Inman Conference 2008 coverage

The largest conference on the topic of (residential) real estate and IT is the Inman Real Estate Connect which was held this week in San Francisco 2008' . I guess there were more than 1 000 participants. Not only from the USA but also Australia, New Zealand, Spain and UK.

Below are the highlights of the week (in no particular order) from the perspectiv from a Swedish Product Manager.

Meeting up with all online friends
Meeting up all people whose blogs you are reading and the people behind many of the services in person has been indeed rewarding. Truly inspiring.

A demo of next generation websites
Tyler Davey from Infusion gave a preview of the new Radisson site that will be released in the autumn. Built in Silverlight and extensively using Microsoft Virtual Earth; the user experience was incredible. Tyler also mentioned that the incredible software Photosynth will be included in Virtual Earth. See this video and get blown away by the photosynth technology.

The Swedish connection
In the presentation "25 Online Real Estate Sites You Don't Know About But Should" Brian Boero, 1000Watt Consulting, started of with showing the Swedish real estate search engine Booli!

A demo of Trulia iPhone Application
Trulias very own Mr Social network Rudy gave me an demo of their iPhone application (YouTube movie). Very impressive. I believe devices with location functionality will have a great impact on the way we find real estate information.

Walkscore
You know that the Americans find the gas price high (still less then half of prices in Sweden) when services like WalkScore is being created. Nevertheless, a great service that measures the walkability of an address.

Webbased solutions to get rid of Excel
As a Product Manager of Datscha it is great to see that there are more people how believe that a web solution is better then the best Excel spreadsheet. At Inman I found two services in this area; T-rex (Property Management) and eRealInvestor ("Analyze your own property and investments and optimize your returns!")

The techiness of the attendees
As an official geek, it was great to see how many attendees that took their notes on a laptop and where present online even at the conference.

During the entire conference there was an active discussion on Twitter.
An example of the discussion.

Read the entire conversation here.

Next time you doing a presentation at a conference be aware that quite a few in audience could be twittering about you, google your facts and browsing through your LinkedIn resume. In other words, be humble and stick to the facts. 

More Inman coverage
Below a some more reading about Inman.
I'm sure there is more to come.

The Orlando Condo Blog
Joel writing for Inman 
Daneil for Inman
Drew about blogging
Matrix 

Finally...
Thanks to everyone who made this conference such a brilliant experience.

Liveblogging from ReBarCamp

Today I attended the ReBarCamp event in San Francisco.

Start of the day
First of all it's in the Swedish American Hall. Pretty wired for a Sweden who has travelled half over the world!

Anyway, there are some 100+ people here and for most of them (including me) it's there first visit to a conference set up as a Barcamp., which means that it is "user generated conferences . In other words, it is up to the crowd to on the spot create the sessions.

So there was quite a confusing crowd in the beginning, but quickly a great list of sessions were created.

Then the sessions started and the conversations for sure kicked off.
How many conversations do you find in the photo below?

Below are quick notes from some of the sessions I attended.

Blog survey
The Center for Real Estate and Social Technology (http://varbuzz.com/crest/) has conducted a survey among bloggers in the USA. They will do those surveyes every quarter.

Result from the first survey
128 responses

Agents 65%

Brokers 23%

50% using WordPress  (especially the veterans)

50% hosted

The median start date is 1 aug 2007

The median is 12 post in may 2008

Medium number of comments 3,4 per post

80% had fewer than 50 commments in may

The more posts you put in the less comments per post

1315 uniqe browsers per month is average

Ideal for traffic is 5 posts per week

35 medium RSS subscribers is average

Full RSS feed --> more readers

Video 101

The crew from Zipvo organised an open discussion about video.
It seems to really start coming off over here.

The discussion was primarily around;
   1. type of camera
   2. "start now, even if the quality isn't there, you will learn"
   3. the business model for the video platforms out there

Podcasting

A great conversation that covered everything from showing audio software to discussing why to use podcasts on an agents site.

The answer for the latter question was according to one of the participants;
   "The consumer will come to your site for three reasons;

       1. to figure out what his house is worth

       2. to view the listings

       3. to learn about the community

   And it is in the last point that you could successfully add Podcasts."

The sum up was (as for video session above) start easy and focus to improve.
An easy starting point is TalkShoe.

Beer with bloggers
After all the sessions the crowd went to the bar next door for the Inman Conference kick off party "Beer with bloggers".

Thanks Zillow for the open bar.

To sum up
Not only did I learn a lot about the US market and what topics are 'hot', also had the opportunity to meet up with people I prio only know through their blogs.

Furthermore, I did also get a hand on experience of BarCamps. For sure liked the concept! Tomorrow starts the Inman Conference. A more 'normal' conference. I sure that will be as great as of today.

Booli covers entire Sweden (and more this spring)

Booli, the Swedish search engine for residential listings, has had a busy spring.

1. Coverage of the entire Sweden
In June Booli announced (in Swedish) that they are now covering the entire Sweden. An impressive task since there are some 6000 brokers (according to Booli) to make searchable.

A quick test in my home town Karlskrona shows that Booli is close (but not there yet) to have all the listings in Hemnet (the market leader in listings and owned by the Association of Swedish Real Estate Agents). Anyway, an impressive first start for a service that just been around for 7 months)

2. Signs an exclusive deal with 'Villaägarna'
A week ago it became official that 'Villaägarna' (Association of house owners in Sweden) has included Booli in their site for searching houses on sale.

Read more about it 1 (press release) and 2 (Booli blog).

3. Internet Entreprenours of the year  
In April the Swedish magazine InternetWorld dubbed Booli to the 'Internet Entrepreneurs' of the year in Sweden.
Find the article here.

To sum up...
An quite impressive spring from a team that for sure believers in the smart use of Internet.

MyDealBook - A LinkedIn for the Commercial Real Estate industry

As far as I'm concerned, the commercial real estate market just got it's first social network. 

MyDealBook was released three weeks ago in the US. One of the founders is Ryan Slack, former CEO of PropertyShark (an information service for the commercial market), and the service also hits the ground running with adding the existing 300 000 PropertyShark users automatically to the network.

The idea for the service is (according to an Inman interview) a spin of from the user needs at PropertyShark;

"As CEO of PropertyShark, I found that our users were demanding that we let them meet other users: They demanded the ability to advertise on the site and they demanded more networking functions. MyDealBook addresses these needs",

MyDealBook is described by this Reuters article as:

"MyDealBook.com combines the best social networking techniques with powerful tools specific to the needs of real estate professionals.  Its features are designed to help users expand professional networks, find new business and manage projects.  Features include user profiles, messaging, networking and marketplace listings, as well as:
    Deals -- features a unique deal management system that allows users to post their professional activities to gain credibility, promotion for their projects, seek funding, market properties and share files
    Mini-feed -- provides users insight into the projects and deal flow within their network
    Events -- lists opportunities for real estate professionals to connect in person, including networking mixers, speed networking, conferences, training, site visits, fund raisers, sporting events, and more
    Groups -- enables users to join or form their own groups for specific purposes, such as organizing events, sharing deal information, collaborating, forming company teams, office networks and investment clubs
    Natural groups -- automatically groups users by company, profession, location, educational institution, professional association, state licensing and professional designation, to allow easy search and identification of
potential clients, business partners, or service providers
    Services -- provides powerful tools to search and match users with complementary business partners
    Jobs -- provides its users with opportunities to find or advertise job openings specific to the real estate industry.  

A niche not covered by Costar?
In this article in New York The Sun an associate director at the commercial real estate firm Newmark Knight Frank said the site could fill a niche not covered by services such as CoStar, the subscription-based Web site commonly used by office leasing brokers that offers only limited information about other industry professionals.

Find out more
About MyDealBook here;
   GeekEstateBlog  - an interview back in September
   4realz - have both a pod interview and a post about it 
   Inman coverage is found here and here

Going to Inman and ReBarCamp

Finally, the tickets are reserved for my trip to the US this summer. The main purpose is to take part at the Inman Connect conference (23rd - 25th July) and the ReBarCamp the day before. But also to take some vacation on the west coast.

This will be my first visit to an Inman event and is really looking forward to it. The agenda looks great. Also looking forward meeting you all!

A great product story...

... is found here at 1000watt blog.

I bet that client received 'the extra length' of support if he later on called in.

Free residential comps introduced to Stockholm

A daily routine for many in Sweden is to go through the comparable residential sales printed in the local paper. At least in the countryside where the local paper cover a smaller area (and the number of comps are fewer).

In large cities like Stockholm this hasn't always been the case since the 'local' paper normally is one of the two national papers, DN or SvD, which haven't put the effort in to this. (There are large papers in the country who has done it, for example Sydsvenskan (great mapping) och Helsingborg Dagblad (just a list).)

However, the local paper Mitt i Stockholm AB which runs 31 (?) local papers in Stockholm has been putting this information in their papers.

Next step, put the information online
Now has Mitt i Stockholm AB taken the next step and put this information online. The service started in April and hit the press a few days (1, 2, 3, 4) with the effect that the service was terrible slow the first days. However, I gave it a try today and it is an impressive web 2.0 service (in terms of being user friendly and designed).

You select a municipality (31 to choose from all in 'greater' Stockholm) and all comparable sales for residential real estates are shown (not multi-family).

The information per comparable sales listing includes:
   - address
   - purchase price
   - purchase date
   - assessment value
   - seller
   - buyer

By clicking on 'read more' the information is displayed like below.

The information feed is from the Swedish Land Register and is (I assume) updated every night (at least it could be).

More to come
Mitt i Stockholm (as many local papers) is working hard to provide super local news, information, classifieds, and also residential listings. (Read more about this localization of news at Mindpark.)  In an article in DI the Online Manager Peter Leijonspjuth states that this is just version 1.0 and more is to come.

Adding apartments comps?
Mentioned is to add comparable sales for apartments '(CoOps') before the summer. This is indeed impressive since this data is not collected by the government. The only source I'm aware of is through the Association of Swedish Real Estate Agents('Mäklarsamfundet'). This data is today available on a summarized level at Mäklarstatistik and at the largest residential listing service Hemnet (which is owned and run by Samfundet). Both services has the same provider; Värderingsdata and costs about 100 SEK (~15 USD) for each search.

It will be interesting to see if this information will be published for free at Mitt i. Especially since Peter previously has worked at Teknik i Media which runs the technical platform for Hemnet and is quoted in the DI article that "it is important to never compete with Hemnet" (my translation).

Cap&Design does a makeover of Hemnet

The Swedish design & communication magazine Cap&Design has a makeover of Hemnet (the Swedish listing service, earlier coverage) in their latest issue. It's done by Daytona and the result looks like below (the article is found here).

Carl Bjurling and Thomas Le Guellaff from Daytona have focused on;
   1. search using pictures
   2. all listings should have the same layout
   3. add services for home renovation
   4. making it easier on 'open house' day with possibility of GPS coordinates 

My thoughts
I like the idea to add a search more based on pictures, just like the way the ads are done in a newspaper. It's a quick way to browse through a list and get a sense of the listing. The same with the functionality helping out on the day of 'open house'. (A possibility to create an account and mark interested listings should be a minimum.)

The same layout for all listing on the detailed page will be complicated since Hemnet only gather a few searchable parameters then link the visitors to the detailed page at each brokers website. Everything is possible, but that one will involve quite a few changes to the overall technical architecture.

I don't believe in creating more services around the lifecycle of a home. Hemnet (or a service like this) should stay focused on investing in a home, not how to renovate it.

Overall, it's a good suggestion on a service that is easy to pick on. But fact speaks for it self, Hemnet still has the most listings and is the preferable choice to start your search. One has to wait an see if new services like Booli (earlier coverage) and bospindeln will change this.

A Swedish perspective on SaaS

Computer Sweden (the largest IT paper in Sweden) ran a SaaS topic last week including a conference (when I was in Cannés...).

The seven articles are found here (in Swedish).

It's great to see this effort and I'm looking forward to more to come.
(Also glad that they put in the effort to find other SaaS representatives than just Salesforce...)

A new tradtion at MIPIM

A tradition in the commercial property industry is to meet up in Cannés (France) in the beginning of March for informal meetings. The reason is to visit the annual MIPIM event. An event that brings 28 000 attendees from 85 countries (some 800 (!) from Sweden.)

 

More info about MIPIM
Click here for photos from MIPIM.

Great coverage on MIPIM is found at CNBC (special MIPIM coverage), PropertyWeek (UK based property magazine), PropertyEU (independent research site) and the blogs at bdonline (architects) and TheLawer (infosite)   

A new traditon for IT believers
This year Datscha (where I'm the Product Manager) gathered IT focused professionals for a drink at our yacht. Even on a short notice quite a group showed up and it was a great gathering. It's always great to meet people that share a common belief. See you all next year.