Real Estate IT

Appraisals/Brokers - Start your engines and show off

Drew at GeekEstateBlog posted an entry about a game called "Price Me Now" from the folks at Realius. It's about guessing the sales price of real life listings. Sounds great!

realius.gif"Realius will allow conference attendees to play its flagship game, Price Me Now™, which challenges players to guess the price of homes for sale in their market, on the show floor. Price Me Now™ evaluates player guesses and awards points based on their performance against the “Realius” price, an aggregate combination of previous player price estimates and the actual list price. Real estate companies and professionals can purchase placement in the game as “coaches” who guide players and make their own professional price guesses."

Will be interesting to see how it will be used by the RE industry, maybe it will be used...

... at universities
Why not include this game in courses about pricing the real estate market?

... by brokers/appraisals
This is the opportunity for all brokers and appraisals to show that they are better then Zillow to forecast the sales price!     

I guess they don't include listings in Sweden...   ;-)

 

Visiting New York

Magnus_in_NY_150px.gif No matter what you do, there is always a need to look at your business from a different perspective. One way to do this, is to change environment and see how business is conducted elsewhere.

For this reason Datscha has spend a couple of days in New York meeting up with excellent people to hear their story and exchange experiences. It has been indeed rewarding and in the upcoming week I will write some posts about it.

It is also very rewarding to show the Datscha service to someone not used to doing business in Sweden since it normally 'blow their mind'. Firstly, due to the fact that so much information could be gathered about the property market. Secondly, their is no equivalent to a web-based DCF module over here.

And who doesn't enjoy such a positive reaction?   ;-)

Properazzi - A pan-European property search

Looking for properties in Europe, but having a hard time to figure out the worth of money? Then Properazzi will be a great starting point.

Properazzi_List_200px.gifOfficially launched today (after two years of technical development) the Barcelona located company has listen 1,8 million properties in 45 European countries.

Properazzi uses a crawler-based search engine technology to find listings at 1000s of estate and publisher sites across Europe.

Money worth over the border
According to Tom Dibaja, Outreach Specialist at Properazzi, they "don't at this stage aim to compete against national property portals. We’re more focused on property search more transparent, and making the maximum amount of information available to consumers. I think that once these features are more developed, many people buying a house in Sweden, for example, would like to know what their money would be worth in, say, the other Nordic countries, or even other parts of Europe."

I believe this a great idea. It's hard to figure out what are the national real estate portals if your are looking outside of your own country.

A look at Sweden
The Nordic region is for quite obvious reasons (I've to admit) not a primary region in a starting phase. However, Properazzi does have listings even in Sweden.

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Even a red house with white garbles! (The very trademark of a house in the Swedish countryside.)  The listing currently are mostly from non-Swedish listings sites.

Founded by a successful team

In terms of founding Properazzi is venture-capital funded by Mangrove Capital Partners (who were originally behind Skype) and private investor Gil Penchina (eBay, Wikia, etc). Managing director, Yannick Laclau ,runs the business from Barcelona in Spain.

More reading at FoREM, Inman and Renthusiast.

 

CoStar acquires Propex; great news for believers

For a believer there are few things more rewarding then seeing other believers succeed.

Therefore my first thought when seeing that CoStar acquires Propex (for 22 million USD) goes to the believers behind the scene. People like Paul Marples (managing director) and Colin Barber (founder and commercial director). Both who I've been fortune to meet up with a number of times. True believers in the use of IT in the real estate industry .

CoStar_in_Europe_260px.gif

My second thought is that the entire market of IT suppliers in the European real estate industry will profit from CoStar's continued expansion over here. The more (market-) money they spend here; the more attention the industry will pay. Which is the greatest thing, having people in the real estate industry starting to think that there may be improvements to be done in the way they are conducting the business. Still It's not about competion in the market place, it's about creating a market.

CoStar    (www.costar.com)
Founded in 1987 by Andrew C. Florance (now days the President & Chief Executive Officer) the company has created the largest researched online database of commercial property information. Their 1 000 researchers have inspected over 2 million properties, mainly in the US. The company is traded on NASDAQ, with $158.9 million in revenues (year-end 2006) and is indeed financial strong with "$158.1 million in cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments, and no long-term debt".  More financial data is found here.

CoStar in Europe
CoStar has acquired 15 companies over the last 20 years starting of in Europe in 2003 by acquiring FOCUS, "a major U.K. provider of web-based access to verified commercial lease comparables, available space, requirements, tenants, planning information and photos across the United Kingdom".  Three months ago, in December 2006, CoStar also acquired Grecam, a provider of commercial property information, research and analytics in France. Read more about CoStar in Europe here.

Propex  (www.propex.co.uk)
Propex was formed in 1999 by Colin Barber, and really took of in year 2000 when the 18 largest investors in the UK joined forces in order to increase liquidity, transparency and efficiency across the real estate market by operating an electronic introduction and marketing platform. According to this article from, I assume PropertyWeek, Propex by year end in April 2006 had  a turnover of £1,7 million (3,3 million USD), with a recorded loss. However, the business seems to have increased substantiality during 2006 since the CoStar press release (in February 2007) talks about "... approximately $5 million in annual revenues...". Find out more about Propex seeing this video and reading. Paul Marples, Managing Director at Propex,  is from now also CoStar Group's senior strategist for developing an international investment sales platform.

Source: thanks Andrew Waller (Remit Consulting) for making me aware of this deal.

ARGUS and Circle merges

Full disclosure: I'm the Product Manager for a Swedish DCF product. Read more here.

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A MAJOR supplier of DCF (Discounted Cash Flow models) solutions has been created when the UK based Circle Software Ltd and US based Realm Business Solutions Inc have decided to merge (The press release).

"Two leading providers of software solutions to the commercial real estate industry, London-based Circle Software and Houston-based Realm Business Solutions, today announced the merging of their respective firms into one global entity.

Based in London , Circle Software was founded in 1990 by Adrian Katz, a designated member of the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors. Circle’s flagship product is Visual Investor, a property and portfolio valuation software program that is the current industry standard in the UK and is broadly used in many countries within continental Europe and the Asia Pacific region where the UK capitalisation approach is employed. Circle also produces and markets CircleDeveloper, the worldwide standard for development appraisals and pro formas.

Realm’s flagship product, ARGUS, is the industry standard among those countries and companies that employ the discounted cash flow (DCF) methodology to value real estate assets. Pioneered and made popular in the US , DCF methodology is quickly gaining the endorsement of many international standards organisations and universities. Realm’s product suite also includes popular tools for property management, portfolio management and budgeting, automated leasing, business intelligence and collaboration and workflow management. "

This merge will indeed be interesting to follow.
I don't have any numbers but this new company has to be, by far, the number one on the market. Any directory of Investment Analysis Software is too be long but I doubt any other supplier is even close.

 

Skandiamäklarna invests in online marketing

The Swedish brokerage firm Skandiamäklarna will, according to an article in Dagens Media, shift the marketing to focus mainly on online for 2007.

A starting point is a new site, valkommenhem.se (Welcome home), aiming to inform and inspire home buyers.

SkandiaMaklarna_Intro_450px.gif

For example, the site gives you the opportunity to see the effect of home styling.

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SkandiaMaklarna_Value_High_350px.gif

 

 

 

The Swedish consulting firms need to pay attention to Google

The Swedish commercial real estate market has been very popular for many years to international investors. For example, some  years up to 70% of the investments have been done by non-Swedish investors.

Today I went through the statistics, provided by Squarespace, for this blog regarding 'Search Engine Queries' (that is, phrases used by people that eventually end up at this site) and to my surprise I found that quite a few had been using "Swedish real estate 2007 outlook".

Of course, I tried it and to my surprise I made it to number one!
Shouldn't that place be 'owned' by some of the larger commercial consulting firms in Sweden? I guess they don't do to much of Search Engine Optimization...

Swedish_Outlook_450px.gif

 

 

 

SBAB launches a residential information service

The Swedish residential mortgage lender SBAB (www.sbab.se) launched a residential information service (named "Storstadsguiden") this Friday. It's a free service that shows medium price per square meter for apartments in Stockholm, Göteborg and Malmö.

SBAB_StorstadsGuiden_350px.gif

Each town is divided in 15 - 30 sub markets. Each sub markets has a value based on actual transactions provided by Ljungqvist Information, which also runs the comparable sales service Ljungqvist (previously named treF).   

The pressrelease is found here (in Swedish).

 

A property magazine goes online with style

I had the opportunity to sit down with the founders, Per Wigart and Rolf Andersson, of FastighetsSverige (a Swedish real estate magazine) the other day.  Their lifestyle magazine, with a strong real estate focus, which was started 1½ year ago, has became a great success in Sweden.

Going online with style
It's common for newspapers to put some of their articles online. Some even provides a PDF version, but it could be done better, like they have down. Below is a screenshot from the latest issue of FastighetsSverige provided online through a service called E-magin.

  E.magin_400px.gif

(The service E-magin is provided by Leanback Sweden AB.)

The visual effect would be that off a flipping through a magazine, you're able to zoom and quickly jump between pages. Furthermore, it is possible to click on the ads (try Datscha's ad on page 53). If you are a subscriber you will receive the online version at the same time as the paper goes to the printshop.

Great product, brilliant online execution!