24-year-old builds mapping tool to untangle Ottawa's scattered development data

Information needed to assess development sites in Ottawa is public but scattered across zoning maps, planning documents, and city databases—a fragmentation that Anthony Bassi, age 24, decided to solve.

Bassi built Asset Avenue as an internal tool for his family's construction and development business, founded in 1963. The platform maps municipal planning applications across Ottawa, estimates what could be built on individual lots, and performs preliminary financial analyses of multi-family properties. He's since opened it to other developers and investors.

"It's all public data that I've kind of just put into a certain way for others to understand more clearly," Bassi told the Ottawa Business Journal. "They don't do the best job of really showcasing it, unfortunately. It's scattered across dev apps, PDFs, the GIS layers that no one really understands how to use."

Asset Avenue has three main components. The development tracker places municipal planning applications on a digital map, showing where projects have been proposed along with details including height, number of units, and application status. The lot analysis tool provides a preliminary estimate of what could be constructed on a particular property by examining zoning, permitted uses, and potential building size—"kind of similar to SimCity," Bassi said. "Can I put a building here and how tall can it go?" A third component, Deal Room, performs financial analysis.

One developer contemplating a 185-unit building near an Ottawa highway used Asset Avenue and, Bassi said, "just off that visual of seeing four large skyscrapers on the map, his competition radar went off." Another property owner uncertain whether an existing house could be replaced with a small multi-unit building got his answer within minutes via the tool's link.