. Laid off from work one year out of college, she moved back in with her parents in a leafy town outside the city. Shuttling into the heart of the metropolis on the suburban rail line, she was stunned by the contrasts in the urban landscape flashing past her window. Mansions with swimming pools and manicured gardens one minute, and “all of a sudden you’re in North Philly, and the backs of houses are falling down,” she says. And as all good startup stories continue, the young entrepreneur thought, “There’s something wrong here. What can be done about it?”

What she did was create a platform that pulls together open municipal data for real estate developers. Sounds wonky, but her FixList platform — described as the Zillow of redevelopment — could help America’s real estate and construction markets remedy a problem plaguing metropolitan areas throughout the country: urban blight. FixList pools city-held data on neighborhood tax delinquency, vacancy rates, construction history, zoning changes and some 20 other indices to model and score properties developers should snap up for redevelopment. It doesn’t dig into the financials, but if a property scores high on FixList, it’s rife for refurbishment. And, in a place like Philadelphia, where roughly 10 percent of the city’s 600,000 properties lie vacant, a dose of data science may be just the thing to close the gap between an obvious problem and those who can fix it. Mosley is “a great person on to a great idea with a great vision,” says Rick Nucci, a Philadelphia startup guru (he co-founded Boomi and Guru and leads Philly Startup Leaders, a group working to promote local entrepreneurship) — and Mosley’s mentor for the past year. By attacking a direct and identifiable business problem, he says, FixList “has massive potential.” She was recently announced Innovator of the Year by women’s group Rad Girls during Philly Tech Week.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.ozy.com