Benjamin
39 · architect
- Rent ceiling
- $2,150/mo
- Wants
- 2BR
Walks away if
North-facing only.
Engine 1 · Demand & Mix · Brooklyn
Meet the people who will rent your building.
Prelived generates every household a Brooklyn site will draw the year it opens — as individuals with incomes, rent ceilings and deal-breakers — then turns them into a unit mix you can build.
One mark per generated household · 94 West Street, Brooklyn, NY 11222
600 households · 5 segments · delivers June 2030
- Ayana30%
- Valeria & Gabriela28%
- Amara23%
- Jordan & Bianca10%
- Andre & Desmond9%
10×
households generated per unit — 600 for a 60-unit building
5
segments, none of them chosen by us
2030
the year modelled, not the year you drew it
0
people surveyed — they haven't moved yet
How it works
Build the renters first. Then design for them.
Three stages, run against public data and the signals no dataset carries.
Stage 1
Read the neighbourhood forward
Liquor licences issued, restaurants opening, bodegas closing, childcare capacity added, schools improving. We model the neighbourhood at your delivery date — not today's.
Stage 2
Generate the households
Ten per unit, one at a time. Income, rent ceiling, what they need, what makes them walk. They cluster into segments on their own; nobody picks the categories.
Stage 3
Design against all of them
Move a slider and all 600 households re-score instantly. Set a rule you never break and the model obeys it, then tells you exactly what that rule cost.
The output
Segment share is your unit mix.
5 groups emerged from this run. Their shares, their budgets, and what each one is actually looking for.
Ayana
36 · PRODUCT MANAGER · GREENPOINT
30.3%
Median income$196,000
Rent ceiling$4,925/mo
Valeria & Gabriela
34 & 42 · BIOTECH SCIENTIST & BIOTECH SCIENTIST · TORONTO
28.2%
Median income$290,000
Rent ceiling$6,000/mo
Amara
31 · TEACHER · BUSHWICK
22.5%
Median income$104,000
Rent ceiling$2,675/mo
Jordan & Bianca
26 & 29 · GRAPHIC DESIGNER & BARTENDER · RIDGEWOOD
10.0%
Median income$164,500
Rent ceiling$4,225/mo
Andre & Desmond
35 & 34 · OPERATIONS LEAD & DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING · UPPER EAST SIDE
9.0%
Median income$276,500
Rent ceiling$5,650/mo
Share × unit count is where the conversation starts, not where it ends — the studio prices every unit type against the same households and moves units accordingly.
Three of 600
Every one of them is a person you can open and read.
Bruno
30 · product manager
- Rent ceiling
- $4,275/mo
- Wants
- 1BR + alcove
Walks away if
More than twelve minutes to the train.
Asher
23 · finance associate
- Rent ceiling
- $4,550/mo
- Wants
- 1BR
Walks away if
Laundry in the basement.
Synthetic, generated, not written. No real resident is represented and nobody was surveyed — you can’t survey people who haven’t moved yet.
Amenities
Priced, not ranked.
What this population pays per month for each one. The bar is the middle half of them — where it's wide, you're choosing whose amenity to buy.
Private outdoor space
$338n=76
In-unit laundry
$200n=142
Co-working lounge
$115n=58
central air
$110n=83
fitness room
$95n=55
Median with the 25th–75th percentile. Amenities weighted by fewer than 25 households are left out rather than shown thin.
Why comps fail
A comp tells you what leased. It can't tell you who walked away.
It reports the sticker price
A comp records asking rent. What a landlord collects is asking rent minus the concessions it took to fill the unit, and nothing obliges anyone to update the sign.
It describes a neighbourhood that already happened
Comps are buildings leased last year to people looking then. You open in 2030, into somewhere measurably different.
It averages people into percentages
The average renter pays $200 for in-unit laundry. A quarter pay $150 and a quarter pay $255. Those are different buildings.
It can't be asked a follow-up question
Switch off in-unit laundry here and the model tells you how many households leave your pool entirely. There's nothing to run that query on in a comp set.
What it isn't
Development is art, not science. We're not arguing.
A developer who has leased six buildings knows things six hundred modelled households never will. Tell Prelived you never build studios, or that in-unit laundry is non-negotiable in your buildings, and it obeys without negotiation — it cannot return a program that breaks your rule.
What it does instead is price the rule: this one costs you three points and $4,100 a month, that one is free because the population already agrees with you. Better colours, a bigger canvas, and a note on what each choice cost. The painting is still yours.
Design partner
Ready to meet them?
Bring a Brooklyn ground-up rental, 20–150 units, with a delivery date. You get the population, the segments and the Program Studio at no cost during the design partner phase — in exchange for an honest read on whether it's useful, wrong, or missing something.
Prelived has not been run against a completed lease-up. Nothing here is validated against an outcome — it’s defensible because every number shows the trail that produced it, not because a building has confirmed it yet.